Its been another herculean effort from the team to pull this year’s research together - but we’re delighted with the results.
The first thing to say is that its a really mixed bag. Publishers are struggling with a lot of the same issues, in a volatile global economy, often with constrained resources. And although we see confidence rising across the market in important strategic areas like identity solutions, we see pockets of respondents that are increasingly nervous. For instance, publishers depending on programmatic revenues are far less confident about cookie deprecation than peers with well-established subscription models.
Strategy meets reality
Accelerating first-party data collection and exploring contextual-targeting have become something of a stock response to the cookie-deprecation question.
Its fine as an answer, but there is a big difference between having a strategy and delivering it successfully.
Similarly, ‘revenue diversification’ gets kicked about as the de facto strategy for securing commercial success and lessening vulnerability of being all-in on advertising. And that may be fine if it fits your model and you have the resources to service a portfolio approach effectively. But most don’t and can’t.
For the third successive year, we’ve seen a decline in the number of publishers agreeing that they are successfully building diverse revenue streams (down from 85% in 2021, to 74% today). This suggests that either less businesses are trying or that building diverse revenue streams is increasingly hard to achieve.
Operational challenges
However, another really significant dimension to this boils down to a publisher’s ability to execute. A large number of respondents cited operational challenges related to either capabilities (concerning people and tools) or efficiencies (processes and automation). Clearly, there are factions that might believe in their business’s strategy yet have little confidence in the organisation’s ability to deliver it - either because of insufficient resources or inadequate processes or both.
The word from the factory floor
The data also revealed a growing divide between those focused on revenue operations (including yield and pricing) and those focused on classic ad operations tasks (such as trafficking and processing campaigns). The latter group, arguably sitting closer to the coal-face of advertising delivery, were far less confident in cookie replacement plans and much more likely to cite targeting and inventory challenges.
There is a tendency among commercial leaders in media businesses to believe that revenue issues can always be solved by selling more and expecting ad operations will simply ‘make it happen’. But if targetable inventory falls to the floor then there is very little these teams can do.
Publishers with a strong organisational backbone; with streamlined and automated processes; and clear lines of communication (including a management that is listening and addressing concerns of specialists within their revenue operations teams) imbue confidence and are more likely to succeed.
