Two years ago, Reach launched its brand safety tool Mantis, which scans and collects data to ensure content is appropriate for advertising. During the pandemic, the tool was used by advertisers to align with positive COVID-related stories, instead of blocking that content.

This led the company to develop Mantis Contextual to collect data on the interests of people coming to Reach’s websites, as well as the launch of Reach Plus, which builds audience segments for advertisers. If someone is reading content about moving, for example, they can be placed in a “Furniture Plus” segment and are likely to be in the market to buy a new sofa, Hornsby said. Mantis collects 125,000 data points a day. Hornsby said the tools will also help lead the company into a cookie-less future. “That sets us up for 2022 and 2023,” he said.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

What did Reach do to hit its user registration target ahead of schedule?

We never really changed our strategy. We just needed to understand our users more and give them a reason to sign up with us, and trade in their registration. People who are looking at royal [family] content, can now sign up for the royal newsletter. That’s been our aim, and that’s what we’ve continued to do. Commenting and newsletters have been big drivers. We are providing local news to people, with [local news aggregator platform] In Your Area and people are also subscribing because of that. In the pandemic, people were really trusting of the local news, and our regional and local business is very strong because people turned to local and trusted brands, looking for things like, is the local restaurant open?

We are getting people to engage with us, and ultimately that means more page views, more opportunities for advertising and performance, and then advertising grows, so it’s a circle. It starts with the data, and that data feeds into the loop.

How are you working to close that 2 million gap?

We can tweak and change and deepen the tools we’ve already got. We have really good data around behavioral advertising but we can apply that to editorial, to look at trends last month versus this month, for example. To see what type of content people were spending more time on than with others. For the royal family, we can see with …read more

Source:: Digiday