Media Briefing: How newsletters publishers are dealing with a destabilized ad landscape

By Tim Peterson

In this week’s Media Briefing, media editor Kayleigh Barber reports on how the economic slowdown and Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature have affected newsletter publishers’ advertising businesses.

Pressure on newsletter publishers
Journalists dissatisfied with their organizations’ racial and ethnic diversity
Facebook’s potential publisher payment pivot, Warner Bros. Discovery’s DE&I commitment, The Washington Post’s tech business and more

The key hits:

Newsletter publishers like Morning Brew, The Gist and 1440, are starting to see a shift in some of their advertisers’ marketing strategies, with categories like crypto pumping the brakes on media buys.
Media buyers want more proof that their investments in newsletters are worth the budget allocation.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection setting has made open rates unreliable but some publishers are using audience surveys to convince advertisers that their campaigns are worth the investment.

The economic slowdown is threatening advertising budgets not two years after the pandemic-induced recession hit the brakes on almost all marketing spend. But that isn’t the only threat at the moment to newsletter publishers’ advertising businesses.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature introduced in September has caused open rates to be viewed as unreliable at a time when advertisers are seeking stronger evidence of a return on their ad dollars. Meanwhile, the proliferation of newsletters over the past couple of years has reached a point of oversaturation in the market, according to some media buyers.

For newsletter-first publishers like Morning Brew, The Gist and 1440, the strategy now is to adapt. For example, some advertiser categories are beginning to drop off, such as brand advertisers. So the publishers are turning to brand lift studies to prove out campaign success, which is also part of their playbook for dealing with Apple’s change destabilizing traditional email metrics.

“What we’ve seen in the market over the last few months is there is definitely a change happening. There are some partners of ours that are looking to scale back a little bit. While some categories may be looking to scale back, however, we have plenty of others, where it’s business as usual, if not even increasing expense,” said Jason Schulweis, evp of brand partnerships and creative studio at Morning Brew.

One of the advertiser categories pumping the brakes is – to no surprise – crypto. “Some big partners of ours are taking hits not only from the larger economy, but also what’s happening in crypto,” he added. Cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum are both steadily dropping in value, hitting one and two year lows, respectively, this week. One crypto exchange platform Coinbase announced it will lay off 18% of its employees as a result of the crashing market.

Advertisers focused on brand awareness campaigns are starting to shift their timelines a bit too.

“We haven’t experienced too many partners canceling things outright, or having really drastic changes in plans. That might change as we get further into the summer months, but so far, there’s been a lot of uncertainty and a lot of pausing or shifting plans out more,” for …read more

Source:: Digiday