By Kayleigh Barber

This week’s Media Briefing takes a look at the pressure publishers are under to win advertisers’ remaining fourth quarter budgets ahead of the holiday season.

• Fourth-quarter fallout
The New York Times Company’s Q3 2022 earnings report
Insider is changing its subscription strategy, publishers contemplate paying for journalists’ Twitter verification and more

Fourth-quarter fallout

The key hits:

• Publishers’ programmatic and direct-sold display ad businesses are in a position to benefit from advertisers’ wavering approach to Q4 ad spending.
• “It’s one of the most challenging Q4’s I’ve ever experienced,” said one media exec.
• Increasing ad inventory is one solution for publishers to sell more turnkey ad campaigns that don’t need long lead times.

The holiday season is not so cheery this year for publishers’ advertising teams.

Advertisers seem to be getting cold feet about where and when they execute their remaining 2022 budgets. While publishers are benefitting from the pivot toward more programmatic and turnkey display ad products, the pressure is on to deliver these campaigns faster in shorter intervals and in higher quantities than they typically know how to accommodate.

Vox Media’s quarterly sell-through rates have not been impacted by the slow release of budgets, but visibility into the publisher’s fourth quarter results are coming later than usual. “Instead of having visibility into what November and December is going to be in September or October, we’re getting that visibility in October or November,” said Vox Media chief revenue officer Ryan Pauley.

The ever-shortening sales cycle

All of the publishers interviewed for this story agreed that their sales cycles have been virtually cut in half over the past couple of months — on average, dropping from 90 days to six weeks, which is reminiscent of the pandemic, according to Pauley. In some cases, the turnaround times, specifically for turnkey ad spots like direct-sold display and video ads, are even shorter.

“Clients [have] sent us RFPs [in] early October and wanted to run that same week or start only a couple of weeks later. And usually we were working with that same partner and planning quarters out,” said Maggie Milnamow, CRO of Insider, who declined to share specific advertiser names. 

The run times for Insider’s campaigns have also been shorter than usual as well, clocking in at about two to four weeks in this quarter versus longer runs that span multiple months or quarters.

Publishers’ programmatic businesses are in a positive position

Seth Hargrave, CEO of media buying agency Media Two Interactive, said his clients have been favoring programmatic advertising through programmatic private marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed deals as well as other quick-turn ad slots in the first part of Q4 because political advertising has drastically reduced the amount of connected TV and streaming inventory available and increased CPMs for the remaining spots to a degree where they don’t want to compete. Largely, publishers have benefited from that, based on where Hargrave is seeing ad spend going. However, he said this is only expected to last another week or so until after the election, at which point CTV will be brought back …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron