‘We’re encouraged’: NewsPassID passes its pilot phase, seeks further scale

By Max Willens

Many local news publishers have trouble keeping up with the changes that have paced digital advertising over the years, so much so that some have even contemplated reducing their reliance on ads altogether. But the results of a recent test suggest those publishers might be able to keep pace with the business model taking shape as third-party cookies are deprecated.

On Thursday, Feb. 10, the Local Media Consortium is expected to share the results of a test it conducted with NewsPassID, an identifier it first announced last spring. The test, conducted with LMC members McClatchy, Lee Enterprises, E.W. Scripps and Tegna, proved that using NewsPassID in open programmatic auctions led to significantly better outcomes for publishers, including not just higher CPMs for inventory sold but for larger percentages of that inventory getting sold as well. The test involved small portions of each publisher’s inventory.

The biggest lift, unsurprisingly, came in cookieless environments including Safari and AMP, where the NewsPassID impressions sold at CPMs 90% higher than control ones. In environments where cookies are still accepted, the NewsPassID impressions were 45% more valuable, the LMC found. The test also suggested that the inventory carrying the NewsPassID was sold in higher volumes, up to 25% more, compared to inventory from the same publishers that did not carry it.

NewsPassID still faces significant hurdles on the road to becoming a preferred identifier for local news publishers, including scaled implementation and competition from vendors. But as a first step forward for a group of publishers that has typically struggled to keep up with digital evolutions, “we’re encouraged,” said Fran Wills, the LMC’s CEO.

The LMC decided to build NewsPassID in part because its leadership wanted to avoid replicating the current dynamic of programmatic advertising, in which ad buyers have used behavioral targeting to disintermediate publishers from their audiences.

A working group convened by a separate LMC initiative, NewsNext, tested out several existing third-party identifiers and decided none of them delivered enough value to justify giving up control of their audience data; Wills described the identifiers the LMC tested as “the usual suspects” but would not provide a specific list, saying the organization conducted its tests under Chatham House rules.

Above and beyond attaching the ID to inventory, the LMC also sought to control how that inventory made its way to market; it worked with the Ozone Project, a publisher advertising alliance that saw its own successes last year, to reduce the number of demand sources that saw the NewsPassID inventory, focusing on making it available to demand sources that had bought from those publishers in the past, rather than maximizing the number of bidders.

That kind of approach, while not typical today, is emblematic of a broader shift within programmatic advertising, explained Rob Weatherhead, a programmatic and digital media consultant.

”The traditional view is, ‘We’ll bring as much demand to supply as possible to drive up the auction,’” Weatherhead said. “But the direction everything’s sailing in is quality over quantity, and that applies at all points …read more

Source:: Digiday