• Predictions: How Leaders Will Adapt to Change to Drive Marketing Performance in 2023

Only one thing is certain about the business forecast for 2023: uncertainty. From customer behavior to workplace dynamics, an unpredictable environment will likely persist. But marketing leaders can’t afford to ride out the year without a plan.

Recent research sponsored by Grammarly with market intelligence firm IDC explores how organizations are leveraging technology and AI to bear the challenges of the moment. I predict three areas where marketing leaders will lean into AI to uplevel their teams, increase productivity and drive alignment across marketing channels.

• Is Your Subscription the One Worth Keeping? Publishers Work to Prove Value

After a frantic couple of years, when reader revenue seemed to be the only game in town, 2022 ushered in talk of a subscriptions shakeout. As markets from heated seats to tacos introduced monthly payment offers, the threat of market saturation has become real. And with the cost of living crisis kicking in, concerns have been growing that consumers are starting to consider just which subscriptions they really need.

• For Creative Publishers, Micropayments Are an Invitation, Not a Cautionary Tale

Micropayments, or a system in which digital readers pay per article, fail to work thanks to a complex web of consumer psychology and macro economics… But, I do wonder (“Oh no,” you’re thinking, “He’s about to offer a new way to do micropayments!”): Perhaps micropayments are a misguided instance of a worthwhile idea. Maybe there are other payment options publishers could be offering readers.

• Focusing On Right KPIs Can Help Marketers Survive Economic Downturns

The current economic downturn is creating growth challenges for businesses everywhere. A recent Crunchbase report showed that startup financing dropped across all stages in the second quarter of 2022, declining by27% from Q1 of this year and 25% year over year… To overcome growth stagnation, optimize revenue, and survive a stretch of economic uncertainty, marketers must adopt strategies that shift attention to the right KPIs.

• Publishers Could Gain From Advertising Spending Slowdown

The digital advertising marketplace may choose smaller publishers and traditional media over big tech. Digital advertising spending declined 1% in November, according to data from Standard Media Index (SMI). This is thought to be the first time that overall spending has fallen in the digital publishing era. The good news is that smaller digital publishers, and even traditional media, could benefit from a weaker concentration of advertising spending with the major platforms.

• Why Publishers Should Champion Seller-Defined Audiences

It remains to be seen when third-party cookies will be fully phased out. But it’s clear that the priority should remain building a solid and flexible first-party data strategy that can withstand constant shifts in privacy and audience accessibility. Publishers who do so will be best positioned to help advertisers fill the gap between privacy and personalization while uncovering new monetization opportunities. The Seller-Defined Audiences strategy is emerging as a way to reinforce the connection between publishers, advertisers, and the consumer.

• Why Advertisers Are Gravitating Toward Publishers That Embrace Video and Audio

As brands look to associate themselves with engaging and reliable content, publishers are meeting advertisers’ needs by increasingly leveraging audio and video as storytelling and monetization tools. Not only do audio and video attract the younger users that advertisers seek, but these formats also allow brands to run more emotionally resonant campaigns than other ad choices offered by digital publishers.

• Some B2B Firms Overlook PR, But Most Claim Benefits, Study Finds

Public relations can help B2B firms establish their brands. But 43% do not use editorial coverage as a sales enablement tool — at least in the UK, according to new research from Champion Communications conducted by Vanson Bourne.

Yet B2B marketers say that public relations is responsible for 74% of all new business opportunities, and 41% say that 80% or more of their marketing-qualified leads came through PR, with the average response at 74%.

• Next Year and Beyond: The State of the Ad Economy

The Big Forecasters have spoken, and after some December revisions to their ad economy outlooks, that ever-constant ebb of optimism and flow of recession concerns has painted a new forecast that, well, is not too far from what was predicted at the start of 2022.

• The Definitive Digiday Guide to What’s In and Out for Advertising in 2023

Adland saw its fair share of ups and downs this year. For a comprehensive look at what this rollercoaster ride has been — and what it means for 2023 — take a look below. And let us know what we missed.

• Is Publishers’ Pivot to Software Over?

The case for a broad revenue mix in publishing has never been stronger. With the events market still on shaky ground after coronavirus lockdowns, digital ad rates tanking and rising cost-of-living pressures squeezing online subscription sales, the last thing any publisher needs to be at the moment is a one-trick pony.

There is no doubt these are tough times, but, this too will pass and those that survive will be left thinking hard about where to go next.

• Chrome Users Ask Appeals Court to Take Up Privacy Battle Over ‘Incognito’ Mode

A group of Google Chrome users are asking a federal appellate court to intervene in a privacy lawsuit alleging that the company wrongly collects data from users who browse in incognito mode.

In papers filed Friday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, counsel for the users say U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers judge incorrectly refused to allow the users to seek monetary damages on a class-wide basis. The users are asking the 9th Circuit to hear an immediate appeal of Gonzalez Rogers’ ruling.

• Facing a Cookieless Future, Marketers Trust Performance-Driven Paid Media

There’s no denying that the prospect of a cookieless future is concerning to many. For years, Magazine Manager Blog has written about various cookie concerns (and the data-driven strategies to address them).

New data from Mediaocean’s 2022 Market Report and 2023 Outlook confirms much of that, with 37% of the more than 600 respondents saying a lack of preparedness for a cookieless future (“and other data deprecation relating to consumer privacy”) was the largest area of concern for their media and marketing initiative.

• Google Says Automation Will Support Advertisers in a World Without Cookies

Google has offered an in-depth look at how automation will pick up where cookies leave off when targeting ads without browser cookies. The company is collaborating with the advertising industry to transition to new private ad technologies that eliminate support for third-party cookies in Chrome during the second half of 2024.

Joey Trotz, director of product management for Privacy Sandbox at Google, in a blog post, describes how the post-cookie project will change its advertising platform once cookies are no longer used. Turns out the project relied highly on automation.

• Data in Advertising: How Publishers Retain User Trust

As more users expect transparency, control, and choice over how their data is used, how can publishers build consumer trust, protect user privacy, and create a more responsible web? Becky Dutta, VP of Customer Success at Permutive, and Mathew Rance, Head of Commercial Data at Immediate Media, met as part of the Responsible Web Roadshow to discuss how publishers are addressing the issue…

• Ad Market Falls for 6th Consecutive Month in November, Signaling Potential Recession

The U.S. ad market fell 6.7% in November, marking the sixth consecutive month of declines and giving impetus to the notion that the ad industry is in recession, according to MediaPost’s analysis of data from Standard Media Index’s (SMI) U.S. ad market tracker.

• Ad Spending Forecast: Cloudy With a Chance of Recession

To be clear, things are bleak — online advertising’s uncurbed euphoria slammed into a harsh reality this year. The layoffs and closures across the media industry are proof of that phenomenon.

Granted, it was inevitable because the rampant growth spurt online advertising has been on was always going to run out of steam. This slowdown is providing a much-needed reality check of sorts for swathes of the market. Inevitable because the rampant growth spurt online advertising has been on was always going to run out of steam.

• Google Apologizes for Ad Manager Outage, Raising Questions on Dependency

Google apologized last week for the “inconvenience” it caused online publishers when its ad managing platform stopped serving ads and prevented sites from generating revenue and advertising agency representatives from serving ads for brands. This once again raises questions about agencies’ and brands’ dependency on Google advertising services.

• Recirculation: How It Can Have a Major Impact on Both Traffic Growth and Revenue for Publishers

Recirculation is a real-time analytics metric that compares the number of people on a given page to the number of people who have continued their journey from that article to another one on the same site. In other words, it’s the percentage of readers that make it past the first article of their visit. While some readers will naturally engage with multiple articles per visit, most need extra help getting deeper into a site. In fact, across the Chartbeat network, 89% of readers will leave a site after engaging with just one article. While that might be a discouraging figure at first glance, it’s also a testament to the importance of Recirculation in your engagement strategy.

• Gartner: Uncertainty Clouds CMO Prospects for 2023

Marketers have had a rough go of it in 2022, and Gartner’s CMO predictions for next year don’t herald happier times. One of the biggest factors pressuring the role remains the economy. While some of the inflationary pinch has eased in recent months, fears a recession will hit next year endure. Marketing departments are often among the first targeted for cutbacks in a downturn.

• Publishers: Search Traffic Continues to Outpace Social, and Other Global Audience Insights From Q3

The third quarter of 2022 saw mobile traffic and engaged time remain largely unchanged while loyalty increased and search traffic slipped in some regions. While most regions saw a decrease or no change in their percentage of pageviews from Search, it’s worth noting that the channel as a whole is on the rise. Raw traffic from Google in particular has risen in 2022, while Facebook traffic has remained flat.

• Surprising Beneficiaries of Ad Slowdown: Small Publishers, Traditional Media

If there is a positive story in the ad-spending downgrades being issued this week by the major agency forecasting units, it’s that ad budgets are becoming far less concentrated among the big digital platforms and the biggest beneficiaries are smaller digital publishers and — surprise — traditional media.

• Ad Revenue Forecast Shrinks for 2023 Amid Economic Uncertainty, Magna Says

Manga predicts that 2023 will be a slow year for U.S.-based advertisers, with sales growing just 4% to $330 billion. This is largely due to the lack of cyclical and political ad spending. When this type of spending is excluded, the firm predicts ad spending will grow 6%, with market recovery in the second half of the year. Following a small uptick in ad revenues in 2022 for traditional media owners, Magna’s predicts that ad sales for publishing and television will shrink by 3% and 4% respectively in 2023.

• Meta Threatens to Remove News From Platform if Journalism Bill Passes

Meta Platforms on Monday threatened to remove news from its social networking service if Congress passes the controversial Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.

“If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions,” spokesperson Andy Stone said Monday on Twitter.

• Yahoo and Taboola Enter 30-Year-Old Commercial Agreement, Developing a Leading Offering for Advertisers and Publishers

Together Yahoo and Taboola are forming a contextual data powerhouse to reach consumers, important as cookies go extinct. As advertisers want to reach consumers at massive scale, but shouldn’t have to be trapped in walled gardens, this deal gives them massive scale from two trusted pioneers.

• Ad Consent Now a Top Issue for Publishers

Consent will be a critical issue for publishers next year, according to Richard Reeves, managing director of the Association of Online Publishers (AOP).  Specifically, Reeves means informed programmatic ad consent, as opposed to, say, email opt-in. Publishers are seeking tech solutions that “do not rely on personally identifiable information,” Reeves said in an interview with the UK’s PressGazette.  

• Publishers Are Adapting Advertising Strategies for a Privacy-First World

So much of the attention around the death of third-party cookies and its impact on the digital advertising industry is focused on the implications for brands and consumers, which is far from the complete picture. The digital publishing industry in the U.S. is massive and set to be shaken up as it heads into the cookieless future. However, for those publishers that leverage the right technologies, the death of cookies should be seen as an opportunity to generate new revenue streams and rebuild trust with their readers.

• Publishers Are Turning to Headless CMS Solutions: Here’s Why

A headless system lets publishers store their content in one place, but distribute to any frontend. With more and more digital channels and devices available to consumers, publishers have had to adapt their publishing processes to reach audiences where they spend their time. This has led to a rise in demand for headless content management systems (CMS) that store content centrally, but distribute it across multiple display options.

• ‘Growth has persisted’: Continued Increase in Digital Content Consumption Indicates Potential for Greater Ad Revenues

The digital habits people worldwide picked during the pandemic have persisted. A new report shares how the continued rise in the use of digital content creates ongoing opportunities for publishers. “Global digital content consumption continues to soar,”—55% of people report spending more time each day consuming content now than they did pre-pandemic, according to a new report by data and analytics platform, DoubleVerify. Further, two of three (66%) say they intend to continue pursuing online hobbies they began during the pandemic.

• Google Publishes Guidelines for Its Ranking Systems

Google has published a help document that outlines its “notable” ranking systems deployed throughout the years. Some of them are still in use today, while others are not. The list outlines how the company defines each system, how it is used, and what it means for Google Search. The document, A guide to Google Search ranking systems, lists the ranking systems currently used in Google Search, and those that the company retired.

• Why Identity-Driven Clean Rooms May Be Part of the Solution to Marketing’s Challenges

As privacy regulations and browsers crack down on third-party cookies, marketers are searching for alternative solutions that will help them better understand audiences. Enter identity-driven data clean rooms, which many marketers believe will serve as a more privacy-focused method for analyzing and activating customer data.

• Advertisers Oppose Privacy Rules, Watchdogs Call for Curbs

The ad industry and advocacy groups on Monday weighed in with the Federal Trade Commission on potential new privacy rules, with the ad industry voicing opposition to possible regulations, but consumer advocates contending that new rules are needed.

• Google Ads Cost Per Leads Rose for 91% of Industries Analyzed

The cost per lead has increased significantly, with 21 of 23 industries seeing an increase year-over-year. The average overall increase — 19% — is significantly higher than last year’s increase of 5%, in contrast to 2020’s decrease of 4%, but similar to 2019’s increase of 21%, according to a benchmark study from WordStream by LOCALiQ.

• Survey: Email Marketing Provides the Best ROI

There’s building for the future — that is, doing the foundational work that will pay untold dividends down a strictly-sunny road — and then there’s planning for the future. Planning requires keeping the rainy-day forecast in mind and taking necessary precautions. And with the current concerns of a recession looming, those planning considerations are being revisited or reconsidered all over the globe in many industries

• 1 Year Later – Identity Adoption Urgency Doubles for Publishers and Marketers: Global Study

Lotame recently released findings from its ‘Beyond the Cookie: Next Generation Customer Acquisition & Retention for Marketers & Publishers’ report. This third report in the ‘Beyond the Cookie’ research series examines how marketers and publishers are addressing customer acquisition and retention in the runup to a post third-party cookie digital advertising landscape. Conducted in September 2022, the report polled over 1,400 respondents across seven global markets (U.S, UK, Mexico, Australia, Colombia, India and Singapore) to examine identity’s role in the cookieless future, how they are building a next-gen tech stack and their advertising investments today and in the future.

• Some Readers Are Canceling Digital Subscriptions

Readers are pruning the number of digital publications they subscribe to, according to a new study by Toolkits and National Research Group.  Of consumers polled, 29% plan to reduce the number of online subscriptions they hold by the end of the year, 16% significantly so. However, 27% expect to add to the number, and 44% will maintain their totals.

• The Challenges of First-Party Data Capture and Strategy

A report from Merkle is again shining a light on brands and marketers as they operate amidst ongoing privacy issues, though the surprising takeaway may just be the seemingly lack of concern some are showing. The Q4 2022 Performance Media Report surveyed 250 “marketing decision-makers” across a variety of industries to gauge their mood and methods. Of those, only 29% said they strongly agreed with the statement: I’m concerned about the impact of the cookieless future on my business

• Google Topics Attracts Marketers, Publishers As Identity Adoption Becomes Urgent

Google Topics, the newest entrant to the identity space, is the most popular solution when it comes to compliance with privacy regulations to identify and target consumers with ads. It’s actively used or tested by 71% of respondents to a recent Lotame study. The use of probabilistic or predictive solutions like Cohorts, contextual, authenticated email-based and Google Topics has grown 50% year-over-year (YoY), demonstrating a larger jump than any other identity category.

• Web Summit 2022: Five Takeaways for Publishers

We’ve just returned from a week in Lisbon attending the Web Summit. We will be posting a number of in-depth features from the event in due course, but below are some key ‘front of mind’ takeaways. Bottom line: Publishers need to rebuild audience trust and micropayments could soon have their day in the sun. The publisher track featured presentations and panel interviews with a raft of publishers including Vice, Axios, Washington Post, TechCrunch, Teen Vogue, The Atlantic, Fast Company, and more. Here are five key front-of-mind takeaways.

• Why 2023 Will Usher in a Third-Party Data Renaissance

Marketers have been riding a years-long roller coaster regarding new privacy laws and policies governing how they can use data to guide their campaigns and customer relationships. At every turn, they’ve received a constant piece of advice: to avoid disruption in third-party data availability, build first-party data assets.  While that’s good advice for many marketers, it’s also not enough. For most brands, third-party data is still a fundamental requirement for enriching and scaling the information they use for effective marketing, particularly acquisition efforts.