Commercial leaders from across the news industry joined the stage to discuss topics including data in the post-cookie world and the impacts of blocklists on publishers, reports Press Gazette
In a panel focussed on the ‘cookie-less’ world, two news brand figures pointed to the particular importance of optimising first-party data capture.
The Independent’s chief data and marketing officer Jo Holdaway and manager director of digital, partnerships and innovation at The Telegraph Karen Eccles both spoke about bolstering data propositions through encouraging online registrations.
Piers North, chief revenue officer at Reach, added to that discussion later in the day, commenting: “You need to transact that data as best you can, but you also need the volume.”
Although touching upon the need to work with news offerings from big technology companies, he also insisted that “you absolutely need to try to own the customer and the data yourself”.
North also encouraged the industry to consider blocklists carefully to avoid penalising publishers reporting hard news stories.
Mentioning Reach’s brand safety AI tool Mantis, he emphasised the importance of understanding marketers’ fears around potentially unsafe content by giving them tools that can detect a story’s suitability without publication delays or blocklisting.
He also said: “The cost of sending journalists into a frontline warzone… is really expensive… we either just don’t cover it and you can listen to the Ukrainian side or the Russian side… but it’s a real problem.”
Elsewhere at the event, News UK COO David Dinsmore spoke about subscriptions and the practicalities behind micropayments for individual articles, while the Evening Standard’s head of audio David Marsland spoke about a “golden age of podcasting”.
Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology conference took place on 21 September at London’s Waldorf Hilton. Read Press Gazette’s full round-up of the day here.
