The programmatic ecosystem is constantly changing. If publishers don’t evolve with it, they risk going extinct.
Over the past decade, A360 Media has transformed its business model in response to shifting ad industry trends. Formerly known as American Media, Inc., its legacy print business revolved around tabloids like The Star and its flagship publication, the National Enquirer. But when the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management acquired it in 2014, the company went on an acquisition spree, expanding its print and digital footprint and entering new content verticals in pursuit of ad revenue.
Since rebranding to A360 in 2020, the publisher has focused on entertainment and women’s lifestyle brands, including Us Weekly, In Touch, Woman’s World and DREW. In November, its sites attracted 350 million page views across 50 million sessions.
A360’s digital growth strategy is largely based on programmatic advertising, with a slightly smaller direct sales business. Instead of building an in-house programmatic team, it turned to a third-party monetization partner, Media Tradecraft (MTC), to help it adjust to major changes in the market four years ago.
That partnership led A360 to abandon its made-for-advertising (MFA) model and streamline its site design to court programmatic demand.
Abandoning arbitrage
Like many publishers, A360 faced a turning point during the pandemic.
Previously, A360’s digital ad business was built on arbitrage and paid traffic sourced mainly from Facebook, said Paul Likins, VP of revenue operations. He described the user experience as “100 slides and 200 ads” and “very 2007.”
But during lockdown, “Facebook got a lot more expensive,” he said. Plus, audiences shifted their attention from A360’s lighter, celebrity-focused fare to harder news.
“In that moment, people didn’t care what the Kardashians were doing,” Likins said. “We could see declines in our content consumption, which meant less sessions, less app impressions, less of everything driving revenue.”
A360 needed a new strategy “to get more blood from that session stone,” Likins said. That meant revamping its site experience to keep users engaged without relying on paid traffic and slideshow gimmicks. But the company didn’t have the in-house expertise to craft a new monetization strategy.
A360 never had a dedicated programmatic team – just one employee tasked with yield management, Likins said, which wasn’t going to cut it in the modern programmatic ecosystem.
Without the resources to build an internal team, A360 considered a few monetization partners, but none were able to offer revenue projections that could beat A360’s existing arbitrage business, he said. The company ultimately signed on with MTC because its pitch about the programmatic revenue benefits of overhauling the site experience was convincing, he added.
That overhaul involved reducing certain sites’ page loading times. MTC also worked with A360’s web dev team to strip old code from newly acquired sites and improve the viewability of ad placements – all things that now seem basic, Likins said.
MTC also worked on heavier lifts, such as realigning A360’s ad tech with its content taxonomy. It also introduced a custom header bidding wrapper and automated pricing floor adjustments, and it helped A360 decide which SSPs to include in Prebid and which to shift server-side to Amazon’s Transparent Ad Marketplace.
More recently, MTC helped A360 adjust its site design in accordance with Google’s Core Web Vitals. For example, to avoid getting dinged by Google for having a high Cumulative Layout Shift score, A360 removed some video takeover ad units that shifted page layouts as the user scrolled down the page.
What’s in a network ID?
Plus, most other third parties require publishers to set up a new Google Ad Manager (GAM) integration, Likins said.
A360 would have to set up a new GAM network ID and hand it over to a managed service, which means losing “all the algorithmic goodwill that goes with having a long-term network ID,” he said. It also means scrapping the optimization data GAM had gathered on A360’s audiences over the years.
Losing its GAM ID also would force A360 to rewrite its sales strategy for private marketplace (PMP) deals from scratch or hand over the PMP business to a partner, he added.
“Media Tradecraft is betting that big publishers want to have their own reputation in market,” said Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media, which provides reporting on the quality of programmatic supply chains and tracks the prevalence of MFA publishers.
Jounce considers A360 to be a “bellwether” publisher that exemplifies best programmatic practices – which proves MTC’s strategy of letting the publisher be the market-facing entity has some merit, Kane said. Other networks represent their publishers’ inventory in market under their own names, he added.
Jounce’s endorsement also signals that A360 has successfully left its MFA past behind.
Challenges ahead
Representing itself in market is also helping A360’s sales teams navigate the shift in advertiser priorities away from the open web and toward curated deals.
To build more curated PMPs, A360 entered a partnership with data management platform ArcSpan this summer. But that relationship is still in its early days.
A360 is also actively testing alternative IDs, including Yahoo’s Connect ID and LiveIntent’s HIRO. Its partnership with MTC has helped it make sense of the complicated ID landscape, Likins said – although A360’s testing of third-party cookie alternatives has slowed given Chrome’s shifting cookie deprecation plans, he added.
Looking ahead, A360 faces another major challenge in its impending merger with local news conglomerate McClatchy.
“We’re becoming a different company, with the convergence of a news publisher and an entertainment brand,” he said. “It creates a larger, more varied audience network for both sides, and we may be able to bring in some non-endemic advertising.”
