'News needs swagger’: Leading publishers call for bold action in advertising
Illustration by Holly Warfield / Getty / The Current
Palm Desert, CA – News needs swagger.
That’s according to Sam Mellor, the BBC’s VP of commercial marketing and growth in North America. She was speaking alongside top executives from major news organizations to a largely ad tech crowd at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting (ALM) last week.
It was a coalition of the biggest names in global news, including The Washington Post, BBC, Bloomberg, The Guardian U.S., NPR, and Yahoo, which gathered to address the disconnect between strong advertising results in journalism and the lack of investment.
News organizations have been timid about showcasing the power of their reach and their audiences, Mellor argued. “It is our responsibility to walk into a room and demonstrate that,” she said. “We can do a better job of that. But it’s there. And I think that the future of news is swagger.”
The data supports this posture. Mellor highlighted that advertising alongside news can boost brand trust by 60%, with 84% of people saying they’re more likely to trust such brands. Despite these benefits, the lingering challenge is how to effectively showcase them.
“We have a tendency to center the conversation around news and news investment in this idea of a moral imperative,” she said onstage. “News is good business. Investing in news is good business.”
Studies have shown there is higher ad recall next to news articles and that people who pay for news subscriptions tend to have higher household incomes. Still, GroupM estimated in its end-of-year forecast that advertising revenue for newspapers and magazines dropped by 4.5% in 2024 and projects it will decrease 3% more in 2025. These decreases have led to many news outlets being closed and journalism jobs being lost.
“We have not fought back enough with data,” Rob Wilk, chief revenue officer at Yahoo, said during the panel. “We need to fight back with data and talk about why this stuff works.”
Johanna Mayer-Jones, The Washington Post’s global chief advertising officer, is eager to uncover why the gap between perception and reality persists. Having sat through countless meetings with advertisers that know news boosts ad performance and doesn’t hurt brand sentiment, she said the hesitation remains.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I get it.’ But somehow, it never trickles down,” she said.
News executives are faced with multiple challenges, from block lists to media planners not understanding the value of news to concerns about brand safety. Many of the executives shared the common fear of a brand’s ad being screenshotted next to unflattering news content.
Yet there are brands like General Motors that do understand the power of the news. Sitting in the crowd, GM’s chief media officer, Shenan Reed, grabbed a mic and shared that 11% of the company’s reach obtained via news is unique.
“I’m on a mission for unique reach because I need to sell more vehicles, not just at a better ROI,” said Reed, who was recently named as the IAB’s board chair. “Finding unique and individual people is super important. News matters.”
On the quest to drive those numbers, Christine Cook, Bloomberg’s chief revenue officer, warned about being too narrowly focused on which audiences to target.
Some of the tools introduced to make advertising safer also limit valuable opportunities, Cook said during the panel. “We’ve developed a lot of precision. Media in general over the last 25 years, it’s gotten very technical and specific and rich and [focused on] developing ROI.”
By trying to be too precise, Cook said marketers can miss out on scale and the potential of someone who may not all fit the specific criteria but could still be interested.
A real coalition
News is not the only channel with concerns about brand safety. Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are among the platforms that have similar challenges, yet they capture enormous budgets, according to the BBC’s Mellor. The difference, she recounted onstage, is they walk into meetings feeling like they’re in a powerful position with huge scale, huge audiences and a lot of leverage.
That’s where the swagger comes in, Mellor said. And it should be industry-wide to conquer the challenges they’re all facing.
“This is a real coalition of news publishers,” The Washington Post’s Mayer-Jones said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen us working together to fix the myths on brand suitability or brand safety, to try and change some of the technologies, to build new things together. And so it feels like this is a big moment.”