Reuters and SAS on trusting the brand and publisher relationship

In a climate where the daily news cycle is turbulent and brand safety is a prominent issue for brands, it’s important that advertiser and publisher partnerships are on strong footings.

Reuters, owned by Thomson Reuters — one of the world’s largest publishers — and analytics provider SAS, which sits at the intersection of data and AI, have one such relationship. Together, they navigate topics that range from new identity solutions to ad monitoring.

Thomson Reuters Director of Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships Josef Najm and SAS Head of Global Programmatic Strategy Mibbie Plouvier join The Current Podcast to describe how their partnership has evolved and how trust plays a vital part.

Najm and Plouvier touch on the downside of keyword blocking, noting that Stagwell’s recent study found that advertising next to controversial news content performed just as effectively as ads next to “positive” news, like sports or entertainment.

“It’s important to find brand partners that are willing to support trusted journalism and at the same time understand that when they’re partnering with news publishers, that audience they’re reaching is a really important audience. It’s an attentive audience, an audience that’s willing to engage,” says Najm.

“With the current news cycle and how constant it is, you could almost just go down a rabbit hole of blocking everything,” says Plouvier. “So from our perspective, it was ‘Let’s partner with key publishers that we can trust and then we don’t have to worry as much about trying to continue to block things or worry about being somewhere we don’t want to be.’”

This episode of The Current Podcast was recorded in the summer of 2024.