TRB Audience Summit is coming on Sept 17. We have gotten a great response to the event.
A key feature is our private salons, which will be group discussions of executives built around conversational case studies. We’ll have salons focused on post-Google audience strategies, AI licensing and product development, consumer revenue, modern B2B and more. My belief is that media is mostly an execution business. We will dig into the details of how publishers are building audience-focused businesses with tangible examples of initiatives. Join us.
Today, why publishers are focused on manufacturing intent.
A media leader's guide to increasing ad revenue
Advertisers are asking harder questions. Advertisers are asking harder questions. The publishers winning those conversations aren’t the ones with the biggest audiences — they’re the ones who know their audiences best, AND can show it. This guide is for media and publishing leaders who are ready to move beyond reach numbers and rate cards. Inside, you’ll find a practical framework for turning your audience engagement data won deals, better rates, and clients that keep coming back, including:
What advertisers actually want to buy (hint: not impressions or CPMs)
How to turn behavioral engagement data into targeted ad products your sales team can sell
How one Omeda customer delivered native CTRs 288% above industry benchmarks using audience data they already had
‘It’s getting back to Internet 1.0’
Search was a cheat code for publishers. It transferred to them what their webpages often lacked: intent. Google became the greatest economic engine in history because people poured their intent into it. By matching their pages to those intent signals, publishers were able to be part of buying journeys, which is a far more profitable endeavor than, say, putting ads in front of people reading about news.
“A click from search comes attached with a very clear intent signal,” said Cornelius Frey, CEO of NucleusLinks, during the morning salon we held with Affinity Global on Tuesday. “Basically, it’s like a penalty shootout without a goalkeeper.”
Discoup COO César Diaz Pamiés said the coupons publisher is seeing AI fragment manufactured intent across many channels. “We read the audience very fast, and we react to that very fast,” he said.
That’s forced publishers to focus less on the traffic spigot from Google, which often came with expressed intent, and instead look to their loyal audiences.
“It’s getting back to internet 1.0,” said People Inc chief commerce officer Tory Brangham. “Smaller audiences can drive just as much business if you give them really targeted, specific content to their needs.”
Cornelius Frey, CEO of Affinity-owned affiliate optimization platform NucleusLinks, said publisher affiliate operations need to adapt to focus on optimizing existing traffic to make more with less.
”You have to do more of the heavy legwork as a publisher to find out what the user really wants, offering the right thing to that particular user and driving that click or purchase,” he said.
That means a brand like People can no longer spin up a commerce page on “best summer dresses” and expect Google traffic from shoppers who have already expressed their intent. Instead, it needs to “manufacture intent” by tying interest in celebrities to their style. ”People plus celebrity plus really good targeted editorial hooks makes a performance story,” she said.
It’s extending that to other areas. For instance, Southern Living editor Ivy Odom has a following interested in her style that can lead to manufactured intent.
This is part of an overall shift at People Inc to build audience-focused products as part of a portfolio strategy, which treats each of its brands differently rather than running a single playbook across them.
BuzzFeed, for its many challenges, was less search driven than many publishers. Its affiliate operations have long manufactured intent, Becca Maier, vp of commerce at BuzzFeed told me.
“What we’re good at is surprising you with a product that you didn’t realize you needed, and then encouraging you to buy it because it’s on sale or because it’s within this post and it’s something you’re already going to add to your cart,” she said.
Thanks to Affinity Global for its partnerships in this salon. Watch my conversation with Cornelius and Camilla that details how Vox managed to increase revenue by 31% despite losing 35% of traffic.
Agentic advertising isn’t ready for primetime
“Is this just AI jazz hands, or is there something actually there under the hood?’ Discovery and planning agents, packaging agents — those are pretty low risk, and they’re definitely possible. They make the planning process faster, while humans still set up the deals and line items. The highest-risk piece is negotiation. These models are hard-coded to be nice, and the worst thing you want to do is put a nice AI negotiator against a human on the other side. They’ll give that stuff to you for free. Humans should negotiate, but AI systems can do the heavy lifting, and we’ll crawl, walk and run into it.”
Listen to my full conversation with Jon as part of TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO. Also, come hear from Jon directly at TRB Audience Summit on Sept 17.
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