In the early years of Google, its PR team would put me on the phone with a random product manager – some went on to be important Silicon Valley executives – to discuss some new feature. They’d regurgitate the blog post in case I had reading comprehension issues and solemnly invoke their true aims, which were to help users, advertisers and publishers.
I always took note that publishers came last. And they’ve mostly dropped off the priority list. That was clear in my conversations with People Inc CEO Neil Vogel and USA Today Co CEO Mike Reed, who told me he hopes to be able to diversify traffic enough in the next year to walk away from Google altogether.
This will be unlikely to send Google’s stock price spiraling – even as a large publisher, USA Today Co has little individual leverage – but it will highlight for regulators how publishing's search-based business models are “dead,” as Mike puts it. (USA Today filed a separate antitrust case against Google for anticompetitive conduct in its ad tech business.) Google will eventually separate its search and AI crawlers. I doubt that will be a sea change.
My conversation with Mike was part of TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO, a series we produced in Cannes with media industry leaders. Today, highlights from conversations with Wall Street Journal CRO Josh Stinchcomb, Spotify co-head of ads Per Sendall, and NBCUniversal chief product officer Ryan McConville. See the full series on YouTube.
On The Rebooting Show, recorded live in Cannes, I discussed the impact of agentic advertising on B2B marketing with HSBC CMO for corporate and institutional banking Nicole German and Bloomberg Media chief commercial officer Christine Cook.
How to fix CTV revenue loss
Programmatic CTV spend is rising, but revenue isn't keeping pace for most media owners. Nearly 80% believe they're leaving money on the table — the culprit isn't demand, it's infrastructure built for display, not CTV. EX.CO's new guide breaks down the three hidden revenue leaks costing you yield (signal loss, static floors, and outdated auction architecture), plus a four-step audit you can run in two weeks. See how one publisher grew CTV revenue 33% in 30 days with no added headcount. Get the data, the framework, and the fix.
USA Today Co CEO Mike Reed: Google’s search model is ‘dead’
Publishers like to moan about Google but rarely take any action. After all, what leverage do they have? USA Today Co CEO Mike Reed has had enough. He’s close to walking away from Google altogether, including inclusion in its search results.
"The traditional Google search business model is dead. It's broken,” Mike told me in Cannes during TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO. “That traffic is declining. And Google, through AI summaries, wants to keep everybody on their platform by giving them the full answer. So we are gonna be in a position soon where we have to block Google as well."
USA Today Co, like all publishers, has been busy diversifying its traffic sources and updating its traffic-and-ads-focused business model
"What we have to do as responsible business executives is create other ways to bring consumers to us. And that's what we've been working on for the last couple of years — developing direct-to-consumer traffic to us. We do that through a curated newsletter strategy, reaching out, having consumers register or subscribe, and then come back because we're constantly communicating with them. And then also we've really built out, on a massive scale, our social media strategy."
I was surprised Mike would go as far as he did in this discussion. Most publishers grouse about the crawler issue – Google doesn’t separate out its AI and search crawler – but do not take action. People Inc CEO Neil Vogel said it blocks all bots by default – except Google’s.
Google is starting to feel pressure on the issue, at least indirectly. The UK’s competition regulator ordered Google to provide publishers the ability to opt out of AI crawling.
How Vox Drove 31% affiliate revenue growth
Declines in search traffic have hit many publishers’ affiliate operations hard. Vox Media has suffered its share of traffic declines. At Vox’s New York stable of sites, traffic is down over 25%. But Vox has been able to grow affiliate revenue at an even faster rate than its traffic decline.
"We realized that actually we don't need all of that Google search traffic,” said Camilla Cho, svp of commerce and affiliate at Vox, in a TRB Expert Talk last week. “I can do find other sources of traffic, but also at the same time making sure that the visits I'm already getting are being monetized and optimized in a better way."
Camilla and NucleusLinks CEO Cornelius Frey joined me to break down how Vox has managed to grow affiliate revenue 31% in the face of traffic declines. Key takeaways:
Here are the three core takeaways:
Static affiliate routing leaves real money on the table. A dozen-plus networks now compete for every click, often pulling from bigger marketing budgets than just the affiliate pot. "Set it and forget it" stopped working years ago.
The mid-and long-tail merchants are where the hidden value sits. Publishers optimize their top merchants closely, but the hundreds of smaller ones is where the real opportunity (and the real waste) lives.
Optimization buys time to build a loyalty business. Vox used this to stabilize revenue while traffic declined, but Camilla was clear: you can't optimize your way out of a volume decline forever. The real path forward is deepening loyalty (email subscribers convert 15-25% better) and finding new channels.
Agents won’t replace human trust
You couldn’t walk very far in Cannes without seeing an ad or activation promising some kind of agentic future. And yet, for all the talk of robots automating everything, Cannes sure was crowded with humans. Someone will need to watch the (sponsored) drone shows.
At the Bloomberg Studios in Cannes, Bloomberg Media chief commercial officer Christine Cook and HSBC CMO for corporate and institutional banking Nicole German joined me to discuss the current and future shifts as media moves into an agentic era. The conclusion: Lots of change is still to come, but the one thing that won’t change much is that humans will continue to trust other humans rather than handing over important decisions to robots.
"We probably should expect agents — depending on who's programmed the agent, or where it was built, or what it was meant to do — are all going to have a different angle or motivation, which isn't gonna be that different than the last 10-15 years of lived experience,” Christine said.
HSBC is hardly looking to agents as the future of marketing. Operating in a highly regulated and complex industry, Nicole doesn’t see agents replacing the need to develop trust with clients over time – and in person.
“There is a real human element to this as well,” she said. “When you're dealing with large, multibillion dollar deals, you want to have a team of humans and look them in the eye and be able to have those conversations around the table."
HSBC is doing the basics to prepare. It is making parts of its sites readable for agents in order to appear in answer engine results. It is tracking its brand appearances in these engines in a “game of Whac-A-Mole.” HSBC found that its clients were uploading RFPs to agentic tools, so HSBC has created a playbook for standing out.
“There are different parts of the sales and marketing journey where we need to be thinking about how we’re showing up in agent-based search,” she said.
This is leading to a “barbell effect,” where rote processes are increasingly automated but strategic relationships are increasingly developed in person. “The interesting thing is how much people want to sit in more intimate settings, around a table, and have a conversation,” she said.
The Center Square is a nonprofit newsroom publishing original reporting across state and national markets. Before beehiiv, newsletters were managed externally, meaning slower turnaround, no direct access to subscriber data, and limited visibility into performance.
After migrating in-house on beehiiv, average open rates climbed from 52% to 72%, click-through rates increased 42.4%, and RSS automation saved more than 15 hours a week. A small internal team now manages 12 state and national newsletters without outside help, and the beehiiv Ad Network added a revenue stream that previously didn’t exist.
Wall Street Journal CRO Josh Stinchcomb: Get 200 of the right people
Every media company is chasing events right now, but for the Wall Street Journal, in-person events are no longer an add-on to big ad campaigns.
"It's largely the main dish in many ways,” said Wall Street Journal CRO Josh Stinchcomb. “There's scarcity. I can use that to lock in commitments. In a world where advertising can be very volatile, this locks in commitments up front because the lead time is there and the scarcity is there."
More broadly speaking, in-person events are rising in importance as so much of business interaction is now done on Zoom and email.
"I do think, as more and more time is spent staring at screens, you want to balance your life experience. That’s why there's continued, if not growing, appetite for people to go to events of various kinds. From a business perspective for us, primarily we operate in B2B categories — categories that are often not looking for mass reach. There's a very specific set of people that they want to get access to and influence. And if you can pull together 100 or 200 of the right ones, that's hugely valuable."
Spotify Ads Co-Head Per Sendall: Agentic advertising needs more time
While everyone at Cannes was talking about the promise of agentic advertising, Spotify's Per Sendall said the real action is still taking place internally.
"We are writing just the vast majority of our code now agentically,” Sendall told me. “And now when we bring that into the ecosystem of advertising, we've released a number of products this year already that are helping us move in this area of agentic buying, agentic discovery, agentic trafficking. We've got a CLI and a codex plug-in that we released, and we've actually open sourced these."
Agentic advertising was advertised everywhere in Cannes, but the insider PoV is that – surprise! – the marketing is far ahead of the reality.
"We're still in very early days as an industry there. But we're still in the very early days of artificial intelligence. It is a reflection of where the technology is, and then how much compute we're able to use. And what we're seeing in terms of the advancements of the models on the back end, we can't be far away from a future where all of these things are technically possible."
NBCU Chief Product Officer Ryan McConville: Platforms draft off TV’s cultural impact
By most measures, user-generated content on big tech platforms is outperforming professionally produced content. Only a lot of creator content is drafting off cultural impact created by legacy media, whether the latest episode of Love Island or World Cup highlights.
TV “deserves more credit because it’s the origin of a lot of cultural moments that get talked about in these other platforms,” NBCU chief product officer Ryan McConville argued. “It’s a story as old as time. TV generates the interest and demand, but the big tech companies that were born later, that built their stacks later, are good at taking credit for the last part of the [customer] journey.”
Ryan uses the example of Liquid Death. NBCU research found that the canned-water brand saw its performance marketing clicks rose by 86% and customer acquisition costs fell by 50% when paired with TV ads during the Summer Olympics.
“Advertisers get tricked a bit and put all their money into performance marketing channels.”
Thanks for reading. Send me a note with your feedback by hitting reply.