In a challenging economy, where can brands and their agencies go to find greater marketing impact?

Despite the demanding environment for brands and media alike, news publishers have been backed to:

• provide marketers effective channels.
• re-invent their audience targeting capabilities.
• successfully adapt their revenue base.

The assessment comes in a forecast by the respected media analyst firm Enders Analysis. Its 2023 outlook for UK display advertising says:

Media are migrating to digital

Enders' forecast notes that, during 2022, published media added more than £1 million a week in digital ad sales.

Their digital ad sales already surpassed print ad sales back in 2021.

Embrace a quality identity replacement

Despite 2023's economic challenges, Enders thinks news publishers are well-placed to offer brands the solutions they need to respond to changes in how ads are targeted - notably, the deprecation of third-party cookie matching and of other digital identifiers like mobile IDs.

"The winners will be those able to use these tough trading years to (re)position themselves to exploit favourable context, premium experiences and exemplary audience insight," Enders says.

It sees news publishers benefitting from creating "commercially relevant context for advertising" and the "decline of cross-site tracking, pushing value into environments with quality audience information, and nudging KPIs from volume to yield".

Rewire for premium brands

Enders concludes: "This is all good news."

It acknowledges that journalism can be a relatively expensive investment compared with social media, user-generated content and self-serve ad platforms.

But the firm says: "Media should compete on different criteria, providing different benefits.

"Professional environments able to trade on quality context and expert selling can help rewire online marketplaces to deliver premium yield for brand-building and end-to-end funnel delivery.