Earlier this week, Niall Coen, CEO of Snack Media & Head of Forums and Commercial Coordination at Snack Media Simon Boynton attended the Digiday Publishing Summit in Budapest to gain more insight into the latest developments in the world of digital media and marketing.
The pair travelled to Hungary to listen to panellists such as Adriana Tailor of TI Media, Tom Pickworth from the Mail Online, and Tim Cronin of AAX along with other industry experts as knowledge sharing and industry discussion took place at this fantastic event.
Digiday intends to tackle really important issues in the industry, by looking at how publishers are keeping on top of the pressures they’re facing every day, looking at alliances between publishers and evaluating how they’re working out, as well as understanding the new ways to drive subscription revenue and on-site monetisation.
Throughout the event though, there were three main topics that were discussed and debated:
- The diversification of revenue streams
- The effect of the demise of third party cookies
- The relationships between Publishers and other platforms
After listening to experts and engaging in networking, there were some main conclusions taken from the whole event.
Too many platforms
The first one being that with the industry being the way it is, there are simply too many platforms to operate on, and one can’t possibly expect to work effectively with absolutely all of them.
Engagement problems
Publishers and advertisers are looking to find those packs of people who will be attracted to the work delivered to them, but the reality is that finding an audience isn’t actually hard. The hardest bit is truly understanding how to engage with the audience one you have found it, and this involves keeping up with recent trends as well as starting trends yourself.
Subscription diversification
Outside of subscriptions, diversification involves building brands online and then taking them offline – so seeing a move from ‘URL to IRL’ (In Real Life).
5G poses problems
With brand new 5G coming to mobiles and portable devices, the world of streaming and updates for consumers might be getting faster, but it could slow down business for publishers. In fact, the introduction of 5G could make life harder for some as the new tech development is understood to favour the technology companies like Google, Facebook & Amazon.
Collaboration is key
Perhaps more than ever before, collaboration is the answer for publishers going forward. A failure to work together with similar publishers in similar positions, even those in the same industry or space, will play into the hands of the tech giants. Unity is a must.
Ad blocking needs new solution
As things stand, ad blocking is not going away, and thus needs to be tackled differently. Whilst some users will always object to all marketing messages, most people are reasonably happy with certain types advertising creative, so long as it’s non-intrusive and doesn’t disrupt the browsing experience and annoy the reader.
And finally, whilst everyone is petrified of ‘when the cookie crumbles’, our industry has faced many challenges before and will face many more in the future. We have overcome everything in the past and will continue to do so moving forward. We are part of a multi-billion pound industry that simply can’t and won’t fail.
There are plenty more fantastic Digiday events to come, with the Digiday Women in Media Dinner in New York, the Programmatic Media Summit and the Video Advertising Summit all coming in November.
Snack Media specialise in multi-channel content creation, distributed at scale. Through data driven engagement strategies Snack Media creates authentic connections between brands & fans. To find out how Snack Media can connect your brand with 30m sports fans, contact calum@snack-media.com.
