Saving Local Media Isn’t About Demonizing Big Tech

High operatic performances about media are making a spectacle out of Capitol Hill these days. They’re known as “hearings” but they’re really more like hammy vocalizations and their affected tone, sensational eyerolls and melodramatic vocalisms are meant to signal that the pols know full well that Big Tech is to blame for everything that ails the country right now.

There’s just one problem: It’s not true. Facebook, Google and Twitter are easy scapegoats for our distorted and dysfunctional political tenor, but that’s spectacle, not reality. The focus ought to be on helping local media, which have been seriously challenged in the digital age, learn how they can compete for national brand advertising dollars and reader loyalty.

Local media might be in serious trouble but there are serious opportunities.

Tens of billions of dollars’ worth of digital ad revenues ride on the media industry’s ability to figure out how to function without third-party cookies and even the smallest local publishers hold the golden asset of first-party data, frequently with consent.

The ways to leverage those advantages and that loyalty haven’t always been clear to local media. Recently, though, the Local Media Consortium (LMC) has brought new tools and new power to local media to help them help themselves in the age of digital, especially when it comes to the effects of programmatic buying.

NewsNext and NewsPassID are both part of a strategic initiative of the LMC to redefine how local fits into the digital ecosystem, improve its sustainability and deliver a scalable, privacy-compliant single sign-on to local news for consumers that delivers value to consumers as well as to advertisers and revenue to local publishers.

Scott Cunningham, Owner, Cunningham.Tech, a consultant for the LMC and founder of the IAB Tech Lab, puts it this way: “What's happened with programmatic [buying of advertising] is that advertisers started buying audiences at scale, and these audiences were about third-party cookies. It was third-party trading. It was demographic based. They stopped asking about premium content. And this is why all of these local journals and domains didn't make it into the agency holding companies’ buying anymore or had been buried with other content sources if they did make it.”

In the race to reach the biggest audience possible, brands and media buyers have not only reduced the numbers of domains they’re looking at, they’ve inadvertently reduced the quality of the audience, too. Whereas in the past, brands would search out and want to be associated with quality publishers, now it’s just “we want an audience.”

As the first part of his work with the LMC, Cunningham created a Local News Advertising Inclusion List that put a spotlight on the importance of advertisers engaging with local audiences, especially during Covid, and helped address the programmatic practices that have reduced local media share of digital advertising threatening a foundational element of democracy. That work attracted large agencies and brands interested in how they could reach local audiences in a brand-safe way and started new conversations on how to better connect local publishers and broadcasters through programmatic channels.

Media disruption has tested the viability of local journalism – and democracy – in the process.

Local is where you find as good as an attempt at objective and fact-based journalism that we have today and a virtual town hall where neighbors can engage with their neighbors in ways that lack the short-form vitriolic trolling (and lie sharing) that has come to haunt social media.

Local media outlets are not only places where information goes out. Incoming viewpoints from readers on Letters to the Editor pages or in opinion columns render local outlets places for facilitating civil discourse and bringing issues to light, providing local residents with a forum to debate in respectful and productive ways. As local media are businesses that work in and live in the community, they have a vested interest in common with their consumers, their neighbors, to address the challenges that they face in a way that is more about solutions, about helping voices be heard on both sides of an issue to create measured and practical outcomes.

And that’s precisely where Fran Wills, CEO of the Local Media Consortium (LMC), sees an opportunity: “There’s lots of disruption happening in the digital marketplace—changes to ad targeting and identifiers, sunsetting of cookies and consumers’ increased desire to have more control of their personal data. These changes present an opportunity to reestablish local media’s standing in the digital ecosystem through NewsPassID, a more streamlined privacy-compliant way to connect advertisers with consumers. Many local news outlets across the U.S. and Canada have trusted relationships with their audiences but lack scale. NewsPassID provides a new way for local media to create an addressable, privacy-compliant first-party database with the scale to compete for national ad dollars while providing advertisers with a more efficient way to reach local audiences.”

Wills continues: “Keyword blocking that accelerated because of Covid negatively impacted local media and reduced advertisers’ ability to reach local audiences because of this blunt approach to brand safety.”

Brands want these opportunities to engage with local audiences, but they don’t have the structures in place anymore to get there.

It’s been years since local sales people were on the phones or at lunch tables selling, so brands and media buyers have no roadmap to gaining insight into context and content that they can rely on. They’ve become fully focused on programmatic-type ad buys.

After launching the Local News Inclusion list, Cunningham and the LMC established NewsNext, which includes a couple of different working groups of publishers, an ad network working group and a first-party data working group. They conducted a series of interviews with large marketers and media buyers at the national level. As reported in the just-released NewsNext white paper, they asked questions meant to tease out buyers’ avoidance of news information and what was causing it.

The results came down to a few important takeaways: “Professionally-produced journalism mattered to marketers, but the titles of those publications did not necessarily,” says Cunningham. “And of the 20 publishers we interviewed, only two of them had national sales executives anymore. Only two. Many of them eliminated or were eliminating the positions because everything went to programmatic. There was no picking up the phone and calling on an agency, holding companies, or marketers to say, ‘Hey, I've got this aggregate.’ Because they would say, ‘You're not individually big enough for what I'm looking for.’ That's number one. But this notion that publishers were hanging their hats on the publication’s title, only a handful are left that can work in a direct-sales model for national brand advertising. Maybe ‘the New York Times,’ maybe ‘the Washington Post.’ The rest of them? Not so much. Programmatic also obfuscated the ability to safely target advertising across U.S. journalism sources. But buyers were really interested in the dynamic that a newspaper and the local television created, in having been the center of an intelligent conversation in that community, and that equaled engagement.” And engagement means successful advertising.

Which brings me back to local politicians and why I believe demonizing Big Tech is a dead wrong.

Local media is too important for local politicians to ignore and efforts like NewsNext to save local media are vital. Local media sources are the best and often only place to reach engaged – and voting – local audiences. If politicians, who might sit in D.C. but are sent there by district voters, think of themselves as advertisers, then their local outlets are their scale and their target.

Local media are critical to our sense of community and even to our democracy. Like all politics, media is most relevant when it is local. That is precisely why city, county, and state politicians, at the very least, should be turning their attention to something far more urgent than repeating banal platitudes that assault Big Tech but don’t get into solutions that could help how to save their own local media – where they can most easily speak to and convince their voters. After the rise in subscriptions some publishers have seen at least short term during and post Covid, it’s more clear than ever that life-and-death reporting is about what is happening right at hand.

Cunningham believes consumers are becoming more intelligent around this, too: “Fact-based information gathering matters. It matters. What we have in social environments is a lot of shooting from the hip, from people who are not paid to nor interested in expressing objective points of view. And the local reporters, on air or in digital, do that type of stuff for a living. This is where journalism really matters. Now you've got a lot of great conversations happening around social and racial injustice stories. Covid-19, vaccination rollouts, schools reopening, communities emerging post-pandemic… How do we continue to support that is really a healthy conversation to have.”

To do that, the supply chain of advertising has to work for local publishers.

Cunningham believes he can use his experience to work with the LMC members to tip the programmatic supply chain back in favor of local journalism as a start. “If national brand advertisers have more direct access to the ad inventory exposed on those content sources, and frankly, the conversations, I will consider that a win for marketers, publishers and consumers.”