Join us Dec. 1-3 in Nashville for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit
Kevin Gentzel is the chief revenue officer of the Washington Post.
The next major media consumption shift is happening faster than ever. This shift is happening so fast it will actually lap past platform adoption rates and could give longer life to the newspaper over the desktop. This is the speed-of-light transition we are in. It is a device-first world.
As such, reader experiences must be designed not from a mobile-first perspective but from a device-first sensibility. The newspaper continues to be relevant because it has been a perfect “bundle” of daily journalism rolled up on your doorway. The paper brings you news, security, comfort, advertiser-led marketplaces and a family breakfast-table conversation starter — all in one. It easily travels with you, no matter where you go.
In a device-first world, the newsroom that delivers across the platform spectrum will define relevance and shape the future of media. The combination of platform intelligence and excellent journalism is the key to putting the reader first and continuing to deliver on our tradition of the daily journalism bundle. In the future, the perfect bundle of content will be personalized and will come to you in different forms across many devices.
What will that bundle look like?
One of the experiments I am very excited about is what industry leaders are calling Adaptive Storytelling. It starts with fantastic journalism and builds on that foundation by taking into account a combination of factors which can include: the platform someone is using, the device, the user’s environment and even the time of day.
If newsrooms emphasize the reader experience with journalism, a user’s journey across devices will help define tomorrow’s media consumption habits. If we get that right, innovative, integrated advertiser opportunities will inevitably follow.
More in Media
Reach CEO touts Google AI deal as a template, steps up pressure on OpenAI over scraping
Digiday spoke with Reach CEO Piers North about his plans to make its Google AI content deal a blueprint framework for other LLM deals, and its recent cease-and-desist letter to OpenAI.
Social commerce edges past SEO at The Independent for the first time
The Independent’s social-commerce revenue edged past its SEO-based commerce revenue for the first time in September, CEO Christian Broughton said at Digiday’s Media Strategies event in London this week.
Ownership, control, margins: the brand playbook for microseries is still taking shape
Creator-led microseries are hot, and brands want in, but everyone’s still figuring out the structure of the deals and the content itself