Mail Metro Media shifts ad strategy toward PMPs and fewer ads as it unifies stack

On sheer scale alone, you’d assume Mail Metro Media — the commercial ad arm of DMG Media, which owns the Daily Mail and Metro titles — was a textbook high‑volume programmatic machine. And yet, for years, the publisher has been driven by direct digital deals, with a split tech stack and a small programmatic team largely focused on the open market, according to its new md of advertising, Pierce Cook-Anderson. 

He wouldn’t share exact figures but stressed that the “overwhelming majority” of Mail Metro’s digital ad revenue, which was £148.3 million ($202.4 million) last year, still comes from direct deals rather than programmatic — a gap he now wants PMPs to start filling.

Cook-Anderson, who joined from curation platform Audigent two months ago, has a clear mandate: fix what he sees as years of under‑investment in PMPs and managed programmatic, and drive roughly 300% growth in that line over three years without blowing up the direct relationships that still underpin Mail Metro’s revenue.

Fixing that “middle of the stack,” he argues, is the clearest way to grow digital ad revenue (down 15% YoY last year to £148.3 million) prove more outcomes to agencies, and stop open-market decline from quietly eroding the model.

“We have definitely underinvested in our PMP business,” said Cook-Anderson. “This is an area where we have to invest because buyers really want to buy PMPs. There’s a whole different set of budgets, different KPIs that can be activated here,” he said. 

The shift in focus has come alongside a broader changing of the guard in Mail Metro Media’s commercial ranks over the last few months, a restructure that has created a new layer of five managing directors, all of whom report into a single chief revenue officer, Dom Williams.

Previously, the commercial stack was effectively cut in two, with direct and open‑market/programmatic revenue run under different leaders. In the new model, Williams owns the entire stack: print, digital, open market, PMPs, subscriptions and commerce. The restructure has involved the departure of former MMM veterans Lauren Dick and Hannah Buitekant and newcomers, including chief client officer Claudine Williams, alongside new mds spanning commerce, advertising, ad product, new media and commercial editorial, announced earlier this month.

Cook-Anderson is currently hiring a head of programmatic, who will embed within the Mail’s 118 sellers and assist with reskilling them, he said. “My belief is that the moment we start having people focused on doing PMPs, incremental and net new revenue will start flowing into our business. I fully expect to build out a [PMP] team,” he said. 

By plugging its own first-party data signals, including its internal 200 billion commerce and audience data signals into PMPs, Mail Metro Media is trying to turn a high‑volume IO business into an outcomes shop, giving agencies cleaner, more accountable paths just as open‑market signals erode.

Commerce data gives publishers something increasingly valuable in PMP negotiations: evidence not just of audience attention, but of purchase intent and conversion behavior.

In parallel, the number of ads per page is being slashed from 10 to three while ad loads are being cut by 80% to improve subscribers’ page speeds — all in the belief that better user experience plus clearer proof of performance is what agencies now want from publisher partners, noted Cook-Anderson.

The Mail isn’t alone in carving out PMPs as a growth lever. Publishers who are countering the open-web display ad decline are all moving the mix toward direct-sold and PMP deals. The Association of Online Publishers’ February survey found that 68% of publishers are increasingly leaning on direct advertising relationships, with 64% saying most of their ad revenue now comes from direct sales, with PMPs jumping as a top growth area.

“Any publisher over-indexed on open exchange display is in a difficult position, as that revenue stream is in managed decline,” said Gabriel Dorosz, advertising lead at INMA. “The need to rebuild around premium direct, PMP, video, first-party data, and diversified products — not to mention reader revenue — is what’s accelerating.”

Short-form video and CTV-adjacency formats are where a lot of spend is flowing, and are where many publishers are leaning in, he added. “Publishers who can provide evidence of outcomes through attention, brand lift, and incrementality create demand for their inventory that makes it worth moving out of the open exchange and into a guaranteed deal,” said Dorosz.

Publishers have been hit hard by referral traffic declines over the last few years, thanks to the rise of AI search and shifts in Google Discover algorithms. The Mail is no exception. Cook-Anderson knows LLMs and AI search can strip out referral traffic and commoditize news content even further, and the company currently blocks crawlers because the value exchange doesn’t stack up for a newsroom of 1,000 journalists, he stressed.

That stance effectively forces them to monetize the audience they still own as efficiently as possible: fewer, higher‑value impressions, richer first‑party data, and private pipes where they can see and prove what programmatic is doing for brands. The PMP and outcomes play is the hedge: if AI and agentic buying rewrite the open web, Mail Metro wants to be sitting on a portfolio of direct and private programmatic relationships that are hard to dislodge, rather than hoping commoditized open‑exchange demand will somehow bounce back.

Cook-Anderson isn’t walking away from the open marketplace, but treating it as a yield problem — tightening SSPs (the Mail has cut partners by 50%) — now a prerequisite for agencies and clients, he added. Cook Anderson is currently reviewing its top ten ad tech vendor partners but believes that the Mail will likely consolidate further. “The agencies are increasingly working with literally a handful of partners. So we will just have to follow where the money goes,” he said.

Even with those internal levers to pull, he is blunt that the wider backdrop could still bite, particularly in travel, where the war in Iran and rising fuel costs risk knocking out one of Mail Metro Media’s biggest sources of ad spend in the second half of the year.

“One of our largest sectors is travel, whether it’s cruises, whether it’s airlines, whether it’s tourist authorities — it’s incredibly important to our business,” he said. “Clearly the war in Iran has the potential to decimate that spending. We are beginning to see some airlines cancel flights; there is this looming fear of the fuel crisis… I am cautious about what happens in H2. I’m concerned. I think travel is going to potentially suffer.”

Even if travel proves more resilient than expected, Cook-Anderson has another eye on the broader macro risk, and what a potential downturn could mean for confidence and media budgets.

“Are we potentially on the precipice of some form of recession or stagflation event between the U.S. and the U.K.? Maybe. How will that affect consumer confidence? Well, we know that our budgets get pulled,” he said.

With that kind of pressure on budgets and sharper scrutiny on ROI he expects agencies to prioritize anything that makes spend easier to defend. That’s a big reason behind why agencies are talking about cleaner supply paths and closer ties to publishers, not just another cheap reach buy in the open exchange, he believes.