News Corp’s Robert Thomson on fake news: ‘We’ve gone from Mad Men to mad metrics’
Ad agencies should be held accountable for their role in perpetuating fake news through programmatic ad buying, Robert Thomson, CEO of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp said.
Fake news has been around for years in different forms, but it’s soared in prominence lately as many blamed it for swaying the presidential election with false or misleading articles about the candidates that spread widely on Facebook. These sites are propped up by the programmatic advertising system, where advertisers buy space based on defined audience targets rather than buying directly from a given website, which can result in ads winding up in places that the advertiser didn’t intend.
Thomson, speaking today at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference, was careful to direct his comments toward ad agencies, not advertisers, continuing a theme of critical comments he’s made about ad agencies wasting money through automated ad buying by running ads on low-quality sites.
“They make money on fake news,” he said. “Often advertisers will be aggregating audiences. They’re serving ads to audiences they have demographically defined … Ad agencies should also be responsible for the audiences that they’ve created and what they’re serving those audiences and how they’re serving the clients. We’ve gone from the era of Mad Men to mad metrics.”
One of the rare news publications that has a robust online subscription business, the Journal has been tightening up its online paywall with the goal of growing subscriptions as ad revenue becomes harder to come by. Thomson also said he’d like to think the fake news scandal will be a big opportunity for sites like the Journal because it will “renew focus on premium news and news you have to pay for.”
Continuing on the subject of the Journal, he said the goal is to bring in new subscribers without discounting, which he said has become easier with improved software. “The aim is to bring in as many people as we can and then upsell.”
While the mainstream news media has been criticized for missing the undercurrents among voters that led to Donald Trump’s victory, Thomson also expressed optimism for News Corp’s book publishing business, pointing to this year’s success of the memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” from HarperCollins, a News Corp business, as evidence that the company understands the broader market.
“We’re not elitist. We are able to tap into the mass market whereas others are not.”
-
Marketers weigh the cons of working with Google Ad Manager amid Justice Department’s new lawsuit
When is it time to back away?
-
Atlas Obscura wants to be profitable before raising funds in a tricky media market
Atlas Obscura wants to turn a profit this year before it raises another funding round, at a time when publishers are facing lower valuations and pickier investors as deal activity slows.
-
Publishers report Q1 ad revenue is pacing 10-25% behind forecasts
Publishers are facing a slow start to Q1 and sales teams have a lot of work to do to regain lost time.
-
SponsoredHow ad tech is tackling waste by optimizing supply chains
Sponsored by Bidtellect The programmatic and digital advertising industry is well aware of the inefficiencies in buying and selling — from auction duplication and volume bias to multi-integrations and reselling — but how did it get this out of control? How can we fix it? A redundant, multiple-step process to ad delivery has become the norm, […]
-
WTF is cookie stuffing?
Fraud is a well-documented pox on digital advertising, but it’s also an issue for publishers and marketers working together on affiliate marketing deals, too. One of the more tried-and-true techniques is cookie stuffing.
-
Bloomberg, Axios, Politico, other business publishers rethink subscriber retention during the economic downturn
Premium publishers, like POLITICO, Axios and Bloomberg, have to make sure their fees are still considered a necessity as readers recalculate their spending and companies recalculate their expense budgets.
