The future…

Presenting the first in a series of ‘long read’ interviews with key decision-makers in the media industry. First up is Jamie Credland, CEO of World Media Group, an organization which may have flown a little under the radar over the years, despite including the likes of the New York Times, The Economist and the BBC as members. We sat down with Jamie to talk over the state of the media industry, covering everything from brand-safe advertising to AI to the future of advertising. We hope you find it useful.

Talk us through the work that World Media Group does.

World Media Group is a coalition of international, global, trusted media brands with a focus on really high-quality editorial, journalistic values. We exist to champion quality journalism around the world. Specifically, we exist to champion that journalism to the marketing and advertising industry. So there are quite a few organizations that champion the value of quality journalism in and of itself, for very good reasons, but we’re very specifically focused in proving the value and demonstrating the value of those environments to advertisers and marketers. Some of the focus is on commercial issues and how to do the best content marketing, or working with CMOs to understand how publications can work better with them and identify opportunities for future collaboration. There’s a part of the business which is about campaigning and raising awareness. We’re doing quite a lot of work around the issue of brand safety keyword blocking, which is taking advertising revenue out of those publishers.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by brand safety keyword blocking?

Broadly speaking, it’s a system of tools and technologies that advertisers use to ensure that their ads don’t appear next to harmful content. On one level, this is a fantastic idea, and came out of a moment in time where there was the shooting in Christchurch in New Zealand and the beheadings from ISIS many years ago now. That incredibly harmful content was shared on YouTube, with brand advertising next to it, which caused uproar at the time. Preventing that happening again is an absolutely sensible reasonable decision, everyone’s agreed on that. Over the intervening years however, what started as a tool to stop advertisers appearing next to really illegal, criminal stuff, because the technology is now in place, you now have a situation where a lot of agencies and advertisers are blocking advertising appearing next to anything remotely controversial.

As an example, Time’s Person of the Year was Taylor Swift, and they did a fantastic editorial piece with her, the only interview she had done for five years. There was an incredible amount of traffic to that article. To any CMO that content, and the audience it attracts, is absolute gold dust. But many technology systems were blocking that content and marking it as not ‘brand safe’, because in the article Taylor Swift mentioned feminism and feminist ideas, and the word ‘feminism’ is now on a lot of block lists. I think a lot of CMOs are not aware of that. It’s coming from a risk aversion point of view, where people only ever add to those block lists, they never take terms away from them. So over time they become triggered by what otherwise would be legitimate use. That clearly has a big revenue implication for publishers. What World Media Group is saying is that if you are advertising in trusted environments, you don’t really need to worry so much about the content of a specific article. As an example, ‘Trump’ is on a lot of these lists, because anything to do with the election is concerning for some brands. But if it’s an article about Trump and it’s in the Wall Street Journal then it’s unlikely to be filled with misinformation and hate speech. It’s going to be a credible, trusted voice talking to a premium audience.

What other challenges are being faced by your members right now?

The other really interesting piece is the implications of AI for the business. The future of journalism is an interesting discussion, but what’s also interesting is how AI can enable marketers to create better content marketing. What the limits of GenAI are compared to working with a branded content studio or something like the New York Times? Right now, everything we’re seeing suggests that the AI is not really ‘there’, because for premium audiences you need new ideas, and AI doesn’t really do that. But for things such as translation, or creating multiple assets, there are some really interesting opportunities to scale stuff globally.

As you’d imagine we’ve been talking to a lot of publishers about this…

I think every single one of our members has an AI workstream internally, and they’re all developing. It is fascinating to me because they’re all taking slightly different approaches. There really isn’t agreement on the one answer yet. The bit that I think is interesting on the journalism front is that there’s a discussion going on at the moment to work out which are the areas where AI can really add value. Those areas definitely exist, but there also things which AI could never replace. We had Clarissa Ward speaking at an event in Cannes, she’s a reporter from CNN who smuggled herself into Syria to report from there. There is a certain type of reporting that needs a human being to go and ask good questions to people who don’t really want to answer them. That’s never going to get replaced. But if formatting it, packaging it up, and getting it sent out quickly can all be aided by AI, then so much the better.

A lot of media outlets, particularly in news, are facing real problems with declining levels of trust right now. What can they realistically do to combat this?

It’s an interesting question. I think that trust in institutions is generally in decline, it’s not just a media issue – you see that around politicians as well. What we’re still seeing is that trust in brands increases when they’re seen in more trusted environments, so the benefit of being there still holds true. But I think you’re right that there are challenges here. From the editors I’ve spoken to over the last year, two themes emerge. One is that there’s a lot of emphasis on being more transparent about how they’re drawing their conclusions, and a little bit less presumptive that they are always right. I guess engaging with some of these issues from both sides, that doesn’t mean presenting both sides are equally valid, but explaining the context of why you, an editor, really have a particular point of view. And the other piece – the BBC famously has its Verify team, which is, they have a misinformation and disinformation editor now for the first time, and they have a whole team working on specifically identifying what news stories can be trusted, etc.

We’ve tended to focus on challenges and negatives here. What would you say are the key opportunities for media owners and news outlets right now?

For marketers and advertisers, these spaces are still absolutely the fastest way to build trust, credibility and awareness of your brand. I think, in a world where cookie deprecation is real – and regardless of Google’s decision, 50% of internet traffic is now no longer cookied, people are becoming more and more concerned about data privacy. So advertising to people in trusted environments is going to become more and more appealing to marketers. From a news consumer point of view, there’s so much information out there now, and if anything Gen AI is going to lead to a lot more. There is going to be more content than ever before, and it’s going to become harder than ever to tell the difference between what’s true and what’s not. The appetite for a trusted news sources and content that you can’t get other places is going to become more valuable, especially for premium audiences, or business audiences, where any kind of insight that gives you an edge over the competitors is going to become increasingly valuable and not available for free everywhere

You talked about the end of the cookie, but I think part of the challenge is that digital display advertising has never really compensated for the decline of print advertising.

I think the opportunity, which many of our members are already doing, is for these publishers to think about their news brand as multi-platform, multi-revenue stream organisations, and that includes subscriptions, that includes advertising, but also events and premium products and premium experiences. Many of our members are growing revenue because they’re taking that kind of mixed approach. I think that’s key across the board. The other thing is about emphasising the brand. There are some challenges with the current model – we are pretty confident that as a result of Gen AI, search traffic to publishers will probably continue to decline. So becoming a destination, having a really strong first-party relationship with your readers becomes ever more important. Again, many World Media Group members are further down that road than other news organisations. That gives them a position of strength.

There’s a school of thought which says media owners should be going to advertisers and saying ‘please, you have to advertise with us to save democracy and to save the world’. I personally believe that’s true, but I don’t think that’s as compelling as going out to advertisers and saying ‘hey, you need to advertise with us if you want to build your brand with premium audiences and make a lot of money’, and making that kind of commercial case for it, rather than the charitable case, is how you actually move the needle.

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Martin Tripp Associates is a specialist executive search consultancy. We work globally across the media, information, technology, video games and entertainment sectors, and with some of the world’s biggest brands on communications, digital, marketing and technology roles. Feel free to contact us to discuss.