The rapid rise of the machines in optimising ad placement across social and search platforms was entrenching advertiser double standards on brand safety and enforcement, News Corp’s Managing Director of Free News & Lifestyle, Pippa Leary.

“The hypocrisy is breathtaking,” Leary told Mi3 on the sidelines of D-Coded yesterday. “On one hand, they say putting ads around news stories is unsafe at the same time we're watching algorithmic selling going on with no transparency, no visibility on the environments for those ads.”

Leary said News Corp has been working with newsmedia marketing body, ThinkNewsBrands and “other industry bodies’ on the problem but she had not seen any shifts in market behaviour. 

“Clients and agencies so often want a quick fix and get their campaigns away at large scale and large volume, so they take this option not realising the unintended consequences. That is an ongoing problem that has not abated at all."

Max hypocrisy?

Google’s PeformanceMax, Meta’s Advantage+ and a recent rollout by TikTok letting self-learning algorithms to place ads over manual scheduling, often optimised for outcomes on user action – a click or sale – are quickly gaining advertiser buy-in. 

In the case of YouTube, once the champion of “user experience”, adloads are rising, particularly with the YouTube Shorts format, and increasingly interruptive to viewing – music videos, for instance, can be cut multiple times to serve ads. 

Leary said News Corp’s deal for the sales rights to US advertising supported (AVOD) service Tubi, is headed in the opposite direction – its adloads are lower than local broadcaster video offers and YouTube. 

“What's really interesting about Tubi is because it’s built for advertising, they invest in humans to watch every television program, every movie, and they look for the most sensitive or appropriate place to insert an ad.” Leary said. “You're seeing with a lot of the other streamers and YouTube, they are just using algorithms and it is an incredibly disruptive viewing experience. You do not get that with Tubi. They're watching all the time to see how people are coming on and leaving the streaming service and they're quite sensitive to overloading their ad pods.”

Tubi, which has about 1.3 million Australian users and circa 100 million globally, will have News Corp launch a national marketing effort via which the publisher thinks it can push user numbers towards 3 million within 12 months. Foxtel Media previously had the Australian rights to Tubi but has been more focused on its subscription services such as Kayo and Binge. 

News Corp’s investment in mining its audience for purchase “intent signals” based on content consumption would carry across to Tubi’s mostly connected TV audience. 

“We've spent so much time developing our first party data – we've got what I would say is the best first party data asset in Australia and we've also got incredible scale behind that first party data asset,” Leary said. “This is the first time you will see us applying it to a large screen, to full-screen, sound-on, unskippable video ads.”

Both Leary and News Corp sales chief Lou Barrett have spent long tenures in broadcast TV and are bullish about a news publisher taking on networks and streamer in video although it was a new development for media agencies, advertisers and News Corp’s own teams.   

"It will take time for the market to adjust and realise what we've got to sell. Internally, it's also taking us time to adjust because we're going to have to skill up selling premium video –  selling what I would call BVOD is actually quite different to what we've been selling so far, which has been pre-roll [video] and our News Shorts and our vertical video. So we're internally re-skilling our own sales teams. We've had to update all of our processes but this is a huge opportunity. Tubi is incredibly strong and growing fast in the US.“

Leary said Tubi would help build News Corp’s credentials with younger audiences – most of its users are under 35 – and it is the back catalogue of TV series and movies up to 20 years old that are driving younger audience consumption on the platform. 

“We are incredibly strong in 30 and 35-plus in publishing and we are driving lots more engagement because we've moved towards engaged reach,” Leary said. “Our next 18 months is going to be spent on how we make sure when someone hits one of our platforms, one of our sites, we keep them as long as possible. What that also means is we then have to have a forward-looking strategy that says, 'what about people under 30?' Tubi is going to help that in a major way.”