31 January, 2017

Dear PDRF Community,

Happy New Year! I hope that your holidays were joyful and that you are greeting 2017 with energy and a renewed sense of purpose. What’s more, I hope that you are deep in contemplation of the synopses you plan to submit for the PDRF Symposium in Madrid this coming October.

Since I penned the Call for Synopses in the autumn, the worlds of media, marketing and measurement have spun ever-more-quickly into an uncertain future. The themes outlined in the Call for Synopses remain as vital as before, and recent developments make them even more relevant to the broader conversation about how media businesses are evolving. Some examples:

  • There has been intense focus recently on the problem of “fake news” – what it is, where it originates, how it spreads, how much it is believed and how it might be identified through scalable, algorithmic methods. Given the importance of social media in the diffusion of fake news, questions are being raised not just about challenges that social media bring to publisher business models, but also about the threats they might pose to democracies. What’s more, advertisers discovered that some of their programmatic digital media buys were inadvertently paying for the dissemination of fake news.
  • The debate about fake news has focused the public on questions of bias and objectivity in journalism and the value of professional standards. In the wake of the US election and of the Brexit vote in the UK, paid subscriptions to traditional newspaper and magazine brands have soared.   It remains to be seen whether this public support is sufficient and enduring enough to rebalance the media revenue model away from dependence on advertising.
  • Meanwhile, media content owners have continued to struggle to shore up their digital advertising revenues using a variety of strategies.
    • Some have deepened their investments in data services that can help them profile their readers and build person-level identity management systems that work across channels, platforms and devices. As such, these companies are trying to overcome the scale advantages of the behemoth “walled gardens” – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Snapchat.
    • Some have sought to improve programmatic CPMs by restructuring the ad auctions using “header bidding” or “server-to-server” techniques
    • Some have invested more deeply in video since the advertising market will pay more for video ads than for static ads
    • Some have pleaded with their readers to abandon their ad blockers; others have pursued an arms race to forcibly disable ad blockers on their sites. Consumer ad avoidance continues to rise.
    • Some have extended their relationships with the giant platforms, licensing their content in exchange for revenue-sharing. However, these deals sometimes hinge on metrics that remain controversial and opaque.
  • Governments on both sides of the Atlantic show signs of discomfort with some of the practices that are central to the current media/advertising ecosystem. Expect closer scrutiny of behavioural tracking, data privacy practices, and deception via native advertising as this scrutiny tightens.

Most of these recent developments are direct extensions of the themes outlined in the Call for Synopses. I recapitulate them here to provoke and encourage you to think broadly about the topics that are fair game for the Madrid symposium. We work now at the red-hot centre of a very dynamic, contested, vibrant field. The research presented at our meeting this autumn will not be the last word on any of these topics – but it can certainly be an important contribution to our collective understanding of the forces buffeting our industry. And hopefully at least a few of the papers will help illuminate promising paths forward.

I look forward to seeing your synopses!

Best regards,

Scott McDonald, Ph.D.

Programme Chair