Industry should be awash with opportunity right now. Already strained by the facebook-google duopoly, publishers now have to deal with shrinking advertising budgets and advertisers turning away from content related to covid-19. This puts media companies under enormous pressure to make money from new channels. We turned to allison mezzafonte, former executive vice president of bauer xcel media and current cm group media advisor, to explain how publishers can create highly engaged audiences, how those audiences can be monetized, and why media companies need to be optimistic about the future. Editor's note: this article was originally created by our friends at sailthru. Read the original here.
How would you describe the media climate right now? Turbulent. The media has undergone a number of necessary but difficult changes in recent years. Now company mailing list he is forced to look in the mirror and makeover again. It will be a difficult road, but ultimately it will be for the best. We all remember the aftershock of the 2016 presidential election. Facebook's cambridge analytica scandal raised data privacy concerns and made us wonder how the spread of alleged misinformation influenced the outcome of the election. In response, facebook changed
Its policies, deprioritizing publishers in its news feed. These changes decimated some publishers, putting them out of business. It was a warning shot, that's for sure. Publishers suddenly realized the costs of relying on large third-party platforms to reach an audience. Facebook and google – not the publishers themselves – controlled the fate of the media. Now publishers are trying to reconnect with the audience that was once theirs, monetize that connection, and create new experiences from there. Really, publishers don't have much choice. Ad revenue is down as a result of covid-19 and everyone is being forced to find new ways to drive business. It's a scary, but exciting time. What does it mean that many