Category: In the News

Trump campaign ads in particular, these sources say, have slipped through the defenses because they were classified as consumer electronics ads, or because they were labeled as ads for totally different brands, such as Kraft Heinz. One source said its ad ops team got fooled by a pro-Trump ad that featured images of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

And with many of the ads aimed at readers located in swing states, where publishers do not maintain local ad operations teams, most publishers don’t find out the ads are running until an irate reader sends them screenshots.

Compared to the enormous scale of ads sold programmatically, the number of ads that gets through is small. But with political polarization at an all-time high — and ad spend through the roof as well — even the occasional ad has consequences, not just with left- or right-leaning readers but with staffers too, who see the ads as bad for the publisher brand.

“Every time there’s a [problematic] PAC ad, there’s a Slack uproar,” said Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of G/O Media, who said that G/O’s ad ops teams has been dealing with the problem all year.

“I don’t think it’s a conscious effort from the PACs or the campaigns to get their messaging onto sites like ours [through deceit],” Spanfeller added. “It’s just the vagaries of programmatic media buying.”

Digital political ad spending this election season is expected to soar past $1.3 billion, according to eMarketer estimates. While more than three quarters of that money is expected to go to Facebook and Google, hundreds of millions of dollars have been up for grabs, much of it programmatically, not just on display, but much more than normal on connected TV and OTT, where advertisers can deliver TV-quality spots efficiently.

Some news publishers, including Reuters and Bloomberg, have policies against accepting political advertising. But most publishers with programmatic businesses cannot say no to the infusion the ads provide every two years — especially in a year when the coronavirus-induced downturn which has hit publishers’ bottom lines hard.

And this year, unlike so many other advertising categories, politics have delivered: Revenue heads at two different publishers contacted for this story said they were ahead of their original revenue projections for political spending.

And publishers have benefited, to some extent, from Google announcing last year that it would not allow political advertisers to use custom audiences on campaigns run on its platform, driving more revenue into programmatic video markets, said eMarketer analyst Nicole Perrin.

“Our editorial leadership isn’t happy about it, but we’ll take political advertising of all sorts,” one chief revenue officer said. “It’s going to polarize most of our audience, [so] we try to minimize it as much as possible.”

For this election cycle in particular, that has meant requiring exchanges grant them creative review of all political ads that they might run. Back in August, WarnerMedia’s advertising platform Xandr announced that it had launched compliance features for political advertisers which would include a human review of every political ad it distributed.

But these countermeasures don’t work every time. In order to figure out which ads to evaluate, publishers rely on metadata from the ad delivered by demand sources, and the ads are sometimes incorrectly labeled. Justin Wohl, the chief revenue officer of Salon, said he’s seen Trump campaign ads classified as Business & Industrial, Computers & Consumer Electronics, Finance, Law & Government and News, Books & Publications.

Efforts to block the ads at the domain level don’t always work either:  A full third of the ads served to Salon through AdX since July have come from unknown advertiser domains, Wohl said.

“With as many demand partners as there are in a typical programmatic stack, blocking every possible attempt through every possible channel is exceedingly difficult,” said Salon’s Wohl. “Especially when there’s deception and mislabeling going into the buys in the first place.”

Sources including Wohl acknowledged that both left and right could be hiding their domains or miscategorizing their ads, but: “The right-leaning ads are the ones that lead to angry emails from readers,” Wohl added, “so they’re much more so on our radar.” 

But despite more people having the chance to vote ahead of November 3, a large portion of those ballots legally cannot be counted until election day, according to Lindsey Cormack, an assistant professor of political science at the Stevens Institute of Technology. What’s more, depending on the state, some mail-in ballots are still valid if postmarked by the election day itself, further delaying the finally tally.

It’s likely we will know who the next president is by the December holiday season, Cormack said. But that means news publishers have upwards of a month-and-a-half before they are able to make their call. It also means that they have a month-and-a-half to compete for traffic as audiences search for the latest election updates online.

“We are planning for a long election night that could last weeks,” said Paul Volpe, executive editor of Politico.

Broadcast news publishers like CNN, Fox News and NBC are focusing on making their digital experiences during that time more engaging and interactive, with the expectation being that most people will not be glued to their televisions for weeks on end. Digital publishers like Politico, Reuters and The Washington Post have started testing new strategies for driving audiences to their respective sites, including launching new platforms and leaning further into a social media strategy. Some publishers, including The Economist, expect election coverage will be a boon for overall growth.

“One of the centralized themes for this election cycle is personalization,” said Anna Brand, senior editor for news projects at NBC News.

To accomplish this, she said her team has begun testing localized news alerts and emails based on the state that audiences are in, including app notifications promoting the publisher’s Plan The Vote interactive telling people where and how to vote this year.

These mobile state-by-state push alerts had total open rates of up to 16% for each notification, which is three times the normal total open rate for push notifications, according to a company spokesperson. And to continue that engagement hike, Catherine Kim, global head of digital news for NBC News Group, said her team will double down on local alerts as the election nears, and likely, passes November 3.

Reuters has been leaning on a tailored social media strategy for each of its channels to drive traffic back to its election content, with The Economic Dream Team Twitter poll series and its Instagram Stories being two highly performing areas within that strategy for garnering viewer engagements.

According to the publications’ digital news director, Arlyn Gajilan, posts around the time of the primaries on the mobile-based social media platforms were the second-highest source of traffic to U.S. election stories from February to April. 

And for Politico, the publisher soft launched a new downloadable newsletter called Politico Minutes around the time of the conventions with latest updates in a “swipeable” format optimized for mobile users. That platform will be picked back up during the election as well, according to Volpe.

“Easily more than 60% of our users will come to us on mobile for election night,” said Manav Tanneeru, CNN’s senior director of product. And those users will be looking for very specific results out of the more than 500 national, state and local races that will take place on Nov. 3.

Tanneeru said that with that in mind, both CNN’s Election Center, which houses everything from polling data to election results, and its Facts First fact-checking platform are prioritizing simple, state-by-state and issue-by-issue navigation that works for mobile as well.

Aside from personalization, publishers are building out more interactive digital products to inform readers of the possible outcomes and boost engagement.

NBC News and CNN are giving its audience the chance to control over the presidential election’s outcomes — hypothetically. Both publishers have a “Road to 270” map that allows audiences to test different scenarios for how states will vote. And NBC News has a “Swing The Vote” interactive interface where viewers can play with the possibilities of outcomes based on the turn out rates from various demographics.

In all of this, news publishers “can show their chops” with the new and interactive ways to display election results, said Stevens Institute of Technology’s Cormack. “The competition for views will be steep,” but this is a way for publishers to keep people engaged on their site compared to the endless number of sites reporting on the results and getting updated information all at the same time, she said.

The other major focus for news publishers during this election is clearly outlining basic information. Several publishers have built out their own voting hubs with information on where and how people can vote based on their state.

The Washington Post, for one, created an information hub with 51 unique URLs for its readers to share state-specific voting information with their friends and family, said Cameron Barr, a managing editor for The Washington Post.

Cormack added that unlike past years’ debates and election nights, people will be unable to or discouraged from attending viewing parties and election celebrations as well due to the coronavirus.

Knowing that its audience found that to be a significant part of the election experience, Fox News launched a second-screen experience that connects the network’s live broadcast with its digital platform, which was first reported by Deadline. The experience will include both a cheer monitor and an audience monitor that allow viewers to connect with each other and the broadcast hosts. Audiences are also able to track the most important races to them personally with its My Races function, and share those links with their friends and family.

Fox News Digital editor-in-chief Porter Berry summed up the sentiment of the 2020 goal for news publishers: to “offer the most personalized hub yet for the American people on election night.”

And likely beyond.