Author: Sara Guaglione

It’s been a tough three months for publishers, according to executives who spoke during a closed-door town hall session at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, last week.

“Not a great quarter. Traffic’s down. Advertisers are very timid in spending. They’re in a wait-and-see mode. So this is definitely the downslope. We expect it to come back, but definitely not a great quarter,” said one publishing exec.

Q1 is typically a slow quarter for ad revenue, as post-holiday spending slows and new ad budgets get reset. But the exec said the downturn they’re experiencing now contrasts with the same period in 2024, which was their company’s “best quarter … ever.”

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A year into its first brand marketing campaign in over a decade, The Economist’s traffic numbers have seen high highs and low lows. To measure the success of the campaign, the company is prioritizing other metrics, such as brand lift and awareness.

In January 2024, The Economist kicked off its first brand marketing campaign in over 15 years. Growing the publication’s web traffic was never the goal of the campaign, according to Nada Arnot, the company’s evp of marketing, who spoke at this week’s Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado. Instead, the purpose of the campaign was to help shift The Economist’s readership from an elite audience to a more democratic and accessible one, as well as to re-introduce the 181-year-old media brand to younger, more digitally native readers.

“Nowhere in our brand messaging did we say, ‘go to Economist.com to learn more,’ because that’s not a true brand campaign, right? That’s much more of a DR [direct response] campaign,” Arnot said. “And so we didn’t put a traffic metric against it. We did monitor traffic, don’t get me wrong — but what we’re seeing, and strategically, what we really want, is for more people to go to our app, anyways. So, tracking traffic to the website is a little bit of a red herring.”

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