What do you do as a great content leader?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Like everyone else, we\u2019re trying to figure it out, and we\u2019re constantly trying to improve. But there are a few things we\u2019re proud of, one of them being our rich history of serving the communities where we have published for, in some cases, more than 178 years. Readers within our core footprint value our ability to connect them with their communities and each other, and that responsibility informs every decision around content strategy that we make. And it works \u2013 when we operate with the community in mind we\u2019re rewarded with an audience of informed readers who are deeply interested and invested in their communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We also challenge ourselves to broaden appeal beyond hyperlocal readers, and to create content that resonates beyond the core footprint. One way to think about that is understanding what\u2019s relevant to both the cities we serve and then beyond to a statewide level. This way of thinking produces richer content to work with in terms of audience growth and monetization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We deeply value the readers we attract. As a company that doesn\u2019t have a paywall, it\u2019s on us to create content that people value and want to read. For example, in northern New Jersey we own the Star-Ledger, but we have reporters in every county in New Jersey and as a result our reach is deep; NJ.com is the largest news and information site in the Philly DMA even though we don\u2019t have a print publication there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The benefit to advertisers is that we have audiences in unlikely places and they\u2019re real people who return to our sites to read content that is relevant to their daily lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How important is the partnership with your exchange and SSP partners?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Incredibly important. We have the luxury of choosing who we work with, and we pay careful attention to ad quality and the type of demand we accept. We understand if we create unwelcome experiences for our readers we\u2019ll lose them, and it\u2019s our responsibility to have the best relationships with our partners from an SSP perspective. If we align what we do best with what our partners do best, we create a great experience for both sides, and it\u2019s a win-win. Finding partners who believe in us, who will work with us to create a good outcome is important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the things I\u2019ve been excited about with OpenX is that you guys are thinking about this differently than any of our other partners. You\u2019re out of the box and you understand that programmatic is both a technology and a new way of people working together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we operate with the community in mind we\u2019re rewarded with an audience of informed readers who are deeply interested and invested in their communities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n How do you educate and defend against fraudulent traffic?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We haven\u2019t had a real issue with fraudulent traffic. Because our audiences are mostly local, we see the same people on our sites over and over again. And we\u2019re producing real content that\u2019s relevant to real people, so we don\u2019t use click-bait to drive page views \u2013 we don\u2019t try to get traffic by being outrageous. Folks who live in our communities come back day after day. Our readers use our mobile apps the same way they use Facebook by checking in multiple times during the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But we still do a couple of things to safeguard against fraud. We analyze all of our traffic \u2013 if we see IP addresses coming from unexpected places, we investigate. We also identify for fraudulent traffic by looking at header bidding auctions and metadata around those auctions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What are you doing to ensure viewability standards?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ve been focusing on viewability for the last 6 months, and we plan on releasing new technology embedded in our pages to improve viewability. A number of these improvements came from conversations we\u2019ve had with OpenX.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ve also learned that in many cases viewability is less about the position of the ad on page, but that device speed and connection speed are broadest indicators of viewability. On an iPhone 4 we\u2019ll see different viewability numbers than an iPhone 7 or Google Pixel. Viewability is about more than ad tech strategies, more than how you paint ads onto a page \u2013 it\u2019s about how the user is connecting with us. We\u2019re trying to figure out what that all means so we can package inventory based on device and connection as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What are some unique Private Marketplace opportunities you\u2019ve built?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We think of ourselves as being audience builders first and foremost, around 85-95% of our local direct sold campaigns are all targeted using 1st<\/sup> and 3rd<\/sup> party data from our DMP data across multiple platforms and devices. We extended that same capability to Private Marketplace deals, and if you have a client that has a very special need that they can\u2019t fill with standard data, we can do a PMP deal built on custom audiences tuned to their specific needs. We provide a transparent look into our inventory and audiences, and increasingly diverse range of buyers are finding their high-value prospects by cookie matching their CRM data against our audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In both cases OpenX has been a great partner in terms of helping us grow and refine this strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What innovative things are you doing with audience data?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Years ago our tech leaders implemented Lotame to manage 1st<\/sup> party data gained from user interaction with our content. We don\u2019t enable section targeting in a number of our programmatic structures because we prefer to target people who care about the content. We\u2019ve developed a competency around using 1st<\/sup> and 3rd<\/sup> party data to create defined audience segments on just about any topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We know a lot about our readers based on how they interact with our site. We create cookie pools of 1st<\/sup> party uniques around several dimensions including IP address and geo-location \u2013 whether they\u2019re at home or work, content sections they visit, and what they read about. For instance, readers who consume topical news can be mapped out into audiences. It gives us a pretty cool look at what folks are interested in reading, and it helps us do a better job as we more deeply understand what our readers care about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We also help advertisers ingest CRM data into our DMP on a regular basis. We often enrich their 1st<\/sup>party data with 3rd<\/sup> party data to create corroborating audiences. Combining multiple 3rd<\/sup> party audiences to enrich 1st<\/sup> party data is powerful because we can take a real audience with multiple disparate data points that suggest a behavior and qualify that person for that behavior. For example, if one of our advertisers is a luxury European auto brand, we can take a look at the data and see that a user is interested in the car, and then look beyond that to ask, does their household income or other factors support purchase intent?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What else can buyers expect from Advance\u2019s programmatic offerings in 2017?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We are continuing to optimize toward making our inventory efficient to buy, always thinking about how to make it easier for the buyer. We\u2019re also creating more high-value ad units and IAB rising stars. We\u2019ll be building packages on device and connection speed to create viewability models. And we\u2019re also focused on programmatic outstream video. That\u2019s our to-do list, and anything we can do together to partner to do that would be great.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We caught up with Jeff Sutton, Vice President of Audience Targeting, Programmatic and Data Strategies at Advance Local, on viewability, Private Marketplaces, and other innovative programmatic offerings. What do you do as a great content leader? Like everyone else, we\u2019re trying to figure it out, and we\u2019re constantly trying to improve. But there are a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":61671,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[73,29],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61637"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.openx.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}