Why Is Hard News a Hard Sell for Advertisers?

[Commentary] News organizations, those with their roots in newspapers as well as TV, have enjoyed an astonishing increase in consumption and now are far more current, enriched as they are by multimedia, by social media and citizen journalism. Furthermore their content is the most-shared across the internet. This suggests something significant. Advertisers and agencies might take note.

Digitally delivered news, both hard and soft, appears to combine reach, popularity, engagement and authority like no other collective of digital assets. And individual news outlets engage their readers and viewers frequently. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that the advertiser has not followed the user. If ever there was a misalignment of time spent and the allocation of advertiser dollars, this is it. Online, the received wisdom is that hard news is a hard sell and that the principal value of the traffic is as a gateway to more brand-friendly, but lower-traffic, features where the threat of atrocious adjacency is reduced. But the counterpoint to this has been running for years on page 3 of The New York Times, where Chanel, Tiffany and others have held their place a page turn from the hard-news triumphs and tragedies of the world on page one.

[Rob Norman is chief digital officer, global, at GroupM]

[Jan 1]