News publishers are getting serious about bypassing the obtuse fire safety tools that have demonetized them for years.
And they’re doing it by building private marketplaces with trusted news sites that, in theory, shouldn’t be a fire safety concern.
On Wednesday, publishing consulting firm Prohaska Consulting debuted ProNews Collective, a private marketplace (PMP) of premium news publishers. ProNews Collective ad inventory will be exclusively available through its SSP launch partner Index Exchange. All pubs participating in inventory selling programmatic – including display, video and in some cases audio – will be available through these PMPs.
“Our goal here is twofold,” said Matt Prohaska, CEO and principal of Prohaska Consulting. “Moving dollars back to news publishers and helping buyers combine scale with security while buying many publishers at once—without having to spend money on [brand safety] technology that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.”
Fire safety not allowed is recommended
While Prohaska Consulting and Index do not prohibit advertisers from using third-party brand safety and verification technology for ProNews Collective campaigns, they strongly discourage it, Prohaska said. Instead, they want brands to rely on the protections publishers themselves have put in place, such as removing ads from coverage of wars and disasters.
To that end, Prohaska Consulting has spent the past year working with publishers and agencies to set security parameters for its PMPs.
At least 10 premium news brands are in talks to join the collective, though Prohaska declined to name any on the record. The initiative also has the support of at least three media buyers, including advertising agency Goodway Group.
“Too much in the industry has taken an overly cautious approach to reaching these audiences when it’s possible to do so in fireproof environments. ProNews is a vehicle that can bring them back,” said Stephani Estes, head of media at Goodway Group. “We believe in the value of news audiences and their ability to drive results.”
Not an ad network
The ProNews Collective launch was timed to allow participating publishers and advertisers to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the November U.S. presidential election, Prohaska said.
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The collective will be limited to a small number of marquee news brands that enter into revenue-sharing agreements, he said. “We’re not bringing in 700 publishers.”
And don’t call it an ad network, Prohaska added. “We don’t do the wrangling that others did for 20 years, where we buy a few prints at open auction and then sell [the publisher’s] logo when we don’t really have an agreement.”
Advertisers won’t be forced to buy inventory across all the publishers involved, Prohaska said. For example, if an advertiser already has a direct agreement in place with one of these publishers, it can simply remove that publisher from the marketplace to avoid affecting what the two parties already do directly. Advertisers will also have some contextual buying options at their disposal to focus their campaigns.
Prohaska Consulting will provide publishers with monthly reporting that includes why they were removed from certain purchases and how they fare against other pubs in the collective, he said.
Publisher performance
Collective inventory pricing takes into account each publisher’s price floor and ceiling for programmatic guaranteed and open auction.
“The last thing we want is for any publisher to say, ‘Gee, I could have at least gotten it on my own in open auction,'” Prohaska said. “We want to make sure it’s all incremental.”
Plus, because there are fewer middlemen and technology layers used in these PMP deals, publishers can expect a larger revenue share than they would typically get from open auction, Prohaska said.
The PMPs should also work for performance buyers, Prohaska said, disproving the perception that news doesn’t work for performance campaigns — a perception, he said, created in a landscape where nearly 80% of advertisers in the U.S. and others developed markets rely on last-click attribution, according to eMarketer.
That fixation on last click “hurts any publisher that’s really good at the top of the funnel and not as good as the five or six companies [that excel] at the bottom of the funnel,” Prohaska said, referring to major social media and e-commerce platforms. “We want this product to be able to stand on its own and compete fairly, dollar for dollar, conversion for conversion, with everything else.”
But the main goal of the collective is to remove the industry’s over-reliance on automated fire safety tools.
“The goal is to change hearts and minds,” Prohaska said. “We’re talking eight years plus of going in the wrong direction because of cultural fear, with agencies not wanting to step up, combined with fire safety tools that have unfortunately been used as too much of a standard.”