It’s been a newsy NewFronts this year. Literally.
On Wednesday afternoon, a group of news publishers convened at the Interactive Advertising Bureau-hosted event to talk about brand safety and interest in hard news content. The following morning, the New York Times put on its first NewFront presentation in six years.
But many of these publishers’ messages to advertisers focused on what they had to offer beyond their news products.
Hard news has sometimes been a hard sell to advertisers worried about brand safety, and in a news environment that’s been unpredictable and often volatile, speakers from the Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian US spent time noting to advertisers that they don’t necessarily have to spend against hard news to spend with their companies.
“We are using our time today to get you more acquainted with those lifestyle products, and that is because of how much they have grown and changed in the last few years,” NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said to advertisers. “But make no mistake, everything we do at the New York Times, everything we do in lifestyle beyond news, draws its authority and its credibility from the quality and the breadth and the scale of our news.”
Times are a-changin’: At the Times Center on Thursday, The Times spent its hour-and-a-half-long pitch giving advertisers a tour of its core products outside of news, with host Michael Barbaro of The Daily podcast bringing out speakers from various Times verticals.
Levien touted some stats about engagement with games, like the fact that three times the number of people who watched the season finale of The White Lotus (6.2 million people) play NYT games every day. And Camilla Velasquez, SVP and GM of NYT Cooking, said that vertical saw almost 500 million visits last year across its platforms, and announced new content offerings.
From The Athletic, NFL reporter and host of the Scoop City podcast Dianna Russini spoke with former NFL defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh about his upcoming finance podcast, No Free Lunch. Wirecutter Editorial Director Leta Shy emphasized the product recommendation publication’s expansion into coverage of beauty and skin-care products, which she said offers “excellent alignment for advertisers.”
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Global Chief Advertising Officer Joy Robins closed out the pitch by discussing the Times’s appeal with Gen Z, as well as highlighting some of its new ad offerings, including the expansion of its AI-powered BrandMatch targeting tool to content beyond news.
Tusar Barik, SVP of marketing for New York Times Advertising, told Marketing Brew ahead of the presentation that the publication aimed to reintroduce itself to marketers, since the company has “fundamentally transformed” with acquisitions like The Athletic and Wordle since its last NewFront held in 2019.
“We’ve got so many different ways that people as a whole interact with the New York Times, and we are part of people’s lives very deeply,” he said. “Advertisers have this opportunity to really be part of that as well, and we’ve actually seen tremendous growth in our advertising business because of it.”
Safety dance: Prior to the Times’s dedicated dog-and-pony show, executives from the Guardian US, NBCUniversal, Yahoo Ads, and the Washington Post had a conversation on the IAB’s main stage about how advertisers can better embrace hard news in their campaigns. Largely, they said, IAB efforts to encourage advertising against news content are paying off, but they acknowledged that some buyers and CMOs still have concerns.
In addition to discussing the use of block lists, emphasizing ROI on ads that run alongside news, and noting that they are reaching young audiences, some of these execs also mentioned softer content.
Marcia Lesser, VP and head of sales at Yahoo Ads, spoke about the company’s partnership with the AI content startup Goodable to curate “good” news. And Sara Badler, chief advertising officer, North America, for the Guardian US, noted the publisher’s efforts to expand into more multimedia, including games.
Recording in progress: Video was another common topic of discussion for news organizations at NewFronts. Johanna Mayer-Jones, global chief advertising officer at the Washington Post, brought up the publisher’s standout TikTok strategy, and in her closing remarks for the Times, Robins mentioned a “focus on video” across verticals.
It’s a common refrain for an event that has increasingly touted digital video opportunities, and LinkedIn similarly leaned into video during its first-ever NewFront presentation on Monday.