Publishers tout premium media’s ROI and scale as Google, Meta face growing scrutiny

Amid rising pressure on Google’s ad tech practices and growing concern over the opacity of Meta’s AI-powered black box, publishers and media buyers gathered in London last week to prove that alternatives to walled gardens are already thriving.

The group debunked myths about premium media’s reach and spotlighted performance-driven ad tech innovations, which they say are helping to steer budgets into premium media environments like connected TV (CTV) and audio.

“We are seeing shifts. Brands aren’t going after just cheap reach. That’s not what they’re looking at. They are looking at business outcomes, and the ROI — and therefore the money — is following that,” said Melinda Clow, managing partner of programmatic activation at Omnicom Media Group U.K., during one panel.

The panel also included executives from Sky Media U.K., Netflix, Spotify and Channel 4, as part of The Trade Desk’s Rise of the Premium Internet event.

“I feel like I spent most of my career having conversations with marketers where they say, ‘We want to figure out how to spend less money with Google and Meta,’ and yet they continue to spend all of their money with Google and Meta. But it does feel like it’s shifting,” said Pippa Scaife, director of digital advertising at Sky Media U.K.

Addressing misconceptions

Marketers eyeing premium, open internet environments have often questioned their scale. But ad leaders argued the issue stems more from weak messaging than a lack of inventory and pointed to vast, addressable audiences already in place.

“The walled gardens go to market and talk about having huge amounts of scale and data and being really easy to buy against. What we need to do a better job of is saying, ‘Well, actually, we have all of those things too. And we also have this premium quality content, and that’s really invaluable,’” Sky Media’s Scaife said.

OMG’s Clow added the media buyer’s point of view: “Scale is super important. … With a lot of these media partners, they can [actually] compete with the Googles and the Metas of the world.”

But not all scale is made equal. Marketers should scrutinize what qualifies as premium and make sure to compare apples to apples, especially as the industry seesaws on how best to categorize platforms like YouTube.

“[YouTube] is not a TV channel, I think that’s what we all lose sight of,” Scaife said. “YouTube is a tech platform that allows us to view content that is distributed across 110 million different channels, the vast majority of which … don’t have the editorial rigor or the regulatory oversight or the transparency of measurement that we all know is so important in a TV or TV-like environment.”

Catering to performance

Another long-held gripe, and one to which some TV execs in the panel readily admitted, is the complexity marketers have historically encountered when buying premium TV inventory. But with the advent of CTV and programmatic ad buying, that’s rapidly changing.

“We’re all enabling more inventory to be accessible and to be programmatically available,” Scaife said, adding that about 70% of Sky’s live-sports inventory is available programmatically. “What isn’t is largely [unavailable] because it just gets sold out ahead of time.”

CTV is increasingly addressing that marketing investments need to drive performance, not just brand awareness.

OMG’s Clow pointed to Sports Surge, a feature created in partnership with Sky Media and The Trade Desk, which does away with even campaign budget pacing to cater to programmatic buying of live sports.

The feature allows for “fluid” deployment of budgets during moments of high engagement in a game, when more people tune in than usual, Clow explained. “You need a system and a way to capitalize on that extra reach.” Programmatic can uniquely enable this at scale.

“Investment should follow eyeballs, but it doesn’t always do that,” said Patrick Morrell, head of agency trading at Netflix. He echoed Sky Media’s Scaife in highlighting Netflix ad tech innovations coming to market to meet advertisers’ demand for performance-driven CTV ads. One example included interactive ads pushed to viewers’ second screens that are “much more performance driven.”

Premium media, premium experience

To drive home the message that premium media can be just as performant as the walled gardens, Spotify’s EMEA head of automation, Bradd Tipler, highlighted a perhaps often overlooked benefit: the superior user experience.

“In a world of doomscrolling and brain rot, it’s nice to have platforms like Spotify, Netflix, Sky and Channel 4, where it’s an overwhelmingly positive experience for users, because that positive engagement in content translates to positive engagement in ads as well,” Tipler said.

Audiences are certainly engaged, and not only in Spotify’s bread and butter of music and podcasts. Tipler shared that video consumption on Spotify has increased 40% year on year in the U.K. across all age groups — though there are some even brighter spots: Gen Zers saw an 80% increase.

The engagement in Spotify’s ads, especially when run as part of omnichannel campaigns, is equally telling: “When you add Spotify to an omnichannel campaign, your cost per household reach drops about 9% and your cost of action drops about 40%. So we know it’s working,” Tipler said.