The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity takes place this week and celebrates its 70th anniversary. The event may be getting on in years but it’s still a place where interesting things happen (we were born there five years ago) while the themes and topics debated there continue to be thoroughly modern and future-focused.

Among the many likely talking points in the southern French city, some of the hottest include inclusivity, sustainability, cookie-free personalisation and artificial intelligence. The latter is certainly capturing the attention of our audience with AI page views in the year to date +75% higher than the previous two years combined. 

Another topic we’re interested in that’s likely to stir some lively conversations is a need for digital ad spend to be shifted away from made for advertising websites and the long tail of the web to the premium web – trusted channels that engage with consumers in editorially governed environments.

Naturally, of course, we mean ones like our own and there are two good reasons why. As Gideon Spainer recently pointed out recently in Campaign, “advertisers should place a premium on trusted news and magazine brands because they create compelling, professionally produced content, particularly given the surge in fake news and other unreliable and toxic content across the media world.”

The first point – that premium publishers create compelling content – is fairly obvious. It’s the bread and butter of our premium news and magazine brands. The second point is backed up by a new study by the US-based Association of National Advertisers, as reported by The Media Leader here.

Made for advertising websites, where unreliable content is more prevalent, represent 21% of impressions and comprise 15% of spend. This builds upon the two ISBA/PwC Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Studies which identified an “unknown delta” of unattributable ad spend. Marketers’ hard fought for budgets are still being spent where consumer engagement is low, results are poor and money is not accounted for.

Two leading industry commentators, including our CRO Craig Tuck, have recently gone on the record about why premium is now the word.

Starting with Craig, who contributed to this industry opinion piece about whether advertisers undervalue premium newsbrands, he said:

“From our conversations with advertisers, it’s clear premium publishers represent a powerful channel to engage with consumers in trusted environments. As the recent Newsworks and Peter Field analysis of the IPA Databank shows, campaigns using them demonstrate significant increases in effectiveness and profit growth versus those that didn’t.

Thinking specifically about digital, advertisers expect their campaigns to run on reader-first, premium publisher websites – like the ones Ozone represents – as opposed to the internet’s long-tail, made-for-advertising sites. While they do see the inherent value of published media, it’s often the structural and legacy challenges of the programmatic ecosystem that prevent investment reaching premium publishers, meaning the value in these environments is not being fully realised by advertisers.”

From a client perspective and writing for The Media Leader here, Chris Ladd, formerly Head of Media at Nationwide Building Society, said:

“The premium web is one that big brands, agencies and the IAB should champion to create a more effective online world for brands and consumers.

For any UK advertiser, focusing their brand presence on a list of sites that they might recognise and where humans can randomly spot check content and creative delivery is surely common sense for most brands. The long tail of websites probably offers few real impressions, unengaged or transient audiences and questionable content that is unlikely to deliver commercial return.

Ozone’s offering of selected premium websites, initially curated from the newspaper industry’s websites, delivers premium environments for brands where consumers are far more likely to pay attention to content and banner ads — as proven by Lumen.

This and other premium websites should be the focus of a client’s investment, even if this means sacrificing mythical micro-targeting. From my experience, this is promised but seldom delivered and besides, privacy regulation and cookie depreciation will eventually kill it off anyway.”

There’s no doubt the premium web versus the made for advertising, long tail web debate will continue at Cannes this week. If you’d like to talk to a member of the Ozone team about it then email us at [email protected].