Why The Ad Industry Needs More Of A Collective Consciousness

Recent data highlights the scale at which major advertisers use programmatic advertising and are being left with little idea where their ads are appearing and what messages they are financing.

Much of this spending is at the expense of authentic publishers of information: newspaper websites. Maybe it’s time for advertisers and agencies to develop more of a collective approach to solving this problem.

Audience research lab MediaScience has found that ad spending on legitimate news outlets outperforms ad spending places on illegitimate ones.

The analysis measured 5,350 participants and ran across 42 newspaper print runs and 252 websites for a total of 6,037 unique brand exposures, comparing a variety of brand exposure and lift metrics for ads placed on news publishers vs. ads placed on Facebook and YouTube.

The results:

• Newspaper ads outperform Facebook ads of all types by up to four times.
• Combined news formats are twice as effective as combined Facebook formats.
• Ads in news are as good as (or better than) ads on YouTube.
• News offers a stronger ROI than social media.