Agencies and marketers have an important role to play in the future of Australian news

To ensure trusted, reliable news remains available to us and the generations to come, advertisers and agencies have an important role to play.

GroupM’s Seb Rennie argues that news has become more, not less, important. But with the advent of digital, the environment has become more challenging, particularly with the introduction of programmatic ad placement across news publishers.

It’s encouraging to see industry body ThinkNewsBrands working with Roy Morgan to streamline how news is represented in our key planning tool, the Asteroid database.

The reorganisation of the database has created a one stop shop for planners that better represents how we are consuming news these days. While news previously sat within a “print” folder alongside magazines, it is now represented within the database as a stand-alone channel that shows the reach across print, digital and Total News – the combination of the two.

This removes the friction for agencies and clients to access the information they need making it as easy as possible to make the right decisions around investing in news.