In 2018 we’ve seen a real shift towards better co-operation between publishers, with the launch of three game-changing initiatives – The Ozone Project, Impact and PamCo.
Each of these initiatives has been created with the intention of bolstering the ways in which advertisers can access high-reaching inventory, safely, cost-effectively and at scale – simultaneously breathing life back into print industry revenues.
Impact, the newest of these developments, comes in the form of a premium, market-wide takeover, offering advertisers a presence across almost every major newsbrand’s homepage, and the first print ad of almost every major UK newspaper, uniformly for a day.
Its cost effectiveness for mass reach has been conceived to rival OOH, TV and Radio.
With almost all of the national press on board, and twenty-four regional newsbrands in Reach’s Big City package (which includes titles such as The Daily Record and Manchester Evening News) included, its potential reach is huge. It amounts to 21 million adults in a single day and with frequency across the different newsbrands measured at 2.43 OTS a day, according to PamCo data, it makes for a formidable 51.4m impacts.
But with a price tag of £375,000, it’s a big investment, and may not appeal to all advertisers.
Impact was borne out of PamCo – a newly launched measurement currency that combines de-duplicated print, mobile and desktop readership figures. PamCo will reset the way the industry treats the two modes of communication as part of a singular medium.
In another development this year, The Guardian, Telegraph and News UK unveiled The Ozone Project – their own unified digital ad network. It has been specifically designed to deliver simplicity, brand safety, and a cost-effective scale of reach comparable to social media in the UK (of which there are 39.4 million unique users).
The Ozone Project is a deeply competitive and deftly designed means of offering advertisers tailored access to its various, trusting audiences, whereas Impact is more a proclamation of the powerful reach of newsbrands across print and digital as a single whole. Both, along with PamCo breathe new life back into the value of print as a broadcast medium.
Perhaps the constant furore around Facebook’s place in publishing has been the catalyst for newsbrands to finally – after years of speculation – evolve and band together.
Between the massive appetite for news, and for trustworthy content, it’s been a sensible move. So is print a dying medium? Not at all – it might even be the one most well-equipped and ready to evolve.
