INMA Media Innovations Week 2019 – Key Takeaways
This past week Yieldbird spent 2 full days in Hamburg, attending the yearly INMA conference. It was a fully packed agenda with many interesting stories shared by publishers.
The main take-aways from this publisher-centric event
Publishers are still scrambling for advertising revenue as the big ad tech companies (Facebook, Amazon, and Google) continue to attract 70-80% of the total global ad spend. As such, publishers are trying to come up with new, innovative, ways to attract ad revenue and increase subscriptions.
Many of the almost 25 presentations and 5 keynote speeches touched on key themes such as trust, data, and personalization. A clear trend that could be seen is that publishers are moving towards user-first thinking where they are experimenting with different things, especially when it comes to an initiative to increase digital subscriptions & conversions and solutions and programs on how to lower churn rate. Always put the reader in focus!
There were many interesting examples being shared with some of them including Mediahuis from Netherlands sharing how their very detailed data-driven insights was adding new advertising revenue to them, The Irish Times talking about how their focus on a month-long special food magazine was driving new reader revenue and Amedia from Norway talking about how a focus on local live sports broadcasts had increased customer engagement and driving new subscriptions. All good, hands-on, examples of initiatives that can help drive publishers revenue!
The conference was not all about how to increase revenue and subscriptions
Some of the other stories shared reminded us the importance media companies have in society when it comes to supporting free speech and democracy – presentation was done by Gazeta Wyborcza from Poland about how they got involved in a grass-roots movement, supporting free speech and women’s rights (and how this increased loyalty and brand awareness).
Another story came from Helsingin Sanomat in Finland. He took the opportunity to remind Presidents Trump and Putin during their summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018 about the importance of free speech by cleverly placing pro-democracy and free speech ads across over 300 outdoor billboards in and around the city center. Both powerful and interesting stories about how media companies play an important role in our society!
Looking back it was for sure one of the most valuable events of 2019. Big amount of discussions about going after opportunities instead of the ongoing sales pitches and hidden auto-promotion. From the perspective of the media related company, we are coming back to Warsaw with heads full of insights and ideas!
Chief Revenue Officer
