Yes and here’s why they’re better positioned than most to do it

There was a time when the mainstay publishers like magazines, newspapers, TV, and radio owned the advertising world. 

They offered unprecedented reach to coveted and captivated audiences. They could also serve budgets large and small. 

Suffice it to say, these days, digital has made ad spend competition ultra-fierce for publishers. Further compounding the challenge is the fact that in most cases, audience sizes have stagnated or are only growing incrementally.

This reality presents a major revenue challenge for businesses built on the backs of advertising. In most cases, subscriptions and adjacent revenues can’t sustain the business. But that’s exactly why publishers should be doubling down on what they do best: advertising. Further, these efforts should be happening off of their platforms. 

“Wait, did I read that right? OFF their platform?” 

You did! 

Publishers actually have a few aces up their sleeve that are not being fully leveraged:

• Relationships. They have established relationships with a range of brands and businesses. 
• Reputation. They are, in many cases, trusted and long-time partners of these businesses. 
• Exclusivity. In some scenarios, they are the only entity with which a brand or business may be dealing. 
• Data. Publishers already understand what types of campaigns work for these businesses and what audience members who engage look like. 

Publishers as agencies?

In many ways, publishers actually start to look a lot like agencies when viewed through this lens. The primary difference being that they typically only have experience selling their own inventory. With advancements in programmatic ad tech, this a hurdle easily overcome – especially with the right help. 

BRIDGE has recently been helping more and more publishers extend their reach to also include our audience that spans 250 million people. All of our data is based on 100% opt-in, personally identifiable information (PII), ensuring privacy and ethics standards are met on every platform. 

Quite literally overnight, publishers can gain access to inventory on new channels like Display, Connected TV and Email to reach new audiences. In these scenarios, we wholesale access to this inventory and publishers keep the profit. 

New publisher profits for the win

Here’s why inventory expansion makes so much sense for publishers and their advertising clients: 

• Lookalikes are easier to find. Publishers already know what audiences have engaged with a specific brand’s campaigns so they’ve got a headstart on helping to find lookalikes from our buying audience, achieving rapid ROI. 

• Publishers become more valuable to brands. When publishers can demonstrate expanded value to brands, they have the opportunity to become further entrenched with them. 

• Sustained revenue opportunities. This is a business publishers can really grow with sustained revenue opportunities that align well against core competencies. 

For brands and businesses (especially small businesses) lost in a digital advertising world, expanding reach via a trusted publisher partner can be a lifeline. 

For instance, a radio publisher we worked with had a national RV client that wanted to increase sales at specific dealership locations. We helped this publisher expand inventory for a multi-channel campaign that included mobile, desktop, social and email. We were able to reach a hyper-targeted audience of more than 20,000 people, resulting in sixteen RV purchases from customers who were served ads all in just one month. 

This is just one example of success our publisher partners and their clients have had on this front. We’d love to share more with you.

Get in touch today to learn more about how you can expand your publisher inventory virtually overnight.