The Facebook partnership: a publisher’s confession

We absolutely need to steel ourselves to compete, but we also need to know when to partner, writes Trinity Mirror’s Piers North

Today marks the fourth birthday of Facebook as a public company. It is probably not an anniversary that many people outside of the gilded towers of Menlo Park or Brock Street towers will mark, or frankly even acknowledge. At a guess, given the troubled summer months following that float, you would suspect it will be a date that few will mark internally either. Well, aside from the lucky many who now have to remind themselves what a mortgage is perhaps.

However, the date does give us publishers a chance to reflect on the impact the global behemoth has had, and is having, on our industry and what we at Trinity Mirror, the owner of one of the biggest UK news audience digitally, need to do.

Facebook bestrides the publisher world like a colossus, a wonder of the modern tech world. Everywhere we look in our industry, from consumers to advertisers to talent, the Facebook blue stares back at us. In almost everything we do, aside from content creation, they have not so much parked tanks on our lawn as parachuted into our bedrooms. It is staggering to think of the speed of their success, tripling their revenues since the IPO and going from zero to the biggest display ad business in eight years.

In the 30 or so seconds it has taken you to read this far they have earned over $20,000 in ad revenue alone, numbers that for so long that were assumed only to be found in search. All roads are seemingly paved with the Zuckerberg bricks.
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What the UK digital ad spend figures make self-evident is that there is, as there has been for a couple of years now, a two speed display ecosystem in terms of growth. The tech, distribution platforms on one side growing at enormous speed, and the content producers on the other, facing a much slower walk uphill.

So how to navigate this blue-bricked road?

Firstly, we must look at what we can learn and copy from those burgeoning tech platforms within the inevitable constraints. Know your enemy and know yourself and you need not fear the result, so said some ancient warrior. Whether it be data or in-stream native ads, we must adapt. We of course understand the need to stay true to our core; the content and services that power (in our case at Trinity Mirror) near 30 million UK users, but never think that content and audience will be enough to see us through.

But is Facebook an enemy or a frenemy? We absolutely need to steel ourselves to compete, but secondly we also need to know when to partner. Ad tech businesses despair about our and other media owners’ handshake with Facebook. A Faustian pact that can only lead to ruin, they sigh. An alliance that makes the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact look like a match made in heaven, they claim.

The debate around Instant Articles, which Trinity Mirror has been one of the forerunners of for the past six months or so, rages on. Much has been written about the perils of media owners being lured siren-like on to the rocks with short-term promises, but there is not a publisher who can afford to sit idly by and I suspect most ad tech businesses know that, even if they don’t say it in public.

As publishers, our potential global audiences are there in a way we could barely imagine a decade ago, which means our advertising revenue is also there, so it makes little sense for us to stand patiently by the sidelines.

Efforts from the ad tech world to collaborate and provide an alternative to the so-called walled gardens, like the fledgling DigiTrust, are clearly welcome. What is self-evident is that there is still a day-to-day focus from us to continue to double down on our ecosystem and to look for different models, but working with Facebook is not a binary choice to our own futures.

Thirdly, as we embrace our winds of change, and cast aside long-held positions and beliefs internally to compete and partner, publishers must embrace more overt collaboration with each other.

It is a still a struggle for publishers to walk the walk of collaboration even if they all talk the talk. Alliances have arrived, sort of, but we still are yet to find the right balance, or even the right value add.

Meetings with publishers still feel like a confessional booth; publishers giving a little away whilst never admitting to the not-so-hidden list of mortal sins that we all know lurk beneath. We have to find our humility if we are ever to have true redemption.

So how should we mark the IPO birthday? As publishers, we may not be there for the cake-cutting but let’s ensure we turn up for the drinks. Let’s be humble and let’s celebrate being at the party in the first place.

Let’s learn from its success but be confident in the truth that, as advertisers, agencies and Facebook themselves know, if media owners aren’t there, the party wouldn’t half be a bit flat.

Piers North is Trinity Mirror’s head of strategy