CMOs on what makes publisher partnerships work: ‘Great partners push back’
What makes a partnership work between a brand and a publisher?
In a report from the news media alliance, World Media Group shared with The Media Leader, chief marketing officers across a host of global brands shared their key factors to success. These included investing time in partner relationships, providing constructive feedback, and embracing co-creation.
As World Media Group CEO Jamie Credland summarised: “You need to be a trusted partner, you need to be candid up front.”
Direct deals can take a long time to incubate. Jort Possel, global digital marketing leader for EY, commented that partnerships are “definitely mid-term to long-term, not short-term or transactional”.
This requires strong relationships between publisher sales teams and marketers and their agencies, built on trust, “collaborative tension”, and honest feedback.
VistaJet CMO Matteo Atti further explained that he requires at least 12 hours of “partner immersion” before any content creation begins, because “otherwise you don’t know what we’re talking about” when discussing brand needs.
“There aren’t really any shortcuts,” Credland added. “You need a human being going and spending a bunch of time with people. Whether that’s in-person, around the world, […] really getting under the skin of their business.”
Great media partners don’t merely execute briefs, the report suggests, but they enhance them by pushing back client requests that could “compromise quality or authenticity”.
“I think the best media salespeople understand that,” Credland continued. “I’m not sure every media business understands that, because there’s the temptation of easy transactional money.”
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Stability in direct deals
Publishers are increasingly seeking direct revenue sources amid an uncertain programmatic advertising market, driven by AI search innovations that have generally reduced referral traffic. It has thus become imperative for many outlets to develop closer relationships with marketing teams and their agencies.
“The number of publishers, in the last year or two, that have announced a pivot to events or a pivot to various video formats… these things don’t lend themselves to quick transactional partnerships,” Credland told The Media Leader.
“To build those partnerships, that takes trust and time spent together and really understanding the publisher’s brand and the advertiser’s brand and where they align.”
Publishers generally view direct relationships with advertisers and their agencies as a more stable source of revenue, and those that can afford to pivot to a more direct model have thus taken to relying on longer-term deals with fewer, but more lucrative, clients.
Such deals are less likely to be “turned off overnight”, Credland noted, given they require greater resources on behalf of the brand. In contrast, display ad revenues coming from “an anonymous advertiser somewhere down the pipe can just disappear tomorrow if algorithms change or if priorities change,” he added.
While most World Media Group members, Credland admitted, have “very strong editorial brands” that make it easier for their salespeople to feel empowered to develop long-term relationships with large brands, he believes that even smaller publishing brands should look to do the same.
“Even for smaller media businesses now, in a world of Substacks and direct sponsorships, I think more and more publishers and media creators are realising that direct relationships with advertisers are the real opportunity,” he continued.
Measuring success beyond traditional media metrics
The human element is core to the success of publisher-brand partnerships, and therefore, brand leaders interviewed by World Media Group overwhelmingly viewed AI as an “assistant” to the partnership process, rather than an “architect” of it.
Béatrice Boué, global head of digital marketing and media at De Beers Group, commented that AI “doesn’t replace relationships.”
She added: “When I ring on a Friday night, my contact picks up the phone, we have a chat, and we sort things out. I can’t call AI.”
For Boué, the value of content partnerships lies in their ability to “dig deeper” into the brand’s goals by utilising the voice and key attributes of the media brand they are partnering with, thereby leveraging its trust.
The most successful partnerships, she explained, treat content creation as a collaborative rather than transactional process, similar to many advertorials.
But measuring success also requires greater investment, she noted. Traditional metrics, such as impressions, click-through rates, and completion rates, provide “limited insight into partnership effectiveness,” the report concluded.
“The important thing is, on your business objectives, how did you shift the needle?” Boué asked.
For brands embracing more direct relationships with publishers, they must thus establish clear KPIs that connect meber partnerships to business outcomes, the report suggests.
That could include sales impact or changes in brand perception or consideration.
“But the measurement must go beyond media-specific metrics,” it concludes.