Activating Inventory: 3 Key Lessons for Publishers to Unlock Hidden Revenue

By collaborating with industry leaders on both sides of the advertising ecosystem, Comscore identifies the frustrations and challenges that digital publishers currently face with un-monetized content. Through our recently-launched Comscore Activation solution, we worked with Hearst, one of the world’s largest news publishers, to create scalable custom ad packages for SF Chronicle during the Titans of Mavericks surfing competition held outside San Francisco.

Through this work, we’ve developed three key learnings for digital publishers who seek to offer differentiated, hyper-targeted ad packages without sacrificing efficiency.

3 Key Learnings for Digital Publishers:

1. Better targeting leads to higher CPMs
Native content and audiences are a major source of revenue for digital publishers. Without a granular understanding of how to better target their content and audiences, publishers are jeopardizing potential sales opportunities. By creating hyper-targeted segments that aligned with their advertisers’ goals, Hearst was able to drastically increase the scale of sponsorship content enabling them to sell inventory at a premium price, effectively increasing CPMs and unlocking additional revenue.

2. Save time by automating segmentation
Advertisers today often demand a variety of specific targeting options, sometimes in a moment’s notice. This presents an enormous monetization opportunity for publishers, like Hearst, so long as they are able to efficiently leverage their audiences and content in a timely manner. Resource constraints can often impede any major efforts aimed at identifying and segmenting this desired inventory though. For the Titans of Mavericks surfing competition, Hearst automated inventory packaging using Comscore Activation to enable scalable, real-time segmentation. This allowed Hearst to efficiently provide advertisers with custom targets, relieving additional resources to focus on other advertising efforts.

3. Custom ad packaging leads to happy clients
Media buyers are constantly seeking segments and inventory that match the characteristics of their target audience. The more customizable a segment is, the more valuable it is to advertisers aiming to reach that specific audience. For Hearst, activating inventory and creating extremely targeted packages was crucial for improving their valuable sponsorship packages. By leveraging audience interests, contextual categories, brand safety filters, and keyword matches (both positive and negative) – Hearst was able to identify audience interest, capitalize on hyper-targeting opportunities and satisfy advertiser needs.