Publisher Monetization Woes: Is the News Media in Jeopardy? with Jessica Hogue

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Hearst Consumer Media Chief Data Officer, Jessica Hogue, joins us to unpack how a 137-year-old publisher is rebuilding its data foundation—linking first-party identity, contextual intelligence, and tighter supply paths—to grow revenue beyond the open auction.

We tackle AI’s “zero-click” squeeze, brand-safety overblocking, and the push for outcomes without backsliding into last-click. Enjoy!

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Read the full transcript bellow:

Brett House (00:00)

Welcome to Signal & Noise. Today's guest is Jessica Hogue the Chief Data Officer of Consumer Media at Hearst, someone that I, as well as Rio, know really well. She is one of the Where Are You Now Nielsen execs that I worked with for quite a while when I was part of Nielsen. This episode's called Publisher Monetization Woes: Is the news media in jeopardy?

And for those that don't know Jessica, she's a terrific woman. She led a bunch of really high profile product leadership and digital roles at Nielsen, as I mentioned, for about 12 years. I joined through an acquisition from Exelate and worked with her a lot when we launched the Nielsen Marketing Cloud for a few years. And then she moved on to Innovid, helped take Innovid public. She was there for a little bit over four years.

And now she is the chief data officer of consumer media at Hearst. And she serves a really important role of combining and enriching and normalizing all of their consumer audience data across all of their properties within Hearst. And she plays a really good, and I saw this at Nielsen, translation layer between the traditional world of media, the linear world of media, which she certainly did with the television ecosystem,

and the digital, largely digital media world. So we're thrilled to have her. She follows a long list of really great guests that Rio and I have had, including Stephanie Layser Ben Wilde, Dr. Augustine Fou, Shiv Gupta, Mark Zagorski, Lou Paskalis, and we've got a whole bunch more coming up, Adam Greco. But I think you're really going to enjoy this episode, and Rio, I was thrilled with the interview, and I know you've got some feelings about that as well.

Rio (01:43)

Yeah Jessica's great. mean, she's so smart. She's been in the industry, Brett, as you mentioned forever, seen a lot of the big changes. She's kind of been right there. Some of the coolest, most innovative companies. she's just a really smart person. I love what she's doing at Hearst. And you'll hear it in the episode how like they're really trying to prepare for a totally different future. And they really want to be at the vanguard of this as the industry. And a big part of that's going to be, I mean, she's chief data officer, right? Like preparing that data foundation, getting the audience data from all these different places. And it's a big sprawling business that spans everything from traditional television, linear television, to digital, to magazines. So it's cool hearing what their vision is, what she's working on. Hearst did pretty well last year. I this year we'll see. It's been a tough environment for news publishers the last 20 years. And we talked about that a little bit. But last year they had really good performance. I look at it here, they had record profits.

And so it's a good success story. A couple other news items that probably worth mentioning as we kick this off, not directly related, but definitely within the world of advertising and ad tech, we had some recent Google news is interesting. They keep changing by the day, right? There was finally the remedies from Judgement about what to do following the antitrust trial where it was decided they were a monopoly. I tweeted that I thought this was a big nothing burger. It'd be really basically, they can't, yeah, that's coming, right? But they get to keep Chrome. They don't have to spin it off, right? They get to keep like, nothing in the business is really impacted in a big way. Their stock bumped almost 7 % as a result of that.

Brett House (02:59)

Yeah, the Google search specifically not their sell side ⁓ display network. Yep. Yeah, it's like the Department of Justice sort of gave some recommendations, right? But nothing that seems entirely enforceable. And I'm not sure it's gonna really change... Yeah. ⁓

Rio (03:23)

Yeah, they to share search data, and that's going to take years, right? It's going to take years. think Google ends up looking pretty good up to this. But that said, Brett, there's still the ad tech part. I think they probably end up spinning that off. I think it'd be better for them anyway. I think it's only contributing a few billion dollars to their bottom line. So who really cares if you're Google, right? You focus on the future, which is definitely going to be AI search. I think this decision is kind of like,

Brett House (03:49)

Yep.

Rio (03:52)

Harkens back to like, remember the Microsoft decision, the DOJ sued them for being a monopoly.

Brett House (03:57)

Yeah. And then didn't do anything. Didn't really, didn't sort of let them operate as, as the same business really.

Rio (04:01)

Well, it forced them to unbundle their browser from the hardware, we said, you, but it was like a years later, Chrome is a bigger browser than Edge, right? Or whatever they were, Internet Explorer. So like it was kind of a nothing burger back then. I mean, it seemed like it was going to be meaningful, but it was too little too late. I almost think this is the same thing, right? AI search is really changing it. That's where Google needs to compete. they were a monopoly in existing search.

Brett House (04:07)

Yeah, that's true.

Rio (04:29)

as well as with their ad tech, owning both buy and sell. But it's almost like that's the, I'm gonna say that's totally the past, but it's almost seems like that's less important moving forward than it has been. I don't know, but I mean, I guess.

Brett House (04:41)

Yeah, in this case started in 2020. Yeah, it started in 2020. And that was it's a very different world in 2025 than it was in 2020. So it's interesting how slowly these justice motions move, And by the time they come to fruition. Yeah, not the speed of tech. Yeah.

Rio (04:50)

Totally. But not the speed of tech.

Yeah. And then, you know, but at the same time, Google, like I think the EU did find them this morning. It was announced several billion dollars. I mean, for Google, it's peanuts, right? I mean, so like, it looks like they're going to end up exiting this probably OK. The traditional business, maybe they get forced to sell off the ad tech side of it, which would probably be a good thing. I think that was the big news of this last couple of weeks. Probably worth calling out. But yeah, will this impact?

Brett House (05:07)

Yeah.

Rio (05:22)

know, news publishers, know, I think the ad tech decision probably will have a bigger impact on them moving forward. you know, everything's, know, I think AI is the big story here, not necessarily the Google decision.

Brett House (05:32)

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, they're saying let let market forces win. And AI is one of those market forces that's changed the entire landscape since 2020 of how AI of how search is being monetized and utilized by publishers and other vendors in the ecosystem.

Rio (05:49)

Yeah, and as that referral traffic changes and as Google Zero kind of that day approaches. So I think that's the bigger story and that's certainly the bigger impact on publishers. So with that, why don't we jump into the episode? It's going to be a fun one. And I agree with you, Brett, it kind of continues this. We talked to Steph Layser about publisher tech and it's re-platforming. We have Lou Paskalis where we talk about the future of news. And here you get Jessica Hogue, who's right in the front lines, like add a big traditional publisher that's transitioning into a...digital first publishers, so enjoy it everyone, it's a good one.

Brett (06:21)

Hey Jessica, welcome to Signal & Noise. Glad to have you on the podcast.

Jessica Hogue (06:25)

Yeah, it's so fun to be here. Thank you.

Brett (06:27)

And you and I go back quite a few years. We're both sort of part of what I like to call the Nielsen mafia. And I'm in a company now with about 10 or 15 Nielsen people, so it holds well. And you and Rio worked together when Rio was at Slalom consulting, doing some work for Hearst. And I figured I'd love to hear a little bit about, ⁓ or I think our audience would love to hear a little bit about your background and kind of what brought you to your current role as Chief Data Officer,

Jessica Hogue (06:41)

That's Yep. go, yeah.

Brett (06:54)

at Hearst.

Jessica Hogue (06:55)

Yeah, it's, you know, I get asked this question a fair amount because, you know, I think people are always interested in everyone else's career journey and it speaks a little to what we're trying to do at Hearst too. So I, it's fun to kind of go back and sort of look at how did I get here actually? So as you... I pointed out, a lot of my roots are really in analytics and measurement from more than a decade at Nielsen. I actually landed there in 2006, 2007 when the company had made an acquisition in a small social listening startup. so I do kind of, there is a bit of a through line in my own journey, which is, I like the build phase. I like the kind of startup market fit finding era, if you will.

Brett (07:42)

as painful as it can be sometimes.

Jessica Hogue (07:44)

Yeah, you know, it's change, it's high intensity, ⁓ it's all good. But yeah, Nielsen, spent... ⁓

in a variety of different roles and in different parts of that business at the time, ⁓ the one consistent theme I was always working on is triangulating datasets into different analytics or measurement products. And ⁓ that occurred to me much later ⁓ in the process. That's what I always ⁓ tried to get back to. ⁓ And then from Nielsen, I went to Innovid, which was ⁓ just a phenomenal place to land in the rise of CTV. By the time I got to Innovid was already a very vibrant but still young company, not a startup per se, but still ascending in a lot of ways. ⁓ And I was, yeah. So that kind of happened. was really, I mean, it's both a business case, it's thrilling, ⁓ it's incredible to work with founders and see that kind of trajectory. I was...

Brett (08:31)

and you took them public or you were there when they went public.

Rio (08:34)

That must have been fun.

Brett (08:46)

Yeah, and that was a long time coming, right? They'd been around for quite a while, well over a decade, I believe, before.

Jessica Hogue (08:51)

Yeah, I think they were around 11 years old, if I remember correctly around that time. So, yes, you know, I joined to help build a measurement and analytics framework and portfolio on top of the core technology, which is the ad serving business at the time. And so that was also, know, I was a general manager. I got to build that from the start. And, you know, it started with, you know, Tal Chalozin which I'm sure a lot of folks in your audience and community will be familiar with.⁓ who had so many brilliant ideas about where the company could go. And so that was a really fun journey. ⁓ We built that out. We scaled that with the acquisition of TV Squared. And then, yeah, the company went public and continues to really thrive in the measurement category ⁓ as now a provider of outcome and reach and frequency metrics, which is really quite remarkable to see, just knowing how tough that was from the jump. ⁓

Brett (09:49)

Yeah, and you ran point on the TV Squared acquisition and the kind of product management of that? That was Jo Kinsella's company, right?

Jessica Hogue (09:55)

Well, was, yeah, I wouldn't say that I ran point. That was very much a sort of community activity, but ⁓ I like to think that I contributed a lot to what the company could become and why we had a right to sort of bring measurement and analytics to the marketplace, especially from my various tours, knowing how complicated it was. But I had a pretty strong point of view at the time that the buy side, which Innovid is really, Ad Tech facing the buy side,

Brett (10:03)

Yeah.

Jessica Hogue (10:25)

was at the time, had a right to play in the sort of top-down set of metrics. We were delivering CTV at massive scale every day, and you know what everybody needed, reach and frequency metrics with demographics. And then to be able to know, did the creative work, did it produce an outcome? And so I was really passionate about that, and the TV Squared acquisition brought so much to that sort of funnel play, if you will, and then of course the diversification into working with publishers on sort of more of a sell-side offering as well. it was great. Jo is phenomenal. It was really fun to get to work with her too. She is. If you haven't had her on yet...

Brett (11:03)

She is hilarious too, I had her on a panel. I had her on a panel at one of our Brave New Worlds events, which I think it was the same event that you spoke at, and she just had me laughing on that.

Rio (11:16)

She's not been a guest in this podcast yet, Jessica, but hopefully in the near future. Yeah.

Brett (11:17)

Yeah, quite a personality, quite a personality.

Jessica Hogue (11:19)

Well, yeah, yeah, she is.

Yeah, she is. ⁓ So let's see, so how did I get to Hearst? I think somewhat similarly to even what we've been talking about already, ⁓ Hearst didn't have a chief data officer in consumer media. And so it's been really quite a joy and a privilege to be able to be the first and sort of design what does this role do and what's our reason for being? And so part of that still has a little bit of an entrepreneurial sense to it. ⁓

Brett (11:49)

Yeah, I was thinking that. You're kind of defining your role, a sense, defining the function, right, in a sense.

Jessica Hogue (11:53)

Sure. Yeah, exactly.

Rio (11:56)

Is that intrapreneur? Isn't that what that's described right here?

Jessica Hogue (12:00)

You're exactly right, Rio. Yeah, it's definitely inside of this incredible storied institution. And so really our role here is to sort of develop and inform and execute on data strategies. That's kind of the job number one. ⁓ Sometimes that takes really different forms. Sometimes it's partnering and thinking out loud with folks that are data leaders in their respective organizations. ⁓

My team has really grown into a function to support ⁓ a couple of areas. Largely, would situate it as building infrastructure around users and user data, ⁓ and then increasingly we're moving on the content side. ⁓ Part of our opportunity is to do those things at scale ⁓ so that we get the scale across the full footprint of Hearst Media properties and divisions. ⁓ back to a very sort of core functional thing which is you know we know on the other side of all of these various transformations that media companies and publishers

We want to have the best possible relationships with our actual readers and visitors and audience. so for me, in many ways, my day job is data, data, data. But it's kind of still, it's audience at the end of the day. And we saw a big opportunity to be able to infuse a lot of infrastructure and data and investment behind building out those kind of microservices, if you will, and partnering really closely with the various folks in our three divisions.

Rio (13:37)

Well Jessica, we are thrilled to have you on here today. I mean this is a really important topic and you we've come at it from different angles over previous episodes. Steph Layser is on she talked to the tech and the re-platforming. ⁓ We had Dr. Fou on who talked about some of the things publishers experiencing for everything from ad fraud to referral.

Jessica Hogue (13:39)

Yeah.

Rio (13:58)

revenue dipping. in last week we talked a little bit about some of the stuff going with AI. So, We're thrilled to have you here And I guess the background here for those are a little newer to this is the whole business model really that has bankrolled and funded and supported, let's say, not only newsrooms, but investigative journalism, as well as all types of traditional media magazines. It's really been...buckling under these converging forces, everything from programmatic tech taxes that have siphoned away a ton of revenue from publishers to mounting signal loss as cookies have kind of gone away, kind of not. I guess for the most part they have. And now AI, right, it's the latest thing. I mean, we're going to talk about that a lot as referral traffic dips and that's definitely impacting revenue from display, right? It's going to affect publishers. So the bigger question is, what is this doing to the quality journalism and by extension, concept of really a vibrant free press, because it really does depend on publishers having healthy businesses and being able to replace the dollars they're losing with new revenue streams, that's smarter data strategies, richer first party identity, a lot of the stuff your working on, Jessica, we're really excited to hear about, and just finding ways to bring in new revenue streams. We're going to be talking about that. And I really think that fewer people sit closer to this inflection point than you do as your world chief data officer at Hearst overseeing data development for an amazing like 137 year old media institution. I think we can call it that. That has properties across magazines, newspapers, streaming and commerce. And it's a job to figure out how to turn this audience insight into sustainable value, not only for the readers that you mentioned, but for your advertisers. So I think it's a cool vantage point you have mixing this legacy print background with really the stewardship of the metrics everything from digital subscriptions to private marketplace yields, your cleanroom partnerships, what we're doing with AI, in short, really navigating the crossroads, right, of I think where the industry is.

Brett (15:55)

Yeah, so I'm at Hearst, mean, established in what 1887 in William Randolph Hearst was was 23. And I think the first time I heard about it was ⁓ yellow journalism, you know, when you're in like high school or middle school.

Jessica Hogue (15:58)

1887. That's right. ⁓

Brett (16:08)

You know, so knowing that this year you're coming from sort of a legacy or you're in a legacy media or traditionally a legacy media organization that's been around for a long time. You know, Rio just laid out the thesis and publisher monetizations challenged it's in a challenged state. Right. The news media as we've known it, you probably have read the articles from Lou Paskalis or heard him talking about defending

Jessica Hogue (16:28)

Mmm.

Brett (16:29)

the open web and how critical it is to our own democracy. Just at a very high level, when you think about digital transformation, because it's a driver of 75 to 80 % of digital publisher revenue right now, how are you thinking about that journey at Hearst, and how is your team sort of helping to transform to adapt to some of these challenges?

Jessica Hogue (16:55)

Yeah, you know, I have so much to say and...on this one and there's a lot to unpack there, of course. So first of all, in the thesis, no question, things are, the models that got us here, if we talk about sort of high margin, underwritten by ad sales, lots of consumer data, by the way, ⁓ there is no sort of one way out of this situation anymore and I think that's not unique to us and anyone in this sort of industry right now. ⁓

Rio (17:27)

To everyone, yeah.

Jessica Hogue (17:30)

I think you called it out. There are certainly shifts in big platform dynamics. There's regulatory dynamics, ⁓ obviously generative AI. So those are all, in my mind, existential in nature and really big, long and sort of enduring trends. And then there's just the kind of workaday stuff that we've all been grinding it out on. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's cookie deprecation that, frankly, I was still at Nielsen when we were talking about the cookie apocalypse and I'm like, it's like the year of mobile that was a decade. yep, that's still, but it is, the practicality of having these really sort of opaque environments is still something to navigate on a day-to-day basis. ⁓ brand safety and the sort of impact to journalism ⁓ is still something we're very much sort of working the problem on. And just the supply chain sort of at large. Interestingly, the supply chain we often talk about in ad tech

Brett (18:00)

It's been a while. It's, yeah.

Rio (18:01)

That conversation's been going on a while, yeah.

Jessica Hogue (18:28)

but I see just as many shifts in MarTech and we're sort of, know, both. all of those things, for sure, for sure. I think that, and this is really, you know, what compelled me to come here at this time is it's a big inflection point. So, you know, you can kind of look at it as, okay, like it was just a lot of stuff to do and that's true. I think we have the opportunity and this is kind of the, the what inspires our vision to re-architect a lot of the foundations. And so, you know, from our role just as the the data piece, ⁓ data is sort of fundamental and core, but it does kind of require us in this moment to really rethink how did we build the sort of foundational components of tech and data and user experience, how do we do that going forward? Certainly diversifying revenue, which I think we'll get into as well, and I don't sit in the revenue lane necessarily, but a lot of what my team does is sort of create capabilities to monetize our user experiences in a variety of different ways. And there's lots of different things happening on that front. yeah, I I think it is very much a moment of a lot of change. think I sort of choose to, those things invigorate me. mean, I've always kind of been in roles at some amount of change. And this is probably true of everybody's career, right? But even at Nielsen, we were going through the changes in streaming and television consumption for a long time.

I happen to find those things, those environments interesting. And ⁓ you can do a lot if you have the stamina, I think, to work through them.

Brett (20:06)

Yeah, it is the advertising industry. You made some really good points. We talked about this with Stephanie Layser about re-architecting, re-platforming, which is not something that's unique to Hearst. It's common across all, whether they're digital or legacy linear publishers, it's pretty common from a data strategy and MarTech perspective. ⁓

Rio (20:27)

think having audiences, having the measurement in place, it's not easy, right? And I think there's a lot of time that requires investments.

Jessica Hogue (20:35)

Yeah, yeah. But you kind of alluded to it earlier too. mean, the I think that transformation sort of inside of a company and if we describe that as intrapreneurship or what have you, I'm really inspired by the trajectory of Hearst in a lot of ways. ⁓ maybe the company is less well known for this on the media side, but obviously Hearst has been around for more than a century, approaching 140 years, which is really quite staggering when you think about it. ⁓really first learning about William Randolph Hearst when I was in J school ⁓ and it was the battle between Hearst and Pulitzer and it was so fascinating to read about. if you think about where the company started from as a paper business in the 1920s and 30s, I'm probably gonna get some of my chronology a little off here, diversified into magazines, which was a very different product at that time. ⁓ And with Cosmo and Good Housekeeping,

These are brands that are still with us today. if you look at what the new editor in chief is doing with the brand Cosmo, it's it's reinventing and sort of reconnecting to a lot of the values of that brand too. then, Thank you. Thank you for teeing this up. So for your, for your studio audience, if you can see, I've got this gorgeous piece of, this is the, you can see it. There you go.

Brett (21:53)

You have a little show and tell right around the Cosmopolitan magazine. I think you might be able to sh- ⁓

Rio (21:59)

Hahaha There you go, you can see it now, it's a little blurry. Yeah, yeah.

Brett (22:05)

Yeah, what a great brand font Cosmopolitan had.

Jessica Hogue (22:09)

Isn't that? Yeah. So

Rio (22:11)

It's iconic.

Jessica Hogue (22:11)

I We have a small place in the Adirondacks and I was in this, you know, small sort of, you know, antique shop and I was walking up the stairs looking for I don't know what. And on the side of this wall were ⁓ a number of different framed covers of old magazines. And I immediately locked in. I saw Hearst International's Cosmopolitan and I was like, I will. must have that. And so it's it's sitting here in my office as a kind of a reminder of the history.⁓ of the company. yeah, mean, you know, this company has been doing transformation and diversification, and I think it's very much in the DNA of the company, and that's really inspiring. So it's like, okay, let's go do that again. What does it look like on the other side? You know, there's a lot of unknowns, I would say, but yeah, the idea of...

Brett (22:57)

So the organizational change is a little easier because it's part of the of core competency of the organization because it's been doing this for so long. In a sense is what you're...

Jessica Hogue (23:05)

Well, I don't know that change is ever easy.

But I guess I would say that there are plenty of hallmarks and really great outcomes. And also our leadership is, often is the case from leadership of go faster. And so I think all of those things kind of produce the right conditions to get through it. But yeah, I don't want to pretend that it's.

Brett (23:31)

Well, but oftentimes that's the hardest piece. If you don't have people aligned around change or accustomed to change, whether it's historically or otherwise, it becomes harder to implement because people get in the way. Right? How many times have we heard that in our career? You know?

Jessica Hogue (23:43)

Yeah. Right. Right. People. ⁓

Rio (23:46)

Yeah, people are the bottleneck. That's typically the case. Yeah.

Jessica Hogue (23:48)

Yeah, yeah, but you know kind of to bring it back to what we're doing on the data side. you know, because of all of those things, was sort of, you know, as you said, lots of companies are kind of looking at their architecture and platforms and sort of taking this as an opportunity to take stock and retool for what the future is like. And we get a lot of support for that ⁓ and a lot of, you know, really cool collaboration with different folks in our divisions ⁓ to sort of see where we fit and we can help them go faster kind of like for us that's that's the spot we want to be in.

Rio (24:22)

turning back to monetization, obviously a really important topic. And you're looking at publishing industry in general. mean, many people don't know this has been I think between 2002 and 2020, there was a 50 % decline in revenue overall for the industry, which is really pretty catastrophic. Right. So knowing that monetization is going to be really important. I know it's a big focus of what Hearst is doing in general in your role. A big part of that, I mean, I guess one criticism of let's say digital has been a good portion of programmatic ad spend does not reach publishers, right? It's siphoned off by intermediaries, by ad tech companies, by DSPs, by SSPs, by brand safety, ad verification, you know, the list goes really on and on. think for some, for some deals, publishers are keeping well under 50%, right? And you have the tech tax, right? And there's been great studies Like last year, Brett, we talked about with Steph Layser right? That like average CPMs for some open exchange are under a dollar, right? So like, know, pubs are just not getting, what's the expression was like digital pennies for traditional dollars, right? I mean, it's just,

Brett (25:07)

The tech tacks.

Jessica Hogue (25:08)

you dollars. Yeah.

Rio (25:25)

Yeah, it's just been tough. knowing that, how is Hearst repositioning its inventory mix, private marketplaces, programmatic guarantee, direct sold deals? What are you doing to capture more of the ad dollars? I'm curious to hear.

Jessica Hogue (25:35)

Yeah. Yeah, it's a really great question. I would say that there are some things that sort of are consistent across the three business units and then some things that maybe they're kind of pursuing uniquely to how they expose themselves to the markets. But by and large, I mean, there's a huge priority around direct sold, private marketplace, programmatic guaranteed, those are all environments where the objective is to do a few things, to sort of get closer to the end customer, ⁓ sort of writ large, but ⁓ those are places that we can make the environments data rich, ⁓ fully controlled, brand safe, which obviously we are really motivated to sort of be out in front around. ⁓ And so I would say those are all sort of across all three of our business units, those are all priorities are a little bit more exposed, I would say, to open auction inventory than others. ⁓ And those things have sort of been in motion for a while. ⁓ Interestingly, we've kind of put a little bit of a toe dip in the water around a PMP that sort of goes across broader footprint of our inventory ⁓ and understand from the buy side what's interesting there, right? Because I think in a lot of ways, we can talk about the sort of importance of data, first-party data. you know, like we've been here. Plenty of people have first party data. I don't think having first party data, you have to sort of explain the texture and the quality and the value and then make it real, which often means sort of showing it in a really transparent way. And so those are all sort of, I would say underneath the surface sort of priorities of how we're executing is to have new and differentiated ways to also sort of make the quality of our inventory desirable such that we're kind of shifting into those other sort of environments. I have to give major credit to the programmatic teams that actually run these functions in the divisions, which we get to partner with and see. I think the other thing to their credit is developing really strategic relationships in the market with the sort of buy side and the buying sort of platforms. And it's kind of interesting if you think about it, because when I started, programmatic was all about get rid of the people get rid of the relationships like machine to machine. Yeah, and so, you know, what we're doing to sort of reposition that inventory mix also comes back to having strategic relationships and partnerships which are people-led, you know, even though the machines are sort of doing the execution piece. And I think that's important.

Brett (27:53)

Yeah, automate all of this. Yeah.

Rio (27:53)

You're right. Automate everything,

Are you making changes to how, let's say, the ad sellers work with the digital and programmatic team in terms of creating offerings, bundling different types of services? Is there anything that you're doing there that you can call out?

Jessica Hogue (28:22)

I mean, I would say yes, in terms of bundling. mean, some of the types of things that have been important is to really sort of focus on the quality of the inventory and be a little bit more forward in the go-to market of making that known. so, you know, that's everything from sustainability. can be attention metrics. It can be brand safety and suitability. I do sort of feel that, you know, even just the programmatic...sort of priority and how those teams sort of work with centers of excellence, various holding companies, you that's all part of it. So there's a lot of energy behind it. ⁓ There's no one sort of package that I would pick out necessarily, but part of that is here's why, right? know, our brands span a national footprint. If you look at the lifestyle magazine brands, and then in our news businesses, these are hyper local brands at the end of the day, immediate properties.

And so I think one of the ways that we're sort of kind of rustling through how we get more sort of exposure and how we package things is exploring where we can have really sort of an authoritative, differentiated inventory mix because we are hyper local. increasingly that's very attractive for performance advertisers that are looking to drive outcomes, looking to have sort of precision in a certain market. So those are all kind of features I would say that go into ⁓ where we're finding resonance in the market.

Brett (29:48)

And it sounds like when you're talking about inventory, are we talking about both audience targets as well as contextual sort of news content related inventory, which seems to be the big differentiator, right? Especially at the local level.

Jessica Hogue (30:01)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that there's a lot of different, ⁓ you know, my sort of watchword on this front is having optionality, right? Because there are so many different requirements of what advertisers or what the buy side needs and wants, given, you know, the vertical that they're in or the sort of objectives of any given campaign. And so, ⁓ you know, there's certainly been a massive ⁓ focus on first party data. And actually, we have quite a substantial footprint of first party data, would say stronger than a lot of web publishers too. So that continues to be sort of a priority and a defining characteristic. We're working with ecosystem IDs, but yes, mean, contextual has been really important and ⁓ our magazine division has an incredible product called Aura out, which is leveraging contextual signal, AI, it's got sort of predictive elements too. And so those fit for certain use cases. We look at it as a portfolio.

Brett (31:01)

Yeah.

Jessica Hogue (31:01)

What are the set of tools, KPIs, ways to sort of remix the audience and what layers we need to apply onto that to make it addressable and... Sure, absolutely.

Brett (31:09)

Yeah, which is kind of a data enrichment play, right? ⁓ Yeah,

Rio (31:14)

Yeah.

Brett (31:15)

it's giving more sort three dimensionality to the actual audience data, right? As you start to...

Rio (31:20)

And you think about it, like

Jessica Hogue (31:20)

That's right.

Rio (31:22)

this whole signal loss, as ⁓ Google's teased it out for years, I know you wanted to get into that a little bit here. The hypothesis was this would really favor publishers with rich first party data signals to provide deterministic signals, as well as I think for news publishers magazine publishers, right, who have this great contextual data too, like having those contextual signals plus deterministic first party data is really, when people talk about premium inventory, I think you've got it in spades, right?

Jessica Hogue (31:49)

Yeah, yeah. I think so. And I think there's also plenty to do. ⁓ I mean, I really think we're just kind of scratching the surface of what we can surface around hyper local audiences and intent. this kind of dips into ⁓ not just how programmatic and how do you sort of solve for the open auction sort of transformation, but it really does speak to what buyers want in terms of outcomes. And where I really see this going is if you can sort of triangulate around really high quality first party data, behavioral and contextual signals. And by the way, we know a lot of how consumers behave in certain markets because we have such density in places like San Francisco, the state of Texas, the parts of New England where you see this going is new ways of understanding not just intent, right? But where consumers might be headed next. And I think there's probably a lot we can do on particularly our news businesses because they're such a part of consumers' day-to-day lives and increasingly provide more utility from the content experience. All that lends itself to just new ways that we can surface and present those experiences experiences to the advertising community of places that they want to be.

Brett (33:11)

It all ties back to relevance, right? And you've got to combine all of these things in order to make ⁓ the advertising relevant to a consumer experience within any of your properties, right?

Jessica Hogue (33:13)

yeah. ⁓ Yeah, yeah. And, you know, that means continuing to sort of do more, you know, get smarter about how to put the pieces together. mean, you know, I don't think it's sufficient just to say, yes, we have contextual. you want to buy? You know, these things have been sort of around for a while. So we're constantly looking for, OK, what's next? And, you know, where is the market headed? You know, I don't know if you've done a pod yet on the outcomes era, but that's a big, you know, we hear a lot about the

Brett (33:34)

Yeah.

Jessica Hogue (33:49)

really wanting to sort of push the boundaries of outcomes and that means a whole new set of kind of tools and KPIs. Yeah.

Brett (33:56)

Yeah it was Shiv Gupta. Shiv Gupta we talked about that right. And what does that mean. Does that mean a know a double down on direct response advertising. ⁓ Does it mean you know does it mean moving away from sort of brand awareness halo effect brand brand building advertising like.

Rio (34:11)

Brett, was my initial, when I first heard the whole outcomes here, was like, is that what that means? Everything's going to be go back to the, go back to direct response and CPA, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, don't think it's, I don't think it necessarily should mean that.

Brett (34:17)

Yeah, yeah. Bye now! Get a free Super Shami. ⁓

Jessica Hogue (34:19)

Yeah.

Brett (34:25)

Yeah. Yeah. because outcomes, think, Jess you're hinting at outcomes can be defined in a lot of different ways. And a brand awareness halo effect outcome that let's say it's a financial services organization, it's an outcome that has some level of influence on a consumer journey where they get exposed to things deeper down funnel as they start to show more intent. So, yeah.

Jessica Hogue (34:26)

I don't think there's that, yeah. It's an outcome. All right. All right. That's right, yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

Rio (34:51)

AI a little bit earlier, like referral traffic. With AI summaries, I mean, I've seen different studies, anywhere from 25 % to 96 % of traffic dropping off, right? For publishers, obviously, this will impact yield of monetization, right, from display. know, like, what is Hearst doing in this area? Some are calling it Google Zero, like the Google Zero moment, right? Knowing that, you know, at some point, it could go there. We've seen some interesting things, like in the industry, we talked about Cloudflare a little bit, their announcement, kind of being the gatekeeper, wanting to collect tolls on behalf of publishers.

Jessica Hogue (35:11)

Mm.

Rio (35:22)

I think Google was telling publishers, if you block our LLM bots from scraping you, we're not going to scrape you for search, right? So I think there's a lot of things that are in flux here, but we know that this is a trend and it's going to continue. I do understand that traffic is already down, right? So wondering, what are you doing in this area? I'd to hear about your thoughts.

Jessica Hogue (35:47)

Yeah, yeah. Well, definitely, you know, all of those shifts. it does sort of, ⁓ it does sort of remind me of social and sort of the, you know, understanding UGC as a behavior for the first time and how to sort of get good at that. ⁓ You know, I think it, we're...

Brett (36:05)

That's a whole nother topic we can talk about. But yeah, yeah, next up.

Rio (36:07)

Yeah, it's a good one.

Jessica Hogue (36:07)

I know, right? I know. Well, I think we're all kind of going back to school and we're freshmen again, right? We don't know, so we've got to go and study and see what behavior is like and how do consumers engage with the quote unquote answer engines. ⁓ I think answer is sort of implies a lot of finality and actually what they're getting you to do that ask the next best question. But yeah, I would say there's a lot of energy here around just studying what is happening and not missing that moment to sort of get to solutioning too quickly because it's such a seismic change. ⁓ I'm actually really excited. We just kicked off some research that we're doing with a partner for one of our lifestyle brands to understand this very thing, right? You know, how does the media brand show up ⁓ both as a part of an answer, not the source, but as part of the answer? And what are all the subtleties that we can learn about the sort of brand ethos around it, where does it naturally occur? And so that's what I mean by we've got to go and study and really learn how these things kind of work in the wild. So that's part of what we're doing. ⁓ You know, certainly Hearst has licensing models with OpenAI, with Rufus. So there's an element of that too, of, you know, we've got to participate too, knowing that, yeah, exactly. There's a lot of, too, just, I would say, ⁓ you know, different experiments

Brett (37:28)

Yeah, AP has been doing that.

Jessica Hogue (37:35)

around where we can leverage AI and create our own user experience. if part of what will transform over time here is these new kind of surface areas where consumers are going deeper and deeper and deeper into getting more information, whether it's an answer or they're searching more, ⁓ we're also experimenting to figure out where do we sort of provide utility and types of information to support that. ⁓ And so if you think about all of the types of content that probably never makes it into an article. There is an element of sort of rescaffolding of the content, the sort of the CMS, if you will, of what are new ways that we might sort of leverage some of that information that is part of the sort of operation of just producing what was an article or what was a stream historically into new types of formats. And so there's a lot of innovation happening on that front. I'll kind of bring it back to something that doing also in our team is really understanding the sort semantic relationship of content. ⁓ And we're really sort of impressed by how far AI has come in helping us sort of innovate in that area. And so we see that as sort of an input too. If part of an objective is to have more kind of DTC consumer engagement, keep them in our environments longer, serving up new ways for them to consume content or information from us. There's an element of personalization there, potentially. And so we're doing some innovation now to see how we can plume all of the data that we sit on and sort of make it fit for purpose ⁓ to feed some of those user experiences. So there's no one thing that we can be doing.

Brett (39:20)

Well, and it sounds like, yeah, it sounds like the end goal of that thought, that thought bubble is to drive more direct traffic, right? To Hearst properties, right? If your user experience is good, you know, you're not forcing someone because right now there's all this sort of hand waving in the industry, right? I mean, Jason Kint of DCN Digital Content Next, I think you guys remember it's a trade association dedicated to the digital content companies for those on the podcast that don't know it.

Jessica Hogue (39:30)

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Brett (39:46)

just put out a study basically suggesting that ⁓ zero click search, is largely driven by Google, ⁓ is like a dead end in all of the data leading up until I think June of this year based on their interviews with like 20 different members. don't know if Hearst was part of that. And he just, all of the...

Rio (40:08)

dead end as in like people are just not going to go from the search summaries to your website.

Brett (40:11)

Yeah. And so they've seen a precipitous and continuous decline every month, month over month, through June 2025 of referral traffic. And there's a big call out from Jason, as well as Lou Paskalis he did something on Substack on the topic, about the threat to the open web, right? The threat to the foundations of the open web. so

Jessica Hogue (40:29)

Hmm.

Rio (40:33)

Jessica, I'm assuming you consider hers to be part of the open web.

Jessica Hogue (40:36)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Rio (40:37)

Yeah. Because some of your sites probably have authentication or logins, but most of them are just.

Jessica Hogue (40:43)

Yeah, I mean, that's why I was sort of, mean, yes and there's absolutely a sort of registered user base. There's a subscriber user base. It sort of depends on the brand and, you know, across however many hundreds of domains, it's a little bit variable. But Yeah, mean, know, Lou certainly talked about this. You know, one of my takeaways from his sub stack about, ⁓ you know, sort of what's at risk here, you know, it was interesting because he was really making the point as well that context matters. And, you know, it...

Brett (41:13)

Yep. I'm glad

Rio (41:15)

By the way, Lou's gonna be in this podcast.

Brett (41:16)

you lead into that Yeah. Yeah. how LLMs are kind of ⁓ giving you kind of a black and white read of the world, which takes out the context, which sort of denigrates the quality of content and has kind of harmful effects. It's kind of the right.

Jessica Hogue (41:17)

yeah, so we'll... All Yeah, I mean that's exactly right. Well, you know, this is... I always sort of telegraph to other things when I see patterns and immediately when I read that, you know what it reminded me of? Of like sort of the beginning of digital advertising where we went for, because digital by the way, pre-programmatic ⁓ was all about selling contextual. You sold audience based on who came to the site and then we sort of disaggregated the audience from the content. But you know, linear television, know, historically was all about you sold the audience to the content and then you had a pod.

Rio (42:04)

You're selling audiences, yeah.

Jessica Hogue (42:07)

When I was reading that, I sort of felt like, we're getting yet another sort of disaggregation moment. But really what sort of got me thinking about the role of context and the importance there is at some level, this does come back to editorial. And I think only a company that is committed to sort of high quality information, journalistic principles can offer that benefit of editorial and curation. ⁓value there, but you I do think at times...

Brett (42:38)

Yeah. And it's an undervalued value, right?

Jessica Hogue (42:41)

Yeah, I mean, we have trained consumers at times to sort of, you know, think that we can get these things for free. And, you know, I maybe mentioned it early on, but, you know, before I got into media, I went to J school here in New York, and I was like, relatively new out of college. And I feel like what I took away from that experience is it's reporting is really hard. It is hard work. And so, you know, I look at these things, it's like personal for me. I have such a sort of profound respect for how hard that is.

Brett (42:49)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica Hogue (43:11)

Anyway, so it is important. do think there are a lot of people in ad tech and media who... Yeah?

Rio (43:13)

Yeah, I was an aspiring journalist at one point too. I totally get it. Not an easy...

Brett (43:19)

All three of us, right? Like crazy. And

Rio (43:22)

Yeah,

Brett (43:23)

then I thought, then I had the bad idea of like, maybe I'll run the novel. And I was like, well, that wasn't a good idea. That's... So... ⁓

Rio (43:27)

See, I'm still working on my great American novel, Brett, too. But I

Jessica Hogue (43:29)

We can all reconvene in 20 years and see if we've done it.

Rio (43:34)

think it is interesting, though, like this, what we're talking about now, right? Because, and I think publishers generally don't understand that they have some leverage, right? Because these LLMs, need accurate, vetted, fact-checked content. And publishers have that, they have loads of that. You have that in spades, right? So it's okay, like they need it, but...

Jessica Hogue (43:50)

Yeah.

Rio (43:53)

they're going to get it from somewhere. think they'd rather they get it from you, right? So the new models can be trained on your data and you know, whether, even if they're not sending, whether they're sending referral traffic back to you or not, I think you're contributing to those models and you should be compensated something for it, I believe. So I think striking deals and I think publishers that don't strike deals are going to find they're going to get scraped anyway, somehow. that's my, that's my belief, I don't know.

Jessica Hogue (43:55)

Yeah.

Brett (44:13)

And

Jessica Hogue (44:14)

Yeah.

Brett (44:14)

is legalese, is sort of legal enforcement really going to work? It doesn't work to date? Or are we better off with solutions like Cloudflare? Or, and we've even gotten into some of the topics about pay per view, pay per article read, ⁓ monetize ⁓ not on a subscription basis, but on just an individual content read perspective, right?

Rio (44:36)

Yeah. Is that something you're going to get? I mean, that's an interesting topic. I think Brian O'Kelly was talking about it a few months ago. I had a bunch of things I posted on it about, micro payments a viable solution for publishers? Micro payments to those who don't know what they are, they're very small payments, Because they're so small, mean, sometimes we could be talking pennies. You probably can't use credit cards for them and credit card processors for payments. You probably need like maybe

Jessica Hogue (44:50)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Rio (45:03)

And people have thrown out stable coins, which are pegged to the dollar, right? So people throwing this out, is that a viable thing where people have a wallet, they click it, okay, they pay. It's like, you buy gas and then you just expend it as you go visit sites. I mean, that's one solution. And I'm also a believer too, Brett, that I don't think one thing's gonna save publishing. I think it's gonna need to be a bunch of different things deployed at once and kind of see what sticks and maybe...

Brett (45:26)

Yeah.

Rio (45:29)

out of 10 things two or three do, right, or four do, I don't know, is that something that Hearst is experimenting at all? I'd love to hear your personal views on it, if nothing else, Jessica, about that.

Jessica Hogue (45:39)

Yeah, well, personally, haven't seen many of those experiences sort of in my own kind of traversing of my media diet. But I think it's the right idea in so far. to be honest, I'm not sure if we have personally, you know, in any of our brands, ⁓ experimented at all with the micro payments. There are some of the things we have done, which I'll get into, but ⁓ generally speaking, I think that I'm very sort of into the idea of experimenting with willingness to pay and the value exchange and in whatever format that comes because, you know, sometimes for us, that's as simple as, you willing to give us some personal information in exchange to read this article, which, you know, depending

Brett (46:10)

Yep, yep, yep.

Jessica Hogue (46:22)

on where that consumer sits and sort of how they value their own privacy or pennies on the dollar, they're all just, they're a value exchange. And I do think as sort of purveyors of content and experiences, we can get really good at modernizing the look and feel of how we present those offers. But for me, it's even more fundamental of how can we reestablish this willingness to pay for content, which I find, you know, totally the right idea.

Brett (46:51)

Yeah.

Rio (46:51)

You mentioned training people. We train them to expect free content that'll be subsidized by display. Yeah.

Jessica Hogue (46:56)

No, and we've also trained in streaming by introducing sort of like the freemium, sort of ad-supported, all the way to subscription. I think it's all right. I mean, I think every time you look at studies, you do start to see there are different cohorts that have different needs and wants, and those different sort of ways of getting to the content ⁓ do have their own fit. So yeah, the things that I've seen a lot ⁓ in our business is all around the⁓ optimizing the subscription or the paywall and having those be very dynamic, which is a little different than the premise of micro payments, but it's not that far afield. We had, and this has been a lot of innovation in our newspaper business, but the paywall and the reg walls can be very rigid ⁓ instruments, if you will. What's been interesting to study is that you've got a lot of people who may not be in a DMA where that paper is published every day.

But like I'm from LA, I read about California even though I haven't lived there in 25 years at this point. And so I might have very different sort of behaviors of being behind a paywall or accepting that. And so one of the things that there's been a lot of work to do is to get really good at those meters and leverage a lot of AI and a lot of signals so that we're doing our very best job of anticipating what the users on the other side, giving them sort of an option that we think is going to be most sort of relevant for them. But yeah, the micro payments will be interesting to see how it goes. ⁓

Brett (48:37)

Yeah, I find I

Rio (48:38)

There's gotta be.

Brett (48:39)

find them of a consumer experience perspective that the actual paywalls to be frustrating. I wonder if micro payments would be if there would be any less friction in that type of process because because then you're going to increase sort of the frequency of asking for payment. Right. ⁓

Rio (48:54)

Totally, there's gotta be, like I think of The Economist, I love The Economist, but I don't have time to get through that magazine every week, right? So I paid for it for years, but as my life got busier, just eventually was like, they piled up, can't, so I canceled, I would pay for, but every once in a while, I see like on X or on LinkedIn, someone shares an article, it's always paywall, but I would pay, I'd pay per article a small amount if I had some easy way to do it.

Brett (49:01)

Yep.

Jessica Hogue (49:01)

Yeah. But you know the other...The other thing that's, I mean, this is on a different end of the spectrum, but I really love the ability to gift an article. I think it's sort of so wonderful and it comes with that like very cute little icon too usually. ⁓ So I think there's a lot there, but again, I think it's fundamental for the, to reestablish that value exchange. And this is so true because of, at the end of the day, what we're doing is we're reestablishing direct relationships with users, not through all sorts of intermediaries a lot of things.

Brett (49:49)

Yeah, that's a critical point. because a lot of news, I'd like to see that. I don't if you know the numbers for this, but a lot of news is consumed through aggregators, whether it's Google news or Apple news, right? And oftentimes my local news, just in New Jersey, is blocked by paywalls. And so, which is incredibly frustrating from a consumer experience perspective, because I'm like, I just want to read about, you know, X, Y, Z that happened in the town over, and it's blocked by a paywall.

Jessica Hogue (49:57)

aggregators. Yeah. All

Brett (50:15)

⁓ You know, and so I often go direct to publishers, you know, do you know what the stats are in terms of people using aggregators to consume news versus going direct?

Rio (50:25)

I've heard it's to what 10 billion at least a year that's not going to publishers that's being siphoned off by different. I think that's just Google and Metta, right? I was the one, I mean, I don't know how, I know that's one study, but you know, it's a lot.

Jessica Hogue (50:29)

Yeah.

Brett (50:32)

Yep.

Jessica Hogue (50:33)

Yeah, I mean Yeah, Apple News is certainly big. mean, know, ⁓ X, you know, was a lot of places where people would just get headlines, threads, blue sky. I so all of these things are sort of ⁓ also generational a little too. You know, we sort of grew up in the Facebook feed and X headline. So, yeah, it's interesting. But yeah, I think doubling down on.

Brett (50:51)

Yep, yep.

Jessica Hogue (51:01)

At the end of the day, people, do they value the content enough? And the best thing for Hearst is that we invest so much in great content and quality that we have high confidence that ⁓ consumers are gonna wanna meet us there. We haven't even scratched the surface in all the sort of data journalism. There's also different ways of sort of presenting that I think will appeal to different kind of cohorts of users over time too. ⁓

Brett (51:26)

Yep, direct relationships with consumers is a number one priority, it sounds. Yep.

Jessica Hogue (51:31)

Absolutely, absolutely.

Rio (51:33)

Well, looking at content, I mean, think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about keyword blocking and brand safety and... I think your favorite topic, One of your top five, right? And we're gonna have a Zygorsky on in a few weeks, by the way. yeah. Yeah, he's part of the Nielsen mafia, right? Is there any interesting news there? I know that's been kind of...

Jessica Hogue (51:40)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brett (51:45)

Uh-uh.

Jessica Hogue (51:51)

Also a friend and a former Nielsen colleague. Yes, yeah.

Brett (51:54)

Yep, yep, yep.

Rio (52:01)

a problem for publishers as a source of some valid complaints about overzealous keyword blocking. I think we quoted a couple episodes ago some of the numbers about what percent of content has been completely blocked, some of it for not best reasons.

Jessica Hogue (52:07)

Yeah. know your estimates I was pretty surprised by this when I got here. Maybe it was a little ignorance on my part, but I thought, oh, I thought we had solved brand safety. I were at Nielsen at the time, where Nielsen was also innovating in this space. At some level, there is a change management aspect of this, the fact that keyword lists don't have perishable dates, and they just sit there and accumulate.

Brett (52:45)

Yo, yeah, they're not exactly dynamic, are they? ⁓

Jessica Hogue (52:49)

I mean, I was so struck by, okay, that's actually how this works. And we can sort of pick on methodologies of how we do brand safety and suitability, but I think we would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that part of this is just the sort of behavior of ⁓ things are very dynamic and content is very dynamic and having these sort of persistent things that accumulate over time just probably doesn't meet the sort of dynamic nature of content. But ⁓ for us, mean,

We just sort of decided that we could kind of help ourselves a little bit more. And so we have been working with ⁓ some partners to help us understand newer methodologies that are a little bit more semantic in nature, that can get us a sort of corpus of data that says, you know, this may be breaking news, but it's also safe or suitable or lower medium risk for these set of reasons. And we just felt we needed to bring our own data sets to the equation as opposed to just saying, hey, you know,

You shouldn't block news. There's a lot of good stuff here. And so we're working through that right now. ⁓ You know, I do think, you know, what's ⁓ what's probably going to be surprising for advertisers is just how much sort of missed opportunity and efficiency can be had because these are high quality audiences. They're highly engaged. And so we're looking forward to sort of being able to expose more, where we have not just brand safe, but highly sort of relevant environments for brands to be in.

But at some level, this comes down to the mechanics of how do we use ML, how do we use AI, how can we make these things more dynamic? And so it's been fun to see where the methodologies have evolved. ⁓

Brett (54:31)

Yeah, and it's gone from like the sledgehammer sort of approach of keyword block lists to you need more of a chisel approach, right? That's specific to, you know, it's much more dynamic, much more adaptable, right?

Jessica Hogue (54:38)

Yeah, That's right.

Rio (54:43)

It's more like a shotgun approach. Everything, the blast, just immense blast radius, right? Like anything, yeah.

Jessica Hogue (54:43)

But you know, there...

Brett (54:46)

Yeah, because otherwise huge portions

Jessica Hogue (54:47)

Yeah.

Brett (54:48)

of your inventory get blocked for potentially ⁓ reasons that aren't really valid. Right?

Jessica Hogue (54:54)

Right. Right, yeah, I mean, there was this really sort of charming story that we discovered that ⁓ when we were doing our own analyses, which was ⁓ an article that was published from, I believe it was ⁓ our West Coast station in Monterey. So it was from our television station's digital property. And they were reporting on, and I think it was maybe labeled as an accident, but it was a woman who had delivered a baby on the side of a road. And so that certainly created an emergency but the whole story was this very heartwarming story about an EMT who had been trained just the weekend before who was able to manage the situation, deliver the baby, and it was such a feel-good story, but blocked because ⁓ you had emergency and all sorts of words that probably would have connoted something else. so everyone's got these kind of anecdotes, of course, but let's have those kind of conversations with our advertisers to make sure that we can bring forward environments that are brand safe, that are brand suitable, and highlight for them places where maybe they hadn't considered, but that they would agree the right places for their brands to be.

Rio (56:02)

Another topic we want to touch on a little bit ⁓ was let's say supply path optimization or compression. And for those who aren't super big ITECH nerds, there's just been this belief that maybe publishers shouldn't be working with as many dozens of SSPs It makes it very difficult to understand.

Jessica Hogue (56:14)

Yeah

Rio (56:23)

the whole supply path, right? And whole supply chain for media, it adds additional fees. I guess there's a question about, by looking at the supply path, potentially maybe going direct to DSP for publishers, right? mean, think with Trade Desk has been doing some interesting things there, right? With Open Path, right?

Brett (56:41)

With open path,

Jessica Hogue (56:42)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rio (56:43)

Love to know your opinion on like anything that's going on Hearst in terms of SSPs, exchanges, resellers, ⁓ compressing that supply path, reducing hops and anything to help really improve your monetization and yield.

Jessica Hogue (56:56)

Yeah. So I sort of phoned a friend because I knew we were probably going to talk about this and, you know, because listen, I mean, things change so quickly. You kind of always want to stay close to where the business is headed. I think it's generally true that we're trying to get closer to the advertiser and make the supply path as sort of short and clean as possible. So those, I think I mentioned it before, but those values kind of persist here too. You know, we have direct integrations. We have strategic partnerships with the big DSP.

Brett (57:00)

Haha

Jessica Hogue (57:27)

and their kind of parent companies. I don't think we use resellers. That's not sort of really part of the strategy, but ⁓ some of our divisions are also integrated with Open Path. again, here we're kind of trying to sort of lean in and stay close, ⁓ try a few strategies, if you will. ⁓ Ultimately, it's still, we want to participate and be sort of closer to the advertiser with as much sort of transparency as we can about the quality of the inventory and you can see that kind of in our SSP strategy and the SPO strategy as well.

Rio (58:01)

Has there been an active effort to reduce number of SSPs or clean out the supply path at all?

Jessica Hogue (58:06)

You know, I don't know that I could really sort of speak to a specific number or target. I think it's about having the right partners. ⁓ You know, there's definitely, you know, the SSPs I've been trying to sort of understand and stay close to this concept of containerization as well, which is, was a new word that I just started hearing a lot about, ⁓ certainly in the last several weeks. And so, you know, I think we have to sort of stay close and understand what's our opportunity as these sort of dynamics are shifting.

Rio (58:23)

Good one.

Jessica Hogue (58:36)

is so fascinating to me because it's sort of this, the way I think about it, it's like an unbundling of that stack, You're sort of unbundling the data, the custom algorithms, ⁓ and so those types of things are also stuff that we're looking at.

Rio (58:49)

Yeah, well the DSP, the roles of DSP and SSP kind of get like are maybe up in the air, right? Like what is this mediation or decisioning layer sit? If you take it kind of out of buy side, right? And maybe it kind of becomes an AI thing. Does it become a sell side thing, a supply thing? I mean, I think that's really interesting. And then the approach for containerization on sell side for like, let's say programmatic 3.0, right? I mean, Scott Messer talks about this all the time, right? So.

Jessica Hogue (58:57)

Yeah. ⁓That's right. Yeah, and you've got this sort of...Yeah, and then you've got the sort of ad serving layer in between. I I remember one of my last roles at Nielsen as I ran all the digital revenue, which included all of the platforms and the big walled gardens and the publishers, their digital businesses. And I remember inheriting that business. I'm like, there are hundreds of DSPs and SSP, hundreds and hundreds. And of course that sort of went through a massive pruning. And then the sort of DSP functionality has sort of grown and grown over time and we saw that certainly with streaming. So yeah, I mean I think these things kind of always have a natural gyration to them. But some of those dynamics are interesting to me because you've also got this ad serving layer that happens in between, right? Yeah.

Rio (59:53)

Well maybe the SSP becomes a mini ad server, right, in this scenario, right? If you're taking mediation layer, moving closer to supply and DSPs, mean, then you're probably going to see a million DSPs again because if they're not doing the decisioning, they'd be definitely less robust in their functionality, so it'd probably be easier to create one, right?

Jessica Hogue (1:00:09)

I know I've kind said it a few times here, but partnerships in this space really do matter. And having good partnerships and sort of staying close to the partners that we work with on their kind of own sort of roadmap and innovation is, ⁓ I think, really impressive about how Hearst works with different partners too, to sort of try to stay in front of certain areas. And so it's fun. We get to participate sometimes. We're not always leading all those conversations, but for me, it'll be interesting to really see how the next sort of round of data, you know, what are we really talking about? What can we do that's differentiated in that, regardless of how the sort of pipes start to shake out?

Brett (1:00:48)

And are you internally tracking ⁓ sort of the percentage of sales that are going through private marketplace, going through direct with KPIs that are sort of driven to increase that share of your total to me, there's been a lot of emphasis on the importance of content, on ⁓ the willingness to pay and the valuation of that content, which is your core competency. And then that leans itself towards more direct sales, right? ⁓ In more direct relationships with consumers on the other side of the fence. ⁓

Jessica Hogue (1:01:09)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right.

Brett (1:01:23)

so speaking of data and analytics, ⁓ you did a ton of work on the measurement side, reach and frequency measurement, advanced analytics. I've been heavily involved in that ⁓ from the Nielsen Marketing Cloud days with multi-touch attribution, kind of commercializing that, was kind of a Matt Krepsik baby, and he's my new CEO, right, with the visual IQ acquisition.

Jessica Hogue (1:01:44)

Hahahaha

Brett (1:01:48)

And then I went to Neustar where that was all our, MTA, algorithmic logic to understanding consumer propensity and outcomes, et cetera, et ⁓ How are you thinking, because you do come from sort of that core cloth, that Nielsen cloth, how are you thinking about implementing advanced analytics and attribution to prove outcomes to clients?

Jessica Hogue (1:02:10)

you know, there's so much kind of at play of you know, what does the end market really need from us, So that's an early, you stage journey for us. ⁓ But it's been fun, you know, I've been involved in different initiatives across our division and get to bring in vendors that I know from my prior life too. And so right now, more than anything, my activity is to sort of try to act as glue, stay connected, bring in and sort of recommend partners that maybe are used for a specific business unit for a specific reason. and try to sort of help informally, I would say, kind of establish that framework and portfolio. ⁓ I'll add though, interestingly enough, Hearst as a brand, ⁓ we brought on and retained an agency of record last year. We're working with our partner, PMG, so that we could market some of our media brands. And ⁓ I've been heavily involved in, the campaigns, those are sort of led by our CMOs and our communications teams, but on how do we as now a brand put ourselves in the shoes of understanding how do we build reach and frequency across media channels today? How do we measure it? so ironically, I'm working with companies I've worked at before and companies I've partnered before and getting to see that sort of maturation of these capabilities as a brand, which is enormously informative to sort of where we think we want to go in building out our own capabilities.

Brett (1:03:29)

Yeah.

Rio (1:03:37)

Yeah, it's interesting you bring it up.

I think that's like figuring out like what's going to be attractive and palatable to CMOs, right? And I think that's like it's overlooked a lot. And I think the whole act, like, I mean, I love the fact there's been a lot of discussion in the last six months about, okay, a lot of the attribution stats are, mean, technologies have not been, it's been more art than science. Like a lot of times, mean, Fou talked about this, Brett, remember that? About a lot of the attribution is just gamed, right? And I think digital has been siphoning off a lot of

Jessica Hogue (1:03:56)

Hmm.

Rio (1:04:07)

taking credit for a lot of attribution. think the platforms have been certainly accused of taking credit for a lot of attribution that they probably didn't do much to earn. I think traditional channels have been punished for that. And maybe shifting more towards marketing mix modeling. Again, another thing we're going back, ⁓ Maybe like that, we should be taking an approach that we wanna be looking at the full consumer journey, maybe hitting these channels. And maybe we can't cleanly attribute everything, but we know people are there.

Brett (1:04:24)

Yeah.

Jessica Hogue (1:04:25)

Yeah.

Rio (1:04:37)

So we should be in front of them.

Jessica Hogue (1:04:37)

Mm-hmm.

Brett (1:04:38)

Yeah.

Jessica Hogue (1:04:38)

Right, right.

Brett (1:04:39)

Yeah. Well, and the challenge with MTA and MMA that's not sort of automated, especially as we practiced it at Neustar was just the length of time it took. Not only did you need the data sort of governance and housekeeping, like GM is a perfect example of a client of ours. had 60 different...

Jessica Hogue (1:04:52)

Mm-hmm.

Brett (1:04:57)

data warehouses across their brand, 60. And so half of our job was literally unifying kind of what you do, just cleansing, unifying, deduplicating, because you're not going to be able to do any of the advanced analytics and attribution unless you've got to. So that in itself could take six months to a year.

Jessica Hogue (1:04:59)

Yreah. Cleansing and yeah, it's engineering. It's not data science. Yeah

Rio (1:05:15)

Well, within the 60 Brett, they probably bought or licensing the same data at least three or four times and paying for it. I mean, you find these big companies, like they'll do that. big, like we licensed the same Polk data three or four times and paid for it. Right. And Polk did, you know, never said anything. I, that would not surprise me. These big works like it's, it's a.

Brett (1:05:21)

Exactly,

Jessica Hogue (1:05:22)

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Well,

Brett (1:05:33)

Yeah.

Jessica Hogue (1:05:33)

it's interesting too, because I mean, when I was working with people like Krepsik, like back in the day, market mix modeling was not about outcome. It was about channel allocation. was like, you know, it's, yeah, yeah. So it's been so fascinating to see how, you know, we sort of all got sort of persuaded that we could be precisely deterministic everywhere.

Rio (1:05:43)

Yep. Yep.

Brett (1:05:43)

Yeah, it's strategic, it's a strategic planning play, yeah. Yep.

Jessica Hogue (1:05:57)

And, you know, anyway, so now we're sort of back to probabilistic ish, but the sort of unification of MTA and MMM is also just methodologically really fascinating as kind of practitioners. But I do believe, you know, I'm trying to remember ⁓ there's a there's a ⁓ an industry group. Gosh, I'm forgetting the name now, ⁓ which has for years been very consistent in

Brett (1:06:09)

Yeah.

Jessica Hogue (1:06:23)

talking about, you know... ⁓despite sort of any of the perceived or real challenges with MTA, that we can't only do, like we still have to build brands, we still have to build funnels, and you can't only sort of be optimizing to the conversion, because otherwise you have underweighted the opportunity to sort of identify people. And you know, there was a period of time too where we called those impressions waste, because they weren't in the target that was gonna drive a conversion.

Brett (1:06:52)

underweighting piece is that's the challenge, Because you end up, it really is driven by algorithmic logic because there's so many different influencing factors that drive, like consumer propensity. I'm going to buy a snow shovel if I don't have a snow shovel in advance of a snowstorm, right? Don't give credit to the last click or to the last impression or the view through impression or ⁓ all that sort of stuff, right? And so media oftentimes gets over-credited. That was sort of Dr. Fou's

Jessica Hogue (1:06:52)

subscribe. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Brett (1:07:18)

argument, radically over-accredited, just in defense of a vendor or an agency in the dollars they're spending.

Jessica Hogue (1:07:22)

Mm-hmm. yeah, mean, not to get so academic, but there was a time at Nielsen when we had different tools in our portfolio. We had MTA and MMM and brand lift and brand awareness. And I distinctly remember a few meetings with an advertiser where we had instrumented everything and then everything was in conflict. And it was sort of like, what do we, how can we have brand lifter? How can we have conversion and no brand awareness? But I, know, anyway, this is sort of, ⁓ you know, part of why sort of stepping back and not launching.

Brett (1:07:46)

How do you wiggle your way out of that conversation?

Jessica Hogue (1:07:59)

wading so quickly into what can we do at Hearst as a sort of media partner is in part because I think we've got to know where we have real strength in that media equation. Like what's the job to be done? Because we can drive awareness, we can drive reach, but I come from a sort of a mindset of we should know exactly what job we're hired to do and if it's to drive conversions then you might be ⁓ a rotated creative in market and it's just that. But so I'm kind of

Brett (1:08:29)

Yeah,

Jessica Hogue (1:08:29)

caught up in this notion of like, we're going to do full funnel measurement, like, let's be clear on what's the media job to be done, and then let's measure it accordingly.

Rio (1:08:38)

Well, it's an outcome, the outcome is broader then, right? It's not gonna be outcomes, not necessarily conversion or sale. It might be you're generating awareness. Some of these products, like you mentioned financial services, like might have a multi-year sales cycle or buying a car, it's once every seven years, so unless you're gonna hit the person like the month before they go to buy, right? I mean, it's like, and by then they might have already decided what they want, From previous advertisements. So I think taking a broader view, if you are in the age of outcomes, mean, like the outcome

Jessica Hogue (1:08:42)

Exactly.

Rio (1:09:04)

It should span the full customer experience, From awareness through to consideration through to everything,

Brett (1:09:12)

Although I think the age of outcomes, I'm gonna finish with this, but I think the age of outcomes is suggesting that, we can't do that. We can't do full funnel measurement. we're just gonna name, any outcome that you're gonna measure, we can measure that discreetly. But I think when you, it's back to last click.

Jessica Hogue (1:09:18)

Yeah

Rio (1:09:24)

Last click. It's back to last click, right?

Jessica Hogue (1:09:25)

I was,

Brett (1:09:27)

Well, this has been great. we covered all the topics and thank you, Jess, for being such a good sport.

Jessica Hogue (1:09:31)

Of course.