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Image design throughout: Archi Banal
Image design throughout: Archi Banal

MediaJune 2, 2022

Why does online journalism have to put up with such heinous ads?

Image design throughout: Archi Banal
Image design throughout: Archi Banal

Stuff debuted a pretty new design this week – but it, like all of us, still has to live with the tyranny of horrific online ads. Why?

I have a folder on my Google Drive called “journalism online looks like shit”. I’ve had it since 2018, and have dutifully filed away examples of egregious pile-ups of display advertising, link stacks, homepage takeover horrors and chum boxes (the Outbrain bizarro world at the bottom of stories) as I’ve encountered them since. We all have our hobbies, and this is mine.

When I started doing it, I wasn’t quite sure why. It annoyed me, the way it made reading the work of my fellow journalists an exercise in trying to find fragments of text amid the scree. I was also certain it wouldn’t last – couldn’t last. 

The biggest frustration is that the weight of advertising and internal distraction obscured the good, sometimes outstanding journalism, performed by organisations under immense pressure. The New Zealand news media operates in a difficult financial environment, with print still heavily subsidising digital, social media users harshly critiquing its work and worth, and with complex news events happening far too frequently. Rather than supporting its work, the advertising can often make it near-impossible to read.

What I struggle with is who is really being served by this approach. The majority of advertising on news sites is nominally about brand or awareness, and yet it seems almost certain to generate negative brand association the way it’s so carelessly deployed. So it seems bad for the brands involved. The journalists who create the product have it sliced into pieces and obscured, a bleak fate for difficult and important work. The audience has to try and navigate a visual maze, a terrible user experience. Even fancy new design schemes like the very thoughtful one Stuff rolled out this week feel like they’re battling against the voracious demands of unfeeling ad units.

Who wins? The only people, as far as I can tell, are the brokers in the middle. The digital ad market is dominated by media agencies, which decide where the money goes, ad tech companies, which facilitate that distribution, and display networks, dominated by Google, which can take anywhere up to half of the revenue associated with an ad. It feels phenomenally complex by design, and like it works entirely for those who own or manage the pipes, and not all for that trinity connected by those pipes – the news organisations, the audiences and the brands.

Why do we have ads on our news sites anyway?

Ultimately, most journalism has for centuries been a product for which the consumer pays only a portion of the cost of production, with the balance paid by advertisers that buy access to that audience. While news readers have heroically stepped up to pay more of the cost of production, for most news organisations, from small independents like us to giant global organisations like the Guardian, somewhere north of 40% of income comes through advertising. 

This seems unproblematic at its basis, and worked well both aesthetically and financially – until the internet arrived. Then it all went to visual hell, making no one happy. I decided to call a friend who works in a senior role at a large media buying agency to talk through some of my collection of screengrabs, and have him give a critical analysis. That is, to ask someone who really knows why this happens. We agreed to anonymity because he still works in this town, and didn’t want to be seen to criticise either media organisations or brands. So I’ll call him Brian.

Brian’s answers show that the causes of this problem are surprisingly complex, and there is no clear villain in this piece. We as news media deserve a hearty slice of the blame. Creative agencies are not without sin. Brands themselves play a crucial role. Probably the biggest issue is the massive increase in inventory, with advertising everywhere from within your Uber and Amazon apps, to Trade Me, to search to social and more. Tellingly, many of the most powerful new players have no content costs.

Yet Brian agreed that media agencies have not done a great job of pushing the form forward. His main issue was that we’re still measuring the wrong thing. His thesis is that it was born wrong – that because we could measure an impression (how many people might have seen it) and a click, we decided those things were most important for the display ads that dominate most news sites. Whereas with video ads, which dominate social, we don’t expect a click.

“The internet is videotising quite fast, right? So creative agencies and clients made a predetermined split, which said ‘anything brand-y I’ll do in video,” says Brian. “And everything else, that’s direct response. That’s how we chose the metrics that matter. Which is quite an artificial construct.” He says this meant there was an expectation that news sites generate traffic to brands’ own sites, which is to say that news and magazine sites were lumped in as direct response (basically the online equivalent of coupons and junk mail), while video on YouTube or TVNZ OnDemand was seen as a brand play. Brian sees that as a wholly artificial division traceable back to the earliest days of the web, but which is somehow still hanging around.

There are literally hundreds of examples of horrible online ads on news sites (I have that folder, remember), but I thought it best to run through five archetypal examples of ugly, confusing and generally unpleasant online content display to get a sense of why it looks like that. At the end, I got a tantalising glimpse of hope for a better future.

DISCLAIMER: I am obviously riding for a fall here. No one publishing online media can guard against calamitous failings at the intersection of ads, technology and content. So while some of these examples are taken from our local media, this should properly be understood as a plea for improvement as a whole, rather than a critique of what currently goes on at any individual publisher.

1. The vast and often broken homepage takeover

The homepage takeover is one of the priciest items in digital journalism – clients pay upwards of $20,000 to submit users to a barrage of brand on arrival. (Related: the auto roll-down on the Herald, and Stuff’s full blackout to draw attention to a single display ad). These often seem to cut off half the product being advertised, while also making it seem janky and broken by association. 

“Creative agencies have got a role here,” says Brian, who believes they were once places that saw true creativity in areas like this. “I don’t know what’s happened.” He says that while different specs (we’re all on different devices, which makes one-ad-fits-all hard) and size limits have an impact, the main issue is that these are a bolt-on at the end of a larger (and often video-first) piece of creative work, rather than an end unto itself. As a result, they’re handed to juniors late in the piece, and it shows.

2. Your search history haunts you

Google ads follow me round the internet, advertising a product I have already bought, for months afterwards. I bought some trousers from a shop in Wales last year. I love the trousers, but it’s been maddening seeing the poor shop continue to hammer me with ads for trousers I am literally wearing, for months afterwards. Or, in this example from the Daily Mail, an ad for a KiwiSaver provider I already use and a brain-drink I subscribed to yesterday.

“Retargeting is a really powerful tool, and the metrics show that,” says Brian. “But most people don’t think about the story arc.” To him, a more creative and successful approach would be to introduce narrative and storytelling beats there, which intensify the viewer’s feelings towards the brand, rather than hammering hard sells at every encounter. It’s the problem of what we measure, again.

3. Losing the story amid the ads

The NZ Herald’s Liam Dann is one of my favourite writers on the economy, because he writes clearly and succinctly in an area prone to jargon. He also has a habit of making each sentence its own paragraph, which is part of his methodical writing style. The only issue is that when placed online, the CMS makes it into a kind of bizarre avant garde poetry maze. Brian agrees that it’s a problem, but rightly points out that it’s as much about news organisations’ own UX and UI, which is placing boxes to prompt further reading or email signups between every paragraph, causing the chaos we see here.

Liam Dann’s copy, trying to break through (left), Stuff module pileup (right). Image: Archi Banal

4. The galaxy brain of the government being on Outbrain

“One of the measures of success for government agencies is how many people come to their website,” says Brian. “I have no idea why.” Me neither. Not just because expecting people to come to your website seems a somewhat quaint success measure in the social web era, but because Outbrain is a particularly strange place for the government to hang out.

As the late, great website The Awl pointed out in “A complete taxonomy of internet chum”, the strange, compelling ads that sit at the bottom of news stories are colloquially known as chum, and can be categorised into sub-varieties like “Sexy Thing, Old Person’s Face, Skin Thing, and Miracle Cure Thing”. These invariably lead to some of the sketchiest, scammiest places on the internet.

Some chum (Image: Archi Banal)

This is a very strange place for the government to be hanging out! The government is an increasingly large player in advertising, perhaps emboldened by the much-lauded and ubiquitous Covid-19 public health campaign. But while campaigns discouraging drink driving or smoking have a mass communication logic, Brian sees the MBIE ads below, which encourage digital invoicing (!), as somewhat futile – particularly given the scale of Xero’s always-on advertising campaigns. To be clear, MBIE are far from alone in this – you’ll see any number of government agencies and campaigns nested there. But so long as big advertisers support it with their business, news publishers will be forced to keep the lucrative but disgusting chumbox at the bottom of their stories.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, hanging in the chumbox (Image: Archi Banal)

5. A video you didn’t ask for plays right away

“The internet is rapidly videotising,” says Brian. This means that more and more of our time online is spent watching video, and because of that inherent bias toward video as a brand play online, news sites are desperate to create more video plays. That’s why almost every story now has a video attached, however tangentially related, and every time you fail to hit the pause button fast enough – boom, another impression sold. 

It seems scarcely credible that those ads actually do the job assigned to them, but until we invent an acceptable format for brand ads within news stories, this is what we seem stuck with. It’s frustrating for us as a magazine site to feel like nothing has replaced the double-page spreads that were the hero ad format for magazines. But the mobile screen and modern attention span creates an awful pressure to create more video impressions, regardless of how much we all hate autoplay.

 

Is there a better way?

“Another metric actually changes the whole conversation,” says Brian. “I’m passionate about attention time.” This means that rather than counting the basics like views, impressions or clicks, we can start to get a sense of how long someone lingers on an ad. This is currently hard to measure outside of video, but there is fresh technology coming into view that might change all that.

“The part of the blockchain that really interests me is BATs – basic attention tokens,” he says. “Different ways of eliciting an involvement with a brand that is not predicated on the only thing that matters being a click.”

There’s a lot more coming everywhere in digital ads. Apple’s privacy changes made a US$10bn dent in Facebook’s ad revenue, while the so-called “cookiepocalypse” has many in publishing daring to dream of a different future. Cookies are behind a lot of this internet advertising hell – they’re the reason creepy ads follow you around the internet, based on your search history. Between changes to Google Chrome and new EU regulations, they’re likely to be less powerful in future.

Publishers are holding out hope of a return to context – wherein advertisers pay to be in a particular location based on who is likely to be there and what they’re likely to be into. The fact cookies follow you wherever you go has been the biggest reason premium locations like news sites are held to prices set at locations where advertising is not a core business. This is the true foundational reason why so many news sites the world over look like hell – and our best realistic shot at changing all that. In the meantime, the best shot at changing this dysfunctional mess is for those who control the money to demand better of the creative and its expression. It doesn’t seem like much to ask – but we’re decades into display and things seem stubbornly resistant to evolution.

duncan@thespinoff.co.nz


Follow Duncan Greive’s media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

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Kamahl Santamaria (Photo: Supplied)
Kamahl Santamaria (Photo: Supplied)

MediaJune 1, 2022

Why the Kamahl Santamaria saga could cause even bigger problems for TVNZ

Kamahl Santamaria (Photo: Supplied)
Kamahl Santamaria (Photo: Supplied)

The resignation of its highest-profile recruit in years has become a rolling firestorm for TVNZ’s newsroom, at the worst possible time.

For most of its existence, TVNZ has been the elite institution of New Zealand’s media. It has an incredibly powerful cocktail of attributes in its favour, which help it retain pole position. It has a consistent and mostly benign owner in the state, which allows it to operate commercially but lately has allowed it to heavily reinvest its profits. It has the immense advantage of incumbency, of having been a monopoly supplier of television for decades and thus retaining the most reliable audiences in linear television. And because of all this it retains an enormous level of recognition and trust with the public.

It is also very disciplined, particularly during the decade-long tenure of Kevin Kenrick, the CEO who ran it with steely control until handing the reins to former National Party minister Simon Power in March. Save for a brief period in the mid-2010s when the Herald seemed to have great sources within TVNZ, it has mostly been a very well-controlled organisation, outwardly content, rarely leaking. It’s not perfectly true that leaks equal unhappiness – malcontents exist at every news organisation, and journalists naturally talk – but their absence is a strong indication that things are working.

Contrast this with TVNZ’s cross-town rivals at MediaWorks. During the brief, wildly chaotic reign of CEO Mark Weldon, a former Olympic swimmer who came in with a plan to slash news programming in favour of multi-night reality TV, its newsroom leaked constantly. This was the era when Weldon axed Campbell Live and its main investigative journalism show within months, and spent lavishly to create Scout, a short-lived gossip website run by former Herald columnist Rachel Glucina. Weldon used to beam on to every employee’s computer for state-of-the-nation addresses to announce those moves, and my inbox would start pinging with fury and incredulity not long after. 

TVNZ springs multiple leaks

This week it’s been TVNZ’s internal machinations that have been lighting up other reporters’ inboxes, with Stuff, the NZ Herald and Newshub reporting communications associated with the very abrupt departure of Kamahl Santamaria. To recap, John Campbell announced he was stepping down from co-hosting Breakfast at the start of April, after three years in which the show had become a beloved and cosy presence in the TVNZ schedule (and, against the odds, an important TikTok play for the network). His replacement was to be Kamahl Santamaria, a New Zealander who had joined a large contingent at Al Jazeera in Doha and become a major presence at the Qatari network. 

Santamaria was recruited by Paul Yurisich, a former Al Jazeera colleague appointed as head of news at TVNZ in 2020. Crucially, Yurisich was also Santamaria’s executive producer at the network. Santamaria had been looking to return to New Zealand for some years, after having got his start at TV3, and looked outwardly like a great get for TVNZ. 

Kamahl Santamaria (left) and the Breakfast team, April-May 2022 (Photo: TVNZ)

As we now know, he was anything but, going off air within weeks and resigning after just a month. TVNZ initially cited a “family emergency” as the reason for his departure, the first of a series of blunders that inflamed the story. As we soon discovered, it was in fact allegations of inappropriate communications with women at TVNZ. The phrase “family emergency” had the appearance of letting him escape looking like a hero tending to his family, rather than someone who had created the emergency with his own behaviour. 

Within days it became clear that he had priors, with women at Al Jazeera confirming a similar pattern, including alleged unwanted physical interactions, and an NZME reporter detailing a private Instagram account from which Santamaria allegedly sent flirtatious messages and followed around 150 local reporters, 90% of them women. The sheer volume of complaints, along with the pattern they seem to reveal, suggests that it would not have been hard to discover his reputation ahead of such a high-profile hiring.

A newsroom in revolt?

Since the story broke, TVNZ’s newsroom has been as as strong on the story as any other, despite the unique impediments which exist for them in reporting on themselves (for example, it’s hard for them to leak emails sent to their own inboxes). It led the 6pm bulletin – still by far the country’s most powerful news product – on Sunday, in a lengthy package helmed by Kim Baker Wilson that reported all the available facts while also unpacking the church-and-state separation of the newsroom from the wider company. It was impossible not to read it as an internal rebellion against the way it had been managed to this point – the fact that Santamaria’s dignity and TVNZ’s corporate reputation seemed to be prioritised over his victims, and the simple truth of what he did.

The scandal is now at the point where it is feeding on itself, with a senior TVNZ manager emailing staff complaining bitterly of being “embarrassed” and “disgusted” about the culture of leaking which has sprung up. Which was immediately leaked to the Herald’s Katie Harris. 

The situation is compounded by just how much change there has been in key positions within TVNZ, and the fact that two of the company’s most senior positions are now filled by outsiders unaware of its culture, codes and loyalties. CEO Power has been in the role since March, while Yurisich is less than two pandemic-stricken years into his job leading news. Crucially, two of the most senior corporate communications people in the business have left (one to Sky, one to maternity leave) over the past year – these roles are highly specialised and built to handle moments like this. 

Breakfast’s remaining hosts address the departure earlier this week (Photo: Screenshot)

Power has ordered an inquiry into TVNZ’s recruitment processes, saying he believed Santamaria’s hiring showed it hadn’t been followed or applied consistently. This is unlikely to be the end of the issue, though, as the scale of the uproar means that further personnel changes are very possible – most notably Yurisich, who, as Santamaria’s EP, will be expected to have known about his close colleague’s reputation when he recruited him. 

This is not to say that he did, but the pre-existing professional ties between the pair now look damning. Yurisich also recruited another ex-Al Jazeera colleague in Mereana Hond to head digital news. Whenever outsiders are recruited to key roles it inevitably leaves hurt feelings on the part of those passed over, along with their loyalists. The risk of Yurisich losing his newsroom, and with it his job, is now surely very high.

Behind the saga, the merger

Above it all sits the merger with RNZ, which is set to commence its early stages within the next few months. It’s an enormous event in the history of both organisations, and thus very destabilising. TVNZ, both in scale and in prominence, was always likely to dominate the new entity culturally. The one area RNZ might have been perceived as having an advantage in is news, and events like this feed into a sense that it might be given news to control post-merger. 

Which is to say it’s the worst possible moment for all this to be happening. Most wrenchingly for the array of stellar journalists and news people at TVNZ is how avoidable it all was. There were strong, well-liked internal candidates for Yurisich’s job. Santamaria’s chequered history should have been unearthed by a strong recruitment process. And a proactive accounting for the circumstances surrounding his departure might have prevented this from exploding quite so dramatically, serving no one – least of all those who are alleged to have received his unwanted advances. 

Simon Power, Paul Yurisich and TVNZ now have a major test of character and judgement. The stakes of the moment are incredibly high. How they respond will have enormous implications for the elite institution of New Zealand’s media, which suddenly feels shaken and even vulnerable.

duncan@thespinoff.co.nz

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