Canadian publishers partner up to launch homegrown ad platform
A group of Canadian publishers including Postmedia, the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. has joined forces to back a new homegrown advertising platform — Maple Network Exchange — to try to offset the effects of the concentration of digital advertising in the hands of foreign-owned companies such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.
“Canadian advertisers have told us they want to spend their advertising dollars in Canada using Canadian companies and need a compelling alternative to the current market offerings,” said John Hinds, chief executive of publishing association News Media Canada and of the newly created MNE.
“We listened, we agreed and we acted,” he added, explaining that Maple Network Exchange will give advertisers easy access to “premium” target audiences through trusted content.
The media-buying platform, built by Montreal-based District M, is a self-serve, bilingual platform that gives advertisers access to more than two billion impressions monthly on trusted news media sites, with a premium advertising reach of nearly 85 per cent of Canadians.
It promises advertisers “transparent reporting of spend and results” and “immediate and transparent measurement and reporting.” It is also “open access,” meaning additional news media publishers can participate.
Andrew Macleod, chief executive of Postmedia, said the platform is essential to counteract the dominance of foreign players such as Google and Facebook that are taking the lion’s share of the digital advertising pie in Canada.
He said publishers have long agreed on the need for a one-stop Canadian platform that would allow advertisers to “buy at scale” — as they can with the U.S. players — without having to go to each publisher individually.
“We, as an industry, need to find ways to come together,” Macleod said, adding that the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout “gave people an impetus” to act co-operatively.
The “first step” for the platform will be to approach governments and large corporations, he said. “We’re going to put a lot of weight behind this.”
In a separate effort Tuesday, watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting launched a marketing campaign targeting Facebook, accusing the social network of profiting from content it does not produce.
“Facebook profits by publishing content that does not belong to it,” said Daniel Bernhard, executive director of the group.
The broadcast advocacy group says this applies to news stories of all forms produced by others that appear in Facebook’s feeds, whether print, video, or audio.
The campaign features posters of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with the word WANTED that will be rolled out in major cities including Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Montreal.
Bernhard said some countries, such as Australia, have moved to require Facebook to pay news organizations for their content and recognize the “broad positive effects” of journalism for society, while Canada has not made dealing with the tech giants a priority.
Alex Kucharski, a spokesperson for Facebook in Canada, said officials would not be commenting on the campaign.
Amid criticism that aggregating news stories is hurting the economic models of traditional news outlets, tech giants Facebook and Google have created programs aimed at assisting or boosting news gathering.
For example, Facebook launched a $2.5-million Local News Accelerator program in Canada last year with participants including the Winnipeg Free Press, Glacier Media, and the London Free Press.
But a number of countries have been re-examining the impact tech giants are having on their domestic media industries. In Australia, for example, the government said in April that Google and Facebook would have to pay media outlets for news content, which is a big draw for the tech services. The government stepped in after the companies failed to negotiate a voluntary code to level the playing field.
In France, meanwhile, antitrust authorities stepped in last year to compel Google to enter negotiations with publishers to pay for news content on their site. Financial Post