2018 Reports

The Future of Advertising and Publishing

Watson, Sara M.; Bell, Emily J.; Rashidian, Nushin; Hartstone, Abigail

The rise of digital media has fundamentally changed the relationship between marketers and publishers. As audiences increasingly move toward mobile consumption, publishers have had to adapt their business models based on new standards set by social media platforms and advertisers. They are now in competition with large tech companies to reach, and to own, the same audiences. The adtech ecosystem, which was designed by platforms and advertisers to capitalize on the growing amount of data retained about readers, has produced a mess of publishers’ main monetization strategies—leaving the entire space in dire need of evaluation and experimentation.

On October 20, 2017, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, the Digital Initiative at Harvard Business School, and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School hosted a Policy Exchange Forum (PEF) and public conference to explore these shifts in “The Future of Advertising and Publishing.”

The PEF took place in the morning and comprised a closed discussion (by invitation only) built around two major questions: What is the future of the relationship between publishers and advertisers? More specifically, how can platforms, news publishers, and advertisers ensure a robust future for news publishers by shaping the quality of advertising?