‘We’re encouraged’: NewsPassID passes its pilot phase, seeks further scale

The biggest lift, unsurprisingly, came in cookieless environments including Safari and AMP, where the NewsPassID impressions sold at CPMs 90% higher than control ones. In environments where cookies are still accepted, the NewsPassID impressions were 45% more valuable, the LMC found. The test also suggested that the inventory carrying the NewsPassID was sold in higher volumes, up to 25% more, compared to inventory from the same publishers that did not carry it.

NewsPassID still faces significant hurdles on the road to becoming a preferred identifier for local news publishers, including scaled implementation and competition from vendors. But as a first step forward for a group of publishers that has typically struggled to keep up with digital evolutions, “we’re encouraged,” said Fran Wills, the LMC’s CEO.

The LMC decided to build NewsPassID in part because its leadership wanted to avoid replicating the current dynamic of programmatic advertising, in which ad buyers have used behavioral targeting to disintermediate publishers from their audiences.

A working group convened by a separate LMC initiative, NewsNext, tested out several existing third-party identifiers and decided none of them delivered enough value to justify giving up control of their audience data; Wills described the identifiers the LMC tested as “the usual suspects” but would not provide a specific list, saying the organization conducted its tests under Chatham House rules.

Above and beyond attaching the ID to inventory, the LMC also sought to control how that inventory made its way to market; it worked with the Ozone Project, a publisher advertising alliance that saw its own successes last year, to reduce the number of demand sources that saw the NewsPassID inventory, focusing on making it available to demand sources that had bought from those publishers in the past, rather than maximizing the number of bidders.

That kind of approach, while not typical today, is emblematic of a broader shift within programmatic advertising, explained Rob Weatherhead, a programmatic and digital media consultant.

​​”The traditional view is, ‘We’ll bring as much demand to supply as possible to drive up the auction,’” Weatherhead said. “But the direction everything’s sailing in is quality over quantity, and that applies at all points of the [programmatic] supply chain.”

Those shifts still presume some requisite scale, however, and right now NewsPassID is still a ways away from having the kind of scale that advertisers would find attractive. While LMC’s membership reaches a large slice of U.S. internet users — over 192 million, according to Comscore — that audience is spread out across a large group, and implementing NewsPassID across the entire membership will be a significant undertaking. While the pilot program’s four participants have the development resources and expertise necessary to conduct these kinds of tests, many of LMC’s members are much smaller and much less technologically sophisticated.

“We’re trying to set realistic expectations,” Wills said. “If we can get it done in the next two years, we’ll feel like we’ve accomplished our objective.”

As it continues to add publishers, the LMC will also be looking to expand the kinds of inventory NewsPassID supports. It is actively exploring ways to incorporate LMC members’ connected TV inventory, partly to provide more scale to local publishers and partly to solve for the needs of the large national advertisers that the identifier and network are intended to attract.

“As we think about bundling curated marketplaces, we can’t do it without a CTV offering,” said Scott Cunningham, a consultant and the author of Thursday’s report on NewsPassID’s progress. “At IAB ALM [this week], everyone is talking about cross-device measurement. From a measurement and attribution perspective, marketers want to see how things happen [across surfaces].”

Adding those experiences should make NewsPassID significantly more attractive to advertisers — provided it scales. “[Local news publishers] can certainly benefit from it,” said Weatherhead. “If they can build something that’s got some scale.”