How Canadian Publisher La Presse Is Growing Ad Revenue With Data Clean Rooms

Since 2017, 130-year-old Canadian publisher La Presse has been digital only, a shift that’s led to a focus on growing online audiences. The publisher has grown from 4 million monthly unique visitors in 2019 to over 4.6 million as of July 2023, according to data by Comscore, which only has data from the last five years.

The investment in its first-party data has helped spur a 9% increase in total ad revenue in 2022, compared with the year prior, the publisher said. La Presse reported a net profit of $11 million for the completed financial year, adding $12 million to its 2022-established reserve fund of $25 million in the current year, according to its financial statement.

The publisher has secured renewals from strategic advertising partners, increased pricing within its ad product portfolio, and tapped into new ad partners across verticals, including banks, insurance companies, and travel brands, according to Geoffrey Bernard, vp of marketing, data and consumer insights at La Presse.

One element of its first-party strategy is data clean rooms, a privacy-focused way of matching clients’ audiences with publisher audiences, a method that attracts new advertisers.

“20% of the data clean room revenue comes from new advertisers,” said Bernard. “And 80% of incremental dollars comes from existing advertisers.” In 2016, a year prior to shutting its print shop, La Presse got 92% of its ad revenue from digital, per the World Association of News Publishers.

According to industry estimates, cookie demise and regulatory pushback have left nearly 70% of the open web audience unreachable. By getting to know its audience, La Presse has brought more addressability to that cohort. These efforts have allowed the publisher to grow its direct sales efforts outside of programmatic channels.

Higher conversion rate

VIA Rail, Canada’s version of Amtrack, is a long-time client of the digital newspaper and expanded its media buying strategy in 2019 and has more recently worked with the publisher’s data clean room.

VIA Rail amassed its first-party database, primarily email addresses, of 1.3 million people. However, the limited shelf life of third-party identifiers prompted VIA Rail to explore Optable’s data clean room solution. 

“In a cookieless world our efficiency of reaching our audience has become much harder,” said Philippe Normand, director, marketing, digital, and go-to-market, VIA Rail. “It was a no-brainer to look for other activations. This partnership with La Presse was one we thought was really interesting.”

In January, VIA Rail worked with La Presse to run a campaign re-targeting people who used its service once but did not return a second time in the last year on La Presse’s website. Using data clean room tech, it built look-alike audiences based on its database across the publisher’s footprint, targeting them with ads to book train tickets.

As a result, VIA Rail achieved a conversion rate, measured by an uptick of website visitors, of 0.42%, surpassing its benchmark by 125% when compared to other strategies at the same stage of the sales funnel, where the conversion rate was only 0.17%. This amounted to 10,916 qualified visits, the company said.

Identifying 70% of its readers

For the last five years, La Presse has invested in its first-party data cohorts by directly asking readers to voluntarily share information, such as their age range or summer travel plans in exchange for relevant content.

The publisher also used quizzes and contests to gather sociodemographic data from over 16,000 unique participants who consented to the ad-targeting opt-in.

People “provided information such as their age, gender, family income, and household composition,” said Bernard. “We were also able to use that information for marketing such as personalized notifications.” 

Consequently, La Presse was able to directly identify 70% of its 4.2 million reader base through first-party data, according to Bernard.

The publisher has been working with data clean room platform Optable since 2020 to make these audience cohorts available to advertisers in a privacy complaint manner.