How Penske Media Corporation Is Growing Revenue by Monetizing Its Cookieless Inventory

Publishers have been flexing their first-party data strategies for some time. For Penske Media Corporation (PMC), home to names such as Variety, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard, its efforts are paying off.

PMC has seen a 46% increase in revenue from first-party data year-over-year, from 2021 to 2022, partly thanks to its investments in first-party data. The publisher has grown the number of advertiser clients it works with, and now all its requests for proposals include some element of first-party data targeting. It wouldn’t share specifics.

“We’ve been driving a lot more value and performance with our first-party data, which is benefitting advertisers in that they spend media dollars on PMC,” said Brett Goverman, head of data strategy, PMC.

More people are opting out of being tracked around the web by third-party cookies. Cookie demise and regulatory changes mean that roughly between 60% and 70% of the open web audience is unreachable to advertisers today, according to industry estimates. By understanding its audience cohorts more clearly, PMC was able to make those audiences addressable.

Building 1,500 segments

For the last four years, PMC has been working with data management platform Permutive to try and understand what makes its audience unique for advertisers.

The publisher began identifying its differentiated and unique datasets—such as contextual and behavioral data—across its content pillars like entertainment, music, culture, fashion and beauty, luxury, and parenting.

PMC outlined the most requested audience cohorts to build more in-depth segmentation. For example, PMC has a segment for music enthusiasts plus more in-depth segments for specific artists, genres, and decades, all of which help advertisers better understand and activate audiences. The publisher built 1,500 audience segments based on its 130 million unique users monthly, according to Goverman.

PMC’s data studio, called Atlas, aims to help marketers find the right audience to suit their objectives. According to the publisher, by using data enrichment advertisers can enhance their targeting strategy, using lookalike models that use Atlas Data Studio’s first-party data to extend audiences across its networks​.

This, plus its first-party contextual and behavior data, lets the publisher unlock the otherwise unaddressable parts of the web for marketers.

PMC’s previous DMP relied on third-party cookies, meaning that audiences were unaddressable due to cookie-blocked environments like Apple’s Safari browser.

Roughly 76% of the publisher’s deals with advertisers were direct in 2022, with 24% transacted programmatically, the publisher said. First-party data sets can be activated across private marketplace campaigns, open exchange, and programmatic guaranteed.

“The open market campaigns are particularly interesting,” said Goverman. “Now, we can ingest those open market signals and tie it to our first-party data cohorts and be more proactive when working with advertisers.”

PMC actively working on using its first-party data to move advertisers from buying PMC audiences in the open marketplace to more premium environments like PMP deals, according to Goverman.

Improving cost per acquisition

In 2022, 70% of the impressions PMC served used its first-party data. Campaigns that only used first-party data saw a five-fold increase in click-through rate.

The five-fold increase in CTR was calculated by categorizing PMC’s 2022 ad campaigns into three data buckets: first-party data, third-party data, and a combination of both. Then the publisher compared the first-party data bucket to that of the third-party data, finding that CTR was five times higher. It wouldn’t share more specific numbers.

In one such case, PMC also compared its cookieless inventory with that of an advertiser’s first-party data to compare results.

For one of its titles, a lifestyle publisher network with over 2,000 sites She Media, PMC’s first-party data campaign made the cost per acquisition five times more efficient than that of a clothing retailer brand’s first-party data, based on testing two separate campaigns to measure the effectiveness of the individual data sets. The campaign objective was to drive sales, and PMC found She Media’s first-party data consistently yielded a stronger CPA.

The publisher has now scaled back the number of segments its offers marketer to between 1,300 and 1,400.

“It’s a balance between ensuring we have all the information our teams need without creating a platform that gets choked up with too much data,” he added.