Taken together, the explosion of brand marketing campaigns marks a significant moment in the industry.
For one, news publishers rarely engage in these kinds of efforts, largely because they are expensive and publishers generate plenty of awareness through their reporting. In recent years, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg have run a handful of brand campaigns each, but outside of that, they are few and far between.
But more critically, the widespread nature of this trend, combined with the uncanny coordination of its timing, suggests that these publishers have grasped a similar truth or been motivated by a shared concern.
So why have so many publishers opted to do something they have largely never done, and why have they chosen now to do it?
A response to dwindling discovery
The most obvious reason publishers are amping up their brand marketing efforts is because the ways in which consumers are engaging with the news has changed.
Referral traffic from social platforms has been in decline, and disruption posed by artificial intelligence to search engines has only compounded the issue. With fewer consumers now passively encountering news content, publishers need to increase their proactive efforts to reach them, according to Mark Silver, the senior director of strategy at media agency Code and Theory.
In particular, younger generations that have come of age after these shifts in traffic patterns are more likely to be unfamiliar with these publishers in the first place. Publishers can no longer rely on simply producing content and assuming it will find its way in front of these audiences.
MarketWatch, for instance, targeted Gen Z specifically with its marketing, employing a brat green font and cheeky copy to entice young audiences interested in financial literacy.
“The way that consumers make decisions is increasingly around brands,” Silver said. “We have to think of consumers as consumers of information—you can’t just expect them to know what you’re about. You have to tell them.”
Raising brand prominence amid AI disruption
AI figures into this equation in more ways than one.
In addition to disrupting search traffic, answer engines rely on publisher data to power their responses. This reality has led to the emergence of a marketplace dynamic, as AI firms look to strike deals with publishers to license their content.
Already, AI companies have struck deals with around a dozen premium publishers, including The New York Times, Condé Nast, Vox Media, Axel Springer, and more. But these are one-off arrangements, and no consistent framework has been established as to how smaller publishers will be compensated when their data is used to answer user queries.