One of the competitive advantages of the ad tech community is that they are positioned as the low cost medium with CPMs as low as $1.00 for ad impressions. To achieve this low price, these companies have automated the content publishing (via user generated) and the ad buying process as part of their business model. This is a huge competitive advantage for the ad tech sector versus traditional media organizational structures, who have editorial and sales teams and ad rates in the $10-50 CPMs range. At these rates, it sounds like they are dumping ad inventory in an oversaturated market to get market share.


This huge price advantage suggests further pain for publishers in the competition for on-line ad sales. As one president of a mid-size ad agency told me “ Business sucks, it’s tough to survive in the digital age”. This  observation offers the media industry little comfort in today’s environment. So what are we to do as an industry? We are told that we have to go digital to prosper, but it is tough to compete against the ad tech community as they eat up more share of the ad market each year. So let's take a page out of their playbook, instead of them taking one from ours like the packaging of content marketing and native ads that follows the rules of magazine publishing. Let's see where we can automate tasks.

One of the great benefits of technology is that it can automate repetitive tasks that can save on labour costs and increase staff productivity. I still remember the first wave of automation technologies in the publishing industry during the late 1980’s where typesetters, mechanical layout artists, stats cameras, digital retouching and film were are part of the production process and replaced with an Apple Macintosh computer with desktop publishing software and eventually direct to print technology.  Art Directors in this period of transition needed to update their skills as the coloured marker and pieces of paper was becoming obsolete in the creative process and replaced with a keyboard and mouse.

Technologies used to automate today are robot calls and email broadcasts for mass communication. On websites content is published through a CMS and the use of e-commerce check-outs for online sales. For operations there are CRMs, accounting, design, digital edition/app solutions, database and pre-press digital systems. As publishing operations we always strive to get leaner and there is an automation technology that can help with web content at no cost to publishers.

CNW has a content automation tool/widget that publishers can use as content on their site for free. ‘’The CNW News widgets helps provide current content at no cost for a blog or news site,’’ says Nadine Tousignant, Manager, Media and Audience Relations for CNW. The source content is from press releases and it appears as content on your website based on editorial and geographical criteria. The publisher provides a blank web page link on the site and CNW provides the code for the content automation that fills the page. The news feed will appear on the site as a special section with a five story teaser feed that can appear on the home page.

We tested this technology on the Masthead and the COPA sites and it works well as the widget enables the publisher to automate the process of reviewing press releases that may be relevant for your audience. In our case Masthead will have media news and on the COPA site we used digital news filters. For transparency with the reader  the content  is clearly identified as a news feed from CNW.  To read the content, they are not directed to the CNW website, but it appears on the host’s website with the graphic branding intact. All traffic on the web site generated by the content is tracked by the host web sites reporting system so content integration with current processes is seamless. All content that is distributed on the site is reported back to the issuer and helps raise the profile of the media brand as a secondary benefit.




This solution can help small publishers compete against the ad tech community’s competitive advantage of free content and will only take a few of hours for your web person to set it up. The time saving through this content automation concept surely has some benefits to consider. This type of content automation can only complement the information provided on the website as original and insightful—thought cannot be generated by an algorithm and that costs money. This looks like a win-win situation for publishers; they can get free content for their website and CNW’s clients get better press coverage in this two way relationship.

There will be a growing wave of marketing automation technologies that you will be pitched from companies promising the benefits of data management and integrating the data with your marketing efforts. They will claim that this will handle your leads and sales better versus what you are doing now. The system will monitor all reader entry points like social media, email and web site plus customer data that is processed by an analytics algorithm. The algorithm creates a personalized customer profile that will help improve customer service and lead nurturing at each stage of the sales cycle. Geez this sound like a modern circulation plan, maybe they took this idea from our playbook too.