People Inc.’s Jonathan Roberts on the untapped power of content

Cookies are out, context is in. People Inc.’s Jonathan Roberts joins The Big Impression to talk about how America’s biggest publisher is using AI to reinvent contextual advertising with real-time intent.

From Game of Thrones maps to the open web, Roberts believes content is king in the AI economy.

 

Episode Transcript

Please note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.

Damian Fowler (00:00):

I'm Damian Fowler, and welcome to this edition of The Big Impression. Today we're looking at how publishers are using AI to reinvent contextual advertising and why it's becoming an important and powerful alternative to identity-based targeting. My guest is Jonathan Roberts, chief Innovation Officer at People Inc. America's largest publisher, formerly known as Meredith. He's leading the charge with decipher an AI platform that helps advertisers reach audiences based on real time intent across all of People Inc. Site and the Open Web. We're going to break down how it works, what it means for advertisers in a privacy first world and why Jonathan's side hustle. Creating maps for Game of Thrones has something for teachers about building smarter ad tech. So let's get into it. One note, this episode was recorded before the company changed its name. After the Meredith merger, you had some challenges getting the business going again. What made you realize that sort of rethinking targeting with decipher could be the way to go?

Jonathan Roberts (01:17):

We had a really strong belief and always have had a strong belief in the power of great content and also great content that helps people do things. Notably and Meredith are both in the olden times, you would call them service journalism. They help people do things, they inspire people. It's not news, it's not sports. If you go to Better Homes and Gardens to understand how to refresh your living room for spring, you're going to go into purchase a lot of stuff for your living room. If you're planting seeds for a great garden, you're also going to buy garden furniture. If you're going to health.com, you're there because you're managing a condition. If you're going to all recipes, you're shopping for dinner. These are all places where the publisher and the content is a critical path on the purchase to doing something like an economically valuable something. And so putting these two businesses together to build the largest publisher in the US and one of the largest in the world was a real privilege. All combinations are hard. When we acquired Meredith, it is a big, big business. We became the largest print publisher overnight.

(02:23):

What we see now, because we've been growing strongly for many, many quarters, and that growth is continuing, we're public. You can see our numbers, the performance is there, the premium is there, and you can always sell anything once. The trick is will people renew when they come back? And now we're in a world where our advertising revenue, which is the majority of our digital revenue, is stable and growing, deeply reliable and just really large. And we underpin that with decipher. Decipher simply is a belief that what you're reading right now tells a lot more about who you are and what you are going to do than a cookie signal, which is two days late and not relevant. What you did yesterday is less relevant to what you need to do than what you're doing right now. And so using content as a real time predictive signal is very, very performant. It's a hundred percent addressable, right? Everyone's reading content when we target to, they're on our content and we guaranteed it would outperform cookies, and we run a huge amount of ad revenue and we've never had to pay it in a guarantee.

Damian Fowler (03:34):

It's interesting that you're talking about contextual, but you're talking about contextual in real time, which seems to be the difference. I mean, because some people hear contextually, they go, oh, well, that's what you used to do, place an ad next to a piece of content in the garden supplement or the lifestyle supplement, but this is different.

Jonathan Roberts (03:53):

Yes. Yeah. I mean, ensemble say it's 2001 called and once it's at Targeting strategy back, but all things are new ag