[00:00:01] Norm Johnston: The brand safety thing is particularly annoying. We’ve just done a test in the UK with a company called illuma. We did an A/B test of illuma versus one of the main solutions in the market right now. The results were staggering. I mean, just unbelievable. I’d say about 54% of the articles that got blocked were unequivocally brand safe.
[00:00:25] Intro: Welcome to Time for a Reset, the marketing podcast that gets behind the thinking of the industry’s sharpest leaders shaping the world’s most iconic brands. We ask the big questions: What does it take to drive real change? How do you stay ahead when the rules keep evolving? From shifting consumer expectations to marketing’s seat in the boardroom, every episode dives into what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next. Expect smart conversations, real-world insights, and a bold perspective on modern marketing leadership. Let’s hit reset and turn strategy into action. Now, into the conversation.
[00:00:59] Fiona Davis: Welcome to Time for a Reset. I’m your host for today, Fiona from Overline. And with me, I have the wonderful Norm Johnston from News Corp. Hi, Norm. Lovely to have you on.
[00:01:08] Norm Johnston: Thanks, Fiona. Great to be here. Looking forward to this.
[00:01:11] Fiona Davis: So, just by way of background to our listeners, Norm’s been in the industry for quite some time and has a pretty storied career. So, he’s worked across the agency side. He’d been at Publicis, joined Mindshare as the Global Chief Digital Officer, then went into the strategy side of the house, which is an enormous brand and I imagine got you quite a bit of exposure globally to different types of brands and clients. Norm then went on to be the CEO at Unruly, working in the premium video space. You then moved on to News Corp, where you’ve been for quite some time, I believe. Norm has worked all over the world with them, so being with The Times and Wall Street Journal in New York. Norm, maybe if you want to give us a bit of background to the listeners on what you’re doing now at News Corp.
[00:01:51] Norm Johnston: Yeah. Thanks, Fiona. Great to be here. It’s been great. It’s been five years at News Corp. It’s such a big, marvelous company. There’s never a dull day; it’s always something different. We have so many different assets, ranging from Realtor.com, a real estate business, HarperCollins, the book publisher, you mentioned The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, The New York Post, The Australian, news.com.au. We’ve got TalkSport, Virgin Radio. My job is the external end and internal. So, externally, when we have agencies or global advertisers that have a particular opportunity—or it could be the World Cup or a particular problem—it is to help them really configure a solution out of all those wonderful assets. And then internally, to help the company think about important things like AI and data and video and where we should go with the future of advertising.
[00:02:40] Fiona Davis: It’s an interesting time to be in publishing right now, Norm, isn’t it? Especially in a world where there’s a lot of user-generated content, a lot of social media content, where news is pretty important in this day and age. So, we’re going to talk to you a little bit today about brand safety in a news world where it’s become more important than ever, I would say. So, if you were going to hit the reset button in the industry, you’d sort of said to us it was around brand safety. Anything else that you would hit the reset on in the news space today?
[00:03:10] Norm Johnston: It’s great to be part of a news organization because I think it’s incredibly important for society. So, when I go into work every day, I feel like I’m fighting for journalism and independent reporting and, to a certain extent, the future of democracy. So, it’s good to come in with a real passion and a reason for going to work. And, it’s very much focused, and we’ll get into the brand safety stuff, but just with AI and getting our arms around the world of Gen AI and what’s happening in that space, which is moving so fast, evolving so quickly. And with it, there are some great opportunities, but also some challenges, not the least being: how do we make sure that we have provenance and we get compensated for the value of the journalism and the content that we create, which historically has not always happened online? And, hence, if you read the news, you’ll know that we have a lawsuit with Perplexity, but we’re also having great conversations and have done a partnership with OpenAI and others. So, we feel very strongly about that. But there are also pretty significant challenges with things like Google Overviews and the changes in consumer behavior, which most people probably listening to this podcast have experienced. Once you’ve used an overview, it’s kind of hard to go back to regular search because, in most cases, you get your answer pretty succinctly through it. So, the whole concept of Google Zero and declining traffic—if you look at the reports online, these are publicly available reports—the traffic declines have been pretty significant for the news industry, ranging from 7% to 30% declines in traffic. So, we’re trying to navigate that whole world with answer engine optimization, understanding the dynamics and I think Google would also be the first to admit that they’re also trying to work it out as well. This is very new technology, and they’re very conscious, obviously, of the impact that has on publishers, the companies. So, again, I think they’re taking it seriously. I suspect that’s going to evolve even more as answer engines become action engines, where, in a sense, you don’t even have to query something or prompt for an answer. AI will just take actions for you. So, it’s good. I think it’s even more interesting in the coming years, but it’s probably coming months at the pace things are moving right now.
[00:05:20] Fiona Davis: Yeah, absolutely. And I think lots of people often forget that news isn’t free, and it takes a lot of money to produce quality content and fact-check and have it in the world. And AI engines need that content to power itself in the first place, so there’s got to be a quid pro quo there at some point for the industry to last.
[00:05:38] Norm Johnston: That’s our belief, and, unfortunately, there are companies like OpenAI that agree with that and others, unfortunately, like Perplexity, that don’t. Hopefully, more will agree than disagree over time. But the brand safety thing is particularly annoying, and we’re doing quite a bit of work around that. And I’m not sure, in most cases, people are educated enough on what’s happening in that world. And, I’ll give you one example. We’ve just done a test in the UK with a company called illuma, which is, again, AI. So, this is an opportunity to use AI and have a better contextual understanding of the semantics in an article. And we compared,we did an A/B test of illuma versus one of the main solutions in the market right now, one of the big scale players. I won’t get into the name. And the results were staggering. Just unbelievable. I’d say about 50%, I think it’s 54% of the articles that got blocked,and once an article gets blocked, the value goes down significantly CPM-wise. It was about 54%. Over 50% of what was being blocked was unequivocally brand safe. We had an article in The Times newspaper around winemaking in the days of Troy, about 1,500 BC, I think, and it got blocked for drugs, which is not good for us because it’s a very good piece of journalism.
[00:06:56] Fiona Davis: Yeah.
[00:06:56] Norm Johnston: Not good for readers, probably some wine-drinking history fans, and not good for advertisers who would probably want to target some of those people. So, the solutions that are in the marketplace right now do not work. We have the statistical data to suggest that. And I don’t think they’re bad people, but they’re sitting on technology that’s not doing any favors to advertisers, consumers, and journalists.
[00:07:17] Fiona Davis: Yeah, well, and it’s effectively started funneling more and more media to social media platforms, which are not exactly the most brand-safe environments in this day and age in themselves. So, yeah, the irony.
[00:07:29] Norm Johnston: The way you need to think about it is that within newspapers, we’re legally held accountable for what we publish. It’s editorially controlled. And you have these social environments that are, in many cases, a free-for-all. And in the worst-case scenario, you’re not only advertising against something that may be actually really inappropriate, you’re also maybe funding the person that’s creating that content. So, it’s a bit of a double impact there. But we know from looking at these solutions that they will hold newspapers’ editorial control to a higher level of accountability than they will to the 44,000 sites that get bought on average, according to the ANA, on any particular deal. It’s a huge long-tail website. You have this irony that a porn site may be rated as more brand safe because it’s not being validated than a news site. All this goes back to what you were saying around democracy and the importance of independent journalism. And we know from Northwestern University, for example, my alma mater, so I had to get that in there, we’ve done a big research on news deserts. Seven percent of local communities in the US have no local news coverage anymore, and there’s a direct causation between that and a decline in voting, a decline in accountability, and a rise in governmental crime. So, it’s a real issue. And back to your point of people getting content off of TikTok and some of these other environments that is misinformation. And in the UK, the Open Society Foundation did a research, and a third of young Brits believe that a dictatorship may be a good idea. A third of Americans don’t believe the Holocaust could happen. And so, these are people that may be getting information off of some of these environments that is obviously inaccurate and more potentially dangerous.
[00:09:11] Fiona Davis: Dangerous. So, Norm, what can some of the brands do to help? Because, clearly, you hear a lot of brands talking about this and wanting to invest in good quality journalism, good quality sites to make sure that their brands are aligned both with their own brand values, but also with what is resonating in society at the time. How can they get more involved in the actual issue of brand safety? Because there are definitely people out there that are making comments about, “Why is so much of the journalism on known operated sites by editorial teams being blocked? Why can’t I get my hands on it?” And are normally going directly to the publisher to try and do some level of deals, but then don’t really understand at the back end of that, there’s a lot of quality content being blocked. How can they get involved to unstick some of this inventory that’s just sitting there waiting to be bought?
[00:09:58] Norm Johnston: There are some companies that have really leaned into this. Stagwell has done a really good job of doing a lot of research around this area. Some of the other agencies, including yours, have been very supportive as well. I think it’s an education piece. I don’t think they realize this is actually happening. I think moving away from open market long-tail buying into PMPs and creating a curated set of inventory that they know they can trust.Some of the Stagwell research has been really good because it suggests that people… I think the great fear is if you advertise next to, let say, an article around Russia-Ukraine, which, by the way, we have journalists on the ground reporting there. I think most people want to know what’s going on, but people don’t make an association between an ad being next to that content and somehow the brand supporting a war. And Stagwell did some very interesting A/B research on that across a whole range of brand metrics of ads next to that content versus more innocuous content, and the numbers were the same. There was absolutely no material difference at all. So, I think it’s that. And I think it’s also just an understanding that it’s not just about being good for democracy; it actually works. If you look at any of the research out there, you get incremental reach. So, about 25% of the US population are news junkies. They’re highly educated. They have a greater propensity to spend. Average incomes over $100K a year in US dollars. College educated. Of that 25%, about 14% of them only watch news. So, when I hear Mark Pritchard at P&G talking about 100% reach with their media plans, well, if you don’t advertise on news, you’re automatically losing 11% of the population. And we’ve got loads of statistics on engagement rates being higher, dwell time being higher. I mean, they’re very engaged audiences in news environments, so it works. Incremental benefits in terms of incremental reach, for example, that 11% number I gave you. And it also happens to be very good for society. So, it’s an education on those things and getting the more senior-level marketers fully engaged and committed to doing something about it.
[00:12:01] Fiona Davis: Yeah. So, how has your relationship with advertisers kind of evolved in the last couple of years? You talked a little bit about P&G as a good example of people that want to engage in direct publisher relationships. What’s the typical expectation now from a brand buyer with regards to, like, innovation, insights, and measurement? Are you seeing a greater demand now for more integrated programs where they’re talking to you about data as well as inventory? Where’s that headed?
[00:12:28] Norm Johnston: There’s a real bifurcation happening, I think, in the industry at the moment. And at both ends of that barbell, I think there are some really interesting things happening. I think the one end is agentic. It’s automated. It’s around the value of your data. It’s around proving the metrics and measurability. That’s moving quite fast, and we’re having a lot of conversations with the buyers around what that new world looks like and how do we become interoperable into the new world. The value of your data, I think, is really important. We happen to sit on a lot of data. We have 250 million readers worldwide, users worldwide, that are addressable. And as I said before, with the different assets we have, we’ve got some pretty unique datasets. So, Realtor.com, for example, we have a lot of movers. So, we know exactly the size of the house someone’s looking at, whether it’s got an EV port, the size of the lawn or the garden they have, and which kind of lawnmower. And we can leverage that data off our graph to target pretty much anywhere across our properties. So, I think there’s a lot happening on that end of the barbell, which would be AI-to-AI. I actually don’t think it’s going to be getting plans bought over beers; I think it’s going to be plans bought by bots. So, it will be a big change in terms of people and talent and structure and on the ad tech side of what we’re going to need to optimize ourselves within those environments. The other end, I think, is creativity. I talked about action engines before, and as the AIs increasingly take action based on your personal LLM, your PLM (personal language model), if you will, your data. How do you cut through that? If you’re a new brand or a competitive brand or a brand that someone hasn’t used before, trying to get in front of people and get them to notice. So, when I was at Cannes this past year, I looked around. I thought, 40% of the people here are not going to have a job next year. But I think this 40% will get replaced by more creativity, more influencers, more people that are able to come up with really imaginative ideas, which is different than you see a lot with AI. Amazon just had a big announcement around their creative studio and automating creative ads, and I think there’ll be a ton of that on the agentic side of just—I call it GCO, Generative Creative Optimization, versus DCO because it’s not an asset library—it’s creating stuff on the fly. But on the other end of the barbell, you know, the people with killer ideas. So, we’re seeing a demand. Interestingly, our print business is doing well. Tactile experiences. Luxury clients love our cover wraps. I still get people calling for the KISS cover wrap for The New York Post, which was a collector’s item, KISS the band.
[00:15:00] Fiona Davis: Yeah.
[00:15:00] Norm Johnston: Branded content—we just did a great piece for Unilever Personal Care for Rexona, which was polymorphic and multimodal. So, to your point, it was… they integrate across podcast, video, text. I think with AI, the ability to create more of those assets once the brilliant idea is developed will be a lot more cost-effective and easier. So, our branded content business is doing well. And then events. We’ve got a huge events business. I mean, The Wall Street Journal has great events. They’ve got their first tech live event and a lot coming up really soon. So, the other end of the barbell, I think, will also be incredibly important, and having the right kind of creative talent there, I think, also will be key. The messy middle is absolutely the part that disappears.
[00:15:42] Fiona Davis: Disappears. Yeah. Well, I was going to ask you. You kind of touched on all of the elements we wanted to talk about around the difference between access to your content by LLMs and that AI-to-AI. But, also, the one thing I was going to ask you about was the e-commerce side of it. So, obviously, you touched a little bit on Realtor.com, but how much is that playing into your strategy now? Because you’ve got retailers also running their own retail media networks and wanting to do upfront buys with publishers to make sure that their data is matching some of the content that you produce. So, are you finding that they’re engaging a lot more as well?
[00:16:16] Norm Johnston: Yeah. I don’t think it’s binary. So, we actually have conversations with a couple of the specialized media networks. I think retail would be one good example of that, where I think it could be a match made in heaven for a lot of advertisers. And it brings in potential new demand sources that we may not have had before. Health media networks, financial media networks, travel media networks. So, there are some really interesting opportunities there. And then within our own owned and operated sites, we’ve been doing affiliates for quite a long time, and we obviously have the buy side from The Wall Street Journal which is launched. And we know from the data that we have that people go to our sites to research products. We have a huge influence that I don’t think always gets attributed because often the conversion will happen later on the clickstream. So, for us, that’s a big opportunity. We’ve done some really interesting work, for example, with a company called Vudu around shoppable video and actually selling Moët champagne through video ads. So, the one danger I remind people is that starting to compare us to an Amazon or Walmart, I think, is a bit dangerous. From my own personal experience, I will often research things but still go to Amazon because I’ve got Prime, and I will get it immediately the next day. So, I don’t think we should kind of do a direct A/B comparison on the bottom end of the funnel, and we should just make sure people keep in mind that we actually are a full-funnel player. We have such a tremendous important role to play at the very top all the way through, but adding that little extra bit at the end, which is good for our users. If they want to buy something, that’s great. Why not facilitate that? And I do think the one thing with AI is the performant nature of ad units. I think people are just going to expect more chatbots, if you will, but on steroids. So, this idea of a synchronous conversation within a chatbot that you can book a test drive on a car in the advertising unit itself, or you can get a sample of something, or you can buy something simply by typing into the ad unit. So, I think not only on the targeting capability and the metrics, but also just the actual ad units themselves, I think, will be a lot more performant moving forward.
[00:18:13] Fiona Davis: Yeah. Super interesting times, I think, Norm, for the whole industry, actually, and kind of feels like we’re coming full circle back to where actual published journalism is starting to come back into the fold now, and people are prepared to pay for what they know is good. But, also, it’s just easy to buy now from so many different sources, and I think retail is driving a lot of that early conversation because they can do closed-loop measurement, but they don’t have necessarily great upper-funnel data across the board. So, they’re kind of leaning into that, which makes it for interesting times. I wanted to ask you a more broad question, Norm, about sort of looking back on the key moments that shaped your career. What unexpected challenges or insights have shaped the way you approach marketing now?
[00:18:57] Norm Johnston: I mean, I’ve been doing this since the beginning of digital, so really back in ’95, I joined a couple of months after the guys that hired me put the first banner on one. And one is that when you push innovation, it’s hard. It’s not easy. You’re really… so, I’ve done a lot of things. “Why am I doing this? Things don’t always work out.” But those are the things you’re proudest of, really. The ’96 Olympics, we did live streaming for the first time and online games, and we had all sorts of things going on, including a bomb that went off in the middle of the Olympics. But I always encourage people to push the boundaries, but expect that it’s not going to be easy, but you’ll look back in hindsight and think, “That was great.” I always think clarity in what you’re trying to do is really important, particularly when it’s innovation. Really trying to understand, are you expecting to deliver financial results, or are you just trying to learn something? Trying to get to the heart of that early onset expectations. Because I’ve seen all these pipe dreams over the years of things coming and going, and sometimes it takes a couple of times before they really hit. Obviously, the metaverse, when that came around, I thought, “I’m not certain.” I had three boys, so I can always look at them and think, “Okay. Are they using any of the tech?” And if they’re not, I’m like, “Yeah. I’m not sure this is the right cycle.” And, obviously, with Apple Vision coming along, we’re not quite there yet, but at some point, it will hit. So, that’s an area I think if you’re going to explore that, go in with eyes wide open that maybe that’s just learning and trying to understand what that’s going to look like versus actually trying to deliver results of some sort. Other cases, it may be the opposite. And I do think also asking the right questions, not just about objectives, being really hard on stress testing things. And I always tell people, too, that you and I could come up with about five acronyms right now that no one’s ever heard of.
[00:20:38] Fiona Davis: Yeah.
[00:20:39] Norm Johnston: And I’ve been around long enough. I sit in a room, and some people start throwing out acronyms. And I’ll say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What does it mean?” And I’d say, about 50% of the time, the person I ask doesn’t know what it means either, but they just heard it somewhere. So, I think you have to be confident enough just to say that you don’t know what that is. You have to explain it to me or break that down a little bit. And that just comes with having done it for so long, but don’t sit in a room if you don’t understand it and just sit there, and you have to lean in or Google it quickly on the side, maybe.
[00:21:09] Fiona Davis: Exactly. Now you can actually sit there and look it up yourself while the person’s talking. Yeah. Exactly. It’s funny you mentioned that, though, because back when I was working for CBS on the broadcast side, I remember the one learning I took away is that if you’re going to truly innovate, there’s a good chance things are going to go sideways. Right? And you just have to roll with it. So, actually, when they first started streaming the Super Bowl, and they’ve been doing Super Bowl for years, right? First started streaming, and nobody thought it was going to take off the way that it did. The first go-round, we maxed out the whole of the Akamai edge computing capability and crashed it within the first, I think it was, half an hour of running the Super Bowl because nobody realized what the demand for it was going to be. And all of a sudden, we were like, “Oh, God. We probably need to work with the company to expand what their capabilities are for the next go-round.” So, it was that sort of learning on the fly, but, I mean, look at it now. Everyone streams it.
[00:22:02] Norm Johnston: Yeah. Every time we launched a website, people would celebrate. I’m like, “Actually, now the hard work begins,” because I’m telling you, over the next week or two, all the problems are going to come out. We did the first viral campaign for Unilever in the UK years ago for Axe Licks deodorant, and the client called up. He’s like, “But no one in Unilever can see this ad,” and the firewall was blocking it. I’m like, “Oh, my God! You can’t…”
[00:22:24] Fiona Davis: You can’t make this stuff up,
[00:22:25] Norm Johnston: can you? It’s just something. So, just brace yourself for it. Set expectations with the client, all that kind of stuff.
[00:22:32] Fiona Davis: Take screenshots of your ads.
[00:22:34] Norm Johnston: Yes, that it really is appearing. I used to get clients who were like, “When I search my brand, why are the paid ads not coming up?” Like, “Because we don’t want to serve paid ads to you, the client. It’s a waste of money.” Like, “Oh, yeah.”
[00:22:48] Fiona Davis: That’s a good point. Yeah. So, Norm, I was going to leave you with a couple of broader questions about marketing generally. What do you think the most important attributes are for a senior marketer of the future?
[00:23:00] Norm Johnston: It’s kind of riffing on that last bit that we were talking about, which is: Keep your knowledge curve ahead of your action curve. And it’s a real discipline, and it’s not easy because there’s so much happening. But I do think, don’t read about OpenAI, go use it. Don’t read about TikTok, get on TikTok, which is bewildering, and, also, obviously, the algorithm sucks you in. But I think you have to really take the time to learn about these things, read up on them, and, more importantly, experience them to really kind of understand exactly what’s going on. And that takes a discipline because we’re all super busy, and long airplane trips are wonderful for me because I take all my reading. I will go through all my reports religiously. And I’ve always done that, and I do think when I see people—some people don’t do that—they can talk a bit about it, but they don’t really quite understand exactly what’s going on. And the difference in knowledge curve and action curve is, obviously, don’t go rush out and do stuff all the time just because somebody says it’s the next big thing. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for you. Have a strong think about whether indeed you want to take action. If you do take action, why precisely are you doing that? Again, going back, is it learning? Is it impact? What are you going to get out of it? So, that’s what I would say. And I think with AI, it’s more important than ever right now.
[00:24:12] Fiona Davis: A hundred percent. I mean, we talk to all of our clients about, “You just got to get your hands dirty,” because you’re never going to really understand the full capability of it unless you’ve played around with it yourself. And the best way to learn is to try it and try and make sure that you’re doing it in a safe environment so that you can see what you do like about it, what you don’t like about it, and how it will apply in your environment. So, to your point, there’s no one-size-fits-all. You can’t just take someone else’s idea, plug it in, and hope for the best that it’s going to work for you. You need some kind of thought and intent behind it.And then just being vulnerable for a minute, Norm, what are the things you’re working on yourself to continuously improve? Obviously, you’ve adapted through much change over the years. So, what are you trying to change about how you’re doing things today to be a better marketer?
[00:24:54] Norm Johnston: Just constantly focusing on your craft. I see people that get into marketing and advertising sometimes—I’m generalizing—but it’s a craft. It’s like being an engineer. And I always tell people, like, “Do you want to be a black belt?” And if you do, you have to be a religious reader of marketing books. And I often see people in advertising, but they’re not reading any marketing books. I’m like, “Well, how can you be really good at your craft?”So, for me, it’s constantly trying to learn and even taking the time to go to a conference. I go to these conferences, and I would say, yes, there’s a lot of stuff that I’ve heard before and things you know already. But if you really focus on trying to learn something new, you will. You will walk away from that conference with something you think, “Okay. That’s interesting. I haven’t seen it that way before.” But pick up marketing books, reading Von Clausewitz at the moment, which is a great fresh general and the whole approach to strategy being much more of a fluid thing. I’ve written a book, if anybody wants to read that, Adaptive Marketing, available on Amazon.
[00:25:49] Fiona Davis: Give it a plug, Norm.
[00:25:50] Norm Johnston: Get it on eBay for, like, five cents. The signed versions are worth even less. If you really want them, get in touch. I can send one from my treasure trove of books I’ve sold out. But, yeah, it’s just constantly learning, I think, is important.
[00:26:03] Fiona Davis: Yeah. No, I agree. I’m a strong believer, and you’re never too old to learn stuff. I’m reading stuff all the time and doing courses, go to conferences, trying to pick up as much as I can on the way, so I 100% agree with that. Well, Norm, thank you so much for your time today. This has been fantastic. Really great to hear more about the other side of the fence. We’re normally talking to brand marketers and retailers, so it’s good to get the perspective of a publisher in this scenario, which is fantastic. Thanks for coming on.
[00:26:27] Norm Johnston: Thanks so much, Fiona. Thank you. Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
[00:26:30] Fiona Davis: Appreciate it.
[00:26:32] Outro: Thanks for listening to Time for a Reset. If you got something out of today’s episode, share it with a colleague or drop us a review. For more sharp thinking and practical tools to help you lead modern marketing, follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, hit the reset button and get change over the line.
