Digital advertising is a mess - meet 23 industry insiders working on high-profile efforts to fix it

Digital advertising is rife with problems, and marketers are increasingly looking for an independent firm to make sense of constant changes to publishers, advertisers, and tech companies. Enter the IAB Tech Lab, which was spun off from the Interactive Advertising Bureau four years ago to tackle issues like fraud, viewability, and privacy.

Buchheim is a digital-ad veteran, having worked at Yahoo and Microsoft before joining the IAB in 2016. He leads the organization's 30 working groups to develop initiatives aimed at reducing friction between publishers, ad-tech firms, and advertisers.

"When you think about how quickly this industry has grown and how many people have innovated, it's grown up very quickly," Buchheim said. "At some point, it gets to be too much, and you have too many specialized vendors serving single-purpose needs. We haven't paid enough attention to the consumer along the way."

Most recently, he's worked to help publishers prepare for the EU's sprawling General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Buchheim spearheaded a framework that helps publishers collect explicit permission from consumers and avoid potential fees from the regulation.

Buchheim has also worked to create a working group specific to examining blockchain's potential effects on supply-chain transparency and contracts. He's also involved with ads.txt, an effort for publishers that entails placing a piece of code into websites to keep unauthorized ad-tech vendors from selling their inventory.

Ask any ad exec to talk about cleaning up digital advertising, and Marc Pritchard's name is sure to come up. The chief brand officer for Procter & Gamble has spent the past few years threatening to yank his ad dollars from agencies and tech companies unless they fix problems such as nontransparent contracts and third-party measurement not verified by industry watchdog group the Media Rating Council (MRC).

Behind the scenes at P&G is an army focused on following through on Pritchard's mandate, including Kanishka Das, an analytics and insights leader for the company's global e-business, media, and sales-innovation team.

Specifically, his team is zeroed in on developing a structure across 70 markets that tracks the effectiveness of each media dollar verified by MRC's standards. As a result, P&G says that almost all its media spend is measured by third-party companies.

Now that the structure is in place, "one key area will be our ability to behaviorally understand shifting media consumption, how attention is fragmenting and can be re-aggregated and re-utilized so that consumers can discover and access our brands in a way that is useful for them," Das said.

Meanwhile, Christine Lavash, P&G's analytics and insights senior manager for global digital brand building, is focused on ensuring that all the packaged-goods giant's ads meet MRC's viewability guidelines, which requires that 50% of a display ad to be in view on a screen for one second (two seconds for video ads) before an advertiser is charged.

"Now that we have the measurement and are driving out the waste, the next step is to go beyond viewability by looking at things like the context in which the consumer's viewing the ad, how big the ad is relative to the screen, how much clutter there is, and so on," Lavash said.

Del Greco started her career as a sales assistant at Condé Nast in 2002, long before issues such as fraud or the rise of the Facebook-Google duopoly plagued advertisers.

After working at Google and Adelphic Mobile, she founded her own consulting firm, in 2016, called Del Greco Solutions, which specializes in helping ad-tech companies develop strategies and business models and supporting firms working through acquisitions and deals.

Her clients include agencies, investors, and media companies, and she also works with McKinsey as an adviser to its consumer tech and media practice. For example, Del Greco said she recently dug into a project looking at how contracts involving ad-tech companies are worded to explain how data is charged and used. Her goal is explain ad tech to marketers the way she'd explain it to her grandmother.

"There's definitely nothing sexy about it, but I went from media sales, which is about having great presentation skills, into tech, where you knew more and had to make people understand it," she said.

So why would a brand choose to work with a small consulting firm instead of an agency?

Del Greco's company is part of a larger industry trend in which brands are looking to multiple agencies and brokers to better understand data and technology. Specifically, Del Greco points to the Association of National Advertising's bombshell K2 report that was published two years ago as evidence that "there's a need to have an honest broker" among marketers. The report claimed that nontransparent business practices such as collecting cash rebates from clients was "pervasive" across agencies.

Agencies "lost that position of trust," Del Greco said. "Some bad actors ruined it for everyone, and we're still feeling it today. There's a need to have an honest broker."

Eadie joined Adobe in 2016 from the acquisition of TubeMogul and has been part of a fair share of efforts to keep brands from getting ripped off over the years.

Back in 2012, TubeMogul launched a site called fakepreroll.com that linked to video ads jammed into ad formats that displayed below the fold on websites so that they were only viewable to people who scrolled down and racked up boatloads of unseen impressions. The firm has also sussed out bots and fraud to examine nonhuman traffic.

Under Adobe, Eadie is working on efforts around transparency and disclosing how much money companies make from their services as part of the "ad-tech tax." Adobe also has a partnership with AppNexus designed to expose the fees collected from the publisher side of programmatic advertising that are charged to agencies and brands.

Next up, Adobe wants to tackle fraud within mobile-connected TV, audio, and other "emerging" channels.

"The adoption of programmatic is now mainstream, so that means there are more dollars at stake, and there's potentially more activity and opportunity for the nefarious actors to take advantage," Eadie said. "Anything that is blocking the appropriate investing of those dollars gets elevated up to the VP or media, the CMO or the CFO — I think it is a much more conspicuous challenge that all the senior leadership are putting a lot of focus on."

Knotch wants to arm chief marketing officers with data on how effective their ad campaigns are as an alternative to agencies and tech companies that often spin their own data for marketers and "get to tell their own story," according to CEO and founder Gansca.

"Third-party data is messy and hard to trust," she said. "People are used to making money in a certain way and transparency isn't always the best thing for everyone's [interests]."

Gansca works with brands such as Capital One, AT&T, and Ford to act as an independent data collector to crunch stats about branded content. Knotch's tools dig into consumer sentiment about branded content through surveys and provides analysis into what other brands are buying sponsored content through publishers like The New York Times and Popsugar.

Later this fall, Knotch said it would unveil a tool that allows marketers to see branded-content stats specific to individual publishers and also view a list of advertisers that the publisher has worked with, which, in theory, will help brands structure deals with publishers.

"It brings more transparency to that process so that these decisions become more data-driven," Gansca said.

Digital ad veteran Gombert is betting big on blockchain after logging gigs at the IAB, Condé Nast, Google, and Omnicom Media Group.

Gombert is the global CRO of MetaX, a blockchain startup that lets consumers and marketers buy tokens that can be used to essentially give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on which publications should be allowed to be served ads. Those publishers are then added to the adChain registry, which is billed as a universal list of publications safe for all brands. And because it's written in the blockchain, the list cannot be tampered with.

According to Gombert, one of the most revealing uses of the tokens happened when users challenged The New York Times and ultimately voted the "newspaper of record" out of the registry.

"Advertisers really like the fact that they can talk to consumers," she said. "It gives them a different perspective on inventory. It becomes more personal."

As opposed to making money from brands and tech vendors, MetaX's revenue model "is open source and we function based on revenue from token value and applications that we build," she said.

It's no surprise that pop-up ads and autoplay video ads annoy consumers, but they do make money for publishers. Ingis' work with the Coalition for Better Ads is pushing publishers to pull back on such formats from their sites.

Made up from members who work at companies including Facebook, Criteo, and Unilever, the coalition is focused on building a digital-ad ecosystem that puts consumer experience at the forefront.

Ingis serves as coordinator of the coalition and is a partner and chairman at Washington, DC-based law firm Venable LLC, where he specializes in privacy, advertising, internet, and e-commerce law. He also is counsel to the Digital Advertising Alliance and helped launch new standards around digital political ads that require marketers to place an icon dubbed "PoliticalAd" on political ads that link to additional information about the placement.

Ingis represents retailers, media companies, and advertising firms in cases before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the US Congress, often in investigations about a company's data and privacy policies.

"The future of the ad-supported internet and its associated social and economic benefits will depend on how the advertising industry understands and addresses the preferences of consumers and other stakeholders," he said. "The Coalition for Better Ads has created a framework that informs this work, is scalable globally and can evolve as new ad experiences and new technologies emerge."

Navigating hundreds of technology companies can be a headache for brands to figure out what they offer and whether they're legitimate. So the agency vet and former CEO of Havas founded "brand tech" firm You & Mr Jones to invest in technology companies, and then pair those companies up with brands.

The idea behind "brand tech" is that technology makes marketing "better, faster, and cheaper," but traditional agencies haven’t figured out how to make the model work, Jones said.

You & Mr Jones acquires and invests in tech companies and connects those companies to clients. The firm runs a consultancy called Blood that helps marketers work through longer-term projects such as launching new products. And instead of charging clients on either commissions or retainers like agencies do, brands are charged on project fees or Software as a Service (SaaS) pricing.

"We will probably make more money out of our investments than through our clients," Jones said. "We are constantly looking at new spaces like AI, blockchain, and AR, and often see 20-plus of the most cutting-edge new companies a week. This gives us and our clients unique insight into where technology and marketing technology is headed, way beyond the narrow realm of just 'communications.'"

Within the past 12 months, You & Mr Jones has invested in AR company Ninantic, which is launching a "Harry Potter"-themed AR game in the coming months, and poured $20 million into Pinterest. The company has also invested in payments company Amino and VidMob, a startup that helps marketers quickly chop up video assets for mobile and social media.

"We are not setting out to challenge or compete with the existing advertising industry," Jones said. "We are setting out to use technology to disrupt marketing."

Kapoor joined Google seven years ago through the acquisition of AdMeld. Since then she's worked her way up to becoming the search giant's go-to person for marketers' questions about the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has flipped the switch on how marketers collect data through explicit consent.

Kapoor works with publishers and advertisers to explain changes to Google's ecosystem and what it means for marketers. Lately, a lot of those discussions have revolved around GDPR, and Kapoor relocated to London from the US to be closer to the law.

According to Kapoor, 12,000 of Google's clients from all sides of the industry are affected by GDPR, resulting in hundreds of meetings in 67 countries ahead of the rollout in May and lots of frequent flier miles.

"Getting that face-to-face interaction helps so much — it gets very complicated and technical quickly," she said. "There are technical things that you can do to move forward across a lot of these problems that we're facing."

Previous to her role leading GDPR, Kapoor focused on similar bigger ecosystem problems like ad blocking, brand safety, and the ads.txt initiative.

With ads.txt, for example, Google plans to make the option of buying authorized-only inventory the default ad-buying option by the end of the year for its display and video 360 products (formerly called DoubleClick Bid Manager). More than 6,000 websites have created and published ads.txt files.

"It's such a simple tool that publishers can install and publishers get the confidence that what they're buying is real," Kapoor said. "Now that we've got fairly broad adoption, how do we put our money where our mouth is and make the hard decision to cut off inventory that’s not participating?"

There was one bright spot to advertisers' massive boycott of YouTube last year: Business boomed for companies that promised to keep brands' ads away from controversial videos.

After hundreds of brands including Procter & Gamble, Bank of America, and Starbucks pulled their ads on YouTube last year over concerns that they were appearing next to extremist content, OpenSlate's business tripled in 18 months. The company also has deals with major holding companies including WPP, Omnicom, and Dentsu Aegis Network.

OpenSlate provides granular data about YouTube videos that brands use to target and audit media. The six-year-old company analyzes data to generate a score that grades the quality and brand safety of a video to help advertisers understand exactly which videos their ads appear on.

"My hypothesis when I started the company was advertisers that buy video ads are brand advertisers and they care about where their ads run," Kelly said. "We ingest every shred of data about every ad-supported video on YouTube every day."

Unlike other areas of digital media such as fraud and viewability, brand safety is perhaps most dangerous because a PR disaster can snowball into a reputational problem. As Kelly puts it, brand safety is "much less binary."

"While YouTube spent a lot of time cleaning up the really bad stuff — and that is basically gone — what remains is largely subjective and it's up to the advertiser to figure out where they want to be and where they don't want to be."

If you've followed any of the data concerns and privacy backlash against Facebook and Google over the past year, chances are you've stumbled across a few of Kint's tweets.

As CEO of the trade association Digital Context Next, Kint represents members and publishers like CBS Interactive, The New York Times, and Vox Media that have struggled to grow digital ad revenue as the duopoly of Facebook and Google continue to siphon revenue from publishers.

It's no surprise that he's vocal about exposing the duopoly's flaws as well as broader concerns about how digital advertising works.

"We felt it was our role to make sure that we lead the industry on solving for these issues," he said. "Probably a little less conventionally, [we're] making sure that we publicly shined a light on where we saw problems and being candid about where those issues were — we try to do that through industry-leading research but also just through our voice."

To help some publishers get back some of that revenue, DCN has also spun out a subsidiary of its business called TrustX that operates as a digital-advertising marketplace for media companies like Hearst, ESPN, and News Corp.

According to DCN's own research, the duopoly makes up about 85% to 90% of the growth in digital ad spend.

"We spent the better part of two years simply with the goal of making sure that as many people across the industry and the public understood the math that there was a duopoly and two companies were capturing all the growth," Kint said. "That took literally two years to kill the myth that the internet sector is growing and everybody is benefiting — we had to publicly break down those numbers and put a simple term on it."

Two years ago, startup founder Leathern published an article on Medium with the headline "The subprime ad crisis is here," which detailed a list of the shady ways advertisers were getting ripped off by agencies and tech companies, comparing it to 2008's subprime-mortgage crisis.

Now he's one of Facebook's top ad execs on the front lines of cleaning up the platform for the company's more than 6 million advertisers, dealing specifically with the company's high-profile data and transparency issues.

One of his biggest projects to date is the launch of an ad-transparency tool that makes it possible for anyone to see all the ads a marketer is running across Facebook and Instagram at any given time from a tab on their Facebook Page. He also helped roll out a feature that allows users to leave reviews for misleading products that they purchase after clicking through on Facebook ads promoting the items.

"More transparency increases accountability for us and advertisers and helps prevent abuse on Facebook," he said.

And for political ads, the team has stepped up Facebook's policies after it was discovered that Russian operatives purchased ads in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Political and issue-based ads are now stamped with a "paid for by" disclosure at the top and such ads are achieved into a searchable portal for up to seven years after it ran.

The move was met with criticism from publishers who complained that news articles were incorrectly labeled as political ads under the new guidelines, but it's an example of the sticky situations that Leathern is navigating to make Facebook a more transparent ad platform.

"I would say the majority of advertisers — whether political advertisers or not — understand why we are working to make Facebook more transparent," he said. "They stand behind the ads they're putting up and they understand this."

According to Lerner, there's not one culprit in marketers' concerns about digital advertising. A bevy of factors including fraud, consumer privacy, and brand safety are at play.

And the solutions that tech companies and agencies are creating "are like Band-Aids that people are sticking on top of the system — it's becoming this giant Frankenstein," she said.

Her company, MadHive, is building a new infrastructure for digital advertising and "creating an underlying system that people can build upon" that replaces Open RTB, which is the current model of how programmatic advertising passes from ad inventory on publisher websites to advertisers.

While there's a lot of buzz around blockchain's potential for digital advertising, Lerner believes its biggest use case will "allow us to rethink the system," in a way that ad-tech firms and companies pitching solutions cannot.

MadHive is also a founding company in an industry initiative dubbed the AdLedger Consortium that is made up of media and advertising execs from companies like IBM and TEGNA. "The first goal is to help educate the industry by putting together various proof on concepts that people can work on together," Lerner said. "The other [goal] is to start developing new standards in which the ad-tech and advertising space can build blockchain applications."

Lindsay leads JPMorgan Chase's five-person internal team that's tasked with helping all the firm's lines of business when it comes to media buying and overseeing issues like brand safety, programmatic, and ad fraud.

JPMorgan Chase has been a big proponent of taking parts of its advertising team in-house over the past couple of years, which has resulted in efforts to cut back on the number of sites it runs programmatic ads on and an internal tool that plugs into YouTube's API to select ad-friendly channels.

"There are so many teams that touch media but when you think about brand safety, you can make a really big impact by a small change," Lindsay said. "But unless you have that centralized team that's looking across the board, it's hard to realize the scale of the impact you're making."

The brand's external agencies are "critical partners to help support" such initiatives but the internal group is key in wrangling all the moving parts of JPMorgan's marketing because "you need the entire army that is Chase moving in the same direction," she said.

Right now, her team is working on managing partners, which include agencies and publishers for direct deals. The goal is to create a playbook for how the brand works with each of its vendors.

"That gives you the ability to maintain a consistent level of transparency and reduce your exposure to risk while also not being a roadblock and saying that everything has to funnel through the small team of five that we are," Lindsay said.

After a string of brand-safety snafus on YouTube and Facebook made headlines globally last year, marketers started appointing executives to be the point people for a growing swarm of concerns from marketers.

In April, Lowcock was promoted from executive vice president and US chief digital officer to the role of global chief brand-safety officer at IPG Mediabrands' UM to help walk brands through safety issues.

Their biggest concern, he said, is understanding what tools and controls they have available and what else they should be using. He also works to educate clients on the nuances of brand-safety across multiple platforms.

"Take something like video," he said. "Clients have videos running across YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, OTT, and the open web, so you want to ensure consistent application of rules, controls, and filters on every platform."

Those complexities are why marketers need to work with agencies to handle the heavy lifting of getting platforms to establish rules and tools that address brand safety. "Agencies are also better positioned to both lobby and demand change, as collectively our clients have a common set of broad brand-safety needs," he said. "No advertiser wants to appear on hate speech or terrorist videos."

After racking up ad-tech expertise working at companies like SAS, Signal, and Demdex (which was acquired by Adobe), Milicevic set up her own boutique consultancy in 2015 to help advertisers and media companies navigate areas like the digital-supply chain, brand safety, and tech-stack management.

"We see a lot of maybe not explicitly expressed concern around this, but certainly an undercurrent in just about every interaction we have," Milicevic said about marketers' lingering doubts about digital advertising. "A lot of folks are reevaluating partnerships and technology choices they may have made several years ago."

Milicevic specializes in setting strategies and advising clients who have questions like: Are we running ads in a clean, brand-safe place? Should we be working with this company, and what's their perception? Can you help me put together a request for proposal and what questions should I ask?

Those are questions brands may not feel comfortable asking their agencies because "it's a really hard problem to solve internally because it sometimes exposes certain internal politics and decisions that teams make," she said. In other words, agencies sign big deals with companies on behalf of all their clients and don't necessarily have the means to help individual clients work through these problems, per Milicevic.

"This type of work requires a lot of closeness and understanding of how individual teams work," she said. "Operational experience with the kinds of problems that a company is dealing with really make a big advantage."

February 9, 2017, is a date burned into Montgomery's mind. That morning, the London Times published a story with the headline "Big brands fund terror through online adverts" that detailed how brands such as Mercedes-Benz and Waitrose were appearing on YouTube videos backed by ISIS and other terrorist groups.

The story sent waves through the advertising industry, and hundreds of brands quickly pulled or froze their ad campaigns. Montgomery, whose firm handles millions of dollars for brands like Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, and Chanel put together whitelists and blacklists of sites to limit where clients' ads either ran or did not run.

He also signed a deal with video-analytics firm OpenSlate within a few weeks to protect his clients from appearing next to unsavory content.

"If your ads are caught by a journalist at the London Times or the Wall Street Journal and there's a screenshot of your ad in an inappropriate place, there is potential shareholder or brand-value loss," he said.

Montgomery leads a team of six brand-safety specialists positioned around the world in the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific that help clients work on brand safety, including measurement, ad verification, and contextual snafus wherein brands ads appear next to unsavory web content. According to GroupM, brand safety is a catchall for "any risk in the digital-supply chain."

Most recently, he's been working on a verification audit to vet the accuracy of location-based advertising companies' ability to pinpoint exact coordinates and serve targeted ads. "New areas of concern come up like confirming that your geo-location data is accurate. We did a check on this about 18 months ago, and we found that some of the geo-location data was up to 20% or 30% inaccurate," he said.

In November 2016, Donald Trump had just been elected president and Breitbart News — the far-right website tied to now former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon — was in the spotlight because of its connection to Trump's campaign.

Rivitz did not know much about programmatic advertising per se, but he realized that big-name brands likely didn't know that they were running ads next to the site's controversial content because of programmatic software that places digital ads across hundreds of sites.

So he started the anonymous Twitter account Sleeping Giants in his free time and tweeted out screenshots of ads from brands like SoFi and Kellogg's that appeared on Breitbart.

Jammi noticed the account shortly after, and the two started building a team to manage the account, which now counts more than 190,000 followers and has become a powerful force in the ad industry for its work in exposing the perils of automated ad buying on sites that contain content about bigotry and sexism that advertisers want to steer clear of.

"It went from contacting three brands to 'Oh, man, this is going to be every brand to the world,'" Rivitz said.

All told, 4,000 advertisers including Ally Bank and Coca-Cola Germany have pledged to drop Breitbart from their ad buys.

Rivitz said he spends anywhere from three to eight hours a day working on Sleeping Giants.

"This thing, much to my surprise, has become a place to share ideas and bring up ideas that might not get amplified otherwise," he said. "It's become an example of how brands can end up everywhere and everyone needs to be more vigilant about where their ads go; it's allowed brands to wake up and decide what they want to support."

While other publishers chased programmatic ad dollars that use data-backed targeting as a revenue source, Quartz has long eschewed ad tech and instead stuck to building a business off of native advertising that receives a white-glove approach from its in-house team.

"[We knew] that it was definitely going to be a more challenging road, but it's been able to maintain that clean, user-first experience that our entire company has been behind since launch," said Robins, who oversees the publication's ad-sales teams. "Digital advertising doesn't have to just be science; it can be art."

Within the past few years, six-year-old Quartz has become known for innovative, nondisplay-ad formats like 3D augmented-reality ads and chatbots for brands such as Infiniti and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. That approach is guided by the direction that Quartz's editorial team designs its website, app, and email products.

In July, Quartz was acquired by Japanese media company Uzabase for between $75 million and $110 million. According to the firm's materials, Quartz is on track to generate up to $38 million in revenue this year.

Quartz is only now starting to slowly open the programmatic ad spigot, but in a controlled way that keeps the focus on custom content, Robins said. For example, Quartz recently joined Vox Media-owned Concert that allows brands to trade native ads using software.

"It's still our sales team that are working with some of the trading desks and doing private marketplace or programmatic guaranteed deals," Robins said. "The methodology of serving ads is evolving."

The Guardian has invested significantly in programmatic advertising over the past few years — so much so that it now accounts for 80% of its digital ad revenue.

But Spears still has some questions about how it works and his team has done everything from buying its own inventory to running tests that examine where programmatic video ads show up to uncover fraud.

"In many ways, programmatic has had a meteoric rise, except that were quite aware of these issues," Spears said. "Premium publishers are not safe — we're a target for fraud."

In one recent test with Google and MightyHive, Spears' team purchased ads through an open market and learned that 72% of programmatic video ads ended up in unauthorized exchanges and supply-side platforms, meaning that the Guardian didn't receive any of the sale. But when a purchase was made using ads.txt authorized inventory, all the inventory went to legitimate sellers.

While ads.txt has proved to stamp out fraud for the Guardian, Spears said that the need to use technology to solve a problem caused by technology is ironic.

"The market also needs to be talking about why there is a technical solution needed in this space," he said. "As a seller, I want to have a complete detailed log around my inventory to match. That is transparency."

Unlike US publishers that are often reluctant to share audience data with their competitors, European publishers including the Guardian are embracing data pacts in an effort to protect themselves from the duopoly of Facebook and Google that continue to suck up digital-ad revenue from publishers.

The Guardian said it would roll out an industry initiative this fall dubbed The Ozone Project, which pools its data along with data from News UK and The Telegraph into an advertising platform that promises brands reach across 39.4 million unique visitors.

Turner joined The Washington Post in May from Oath to head up the research, experimentation, and development (known as RED) team, which focuses on building innovative ad products in-house that don't rely on a bunch of external ad-tech firms. And right off the bat, he's got a plan to turn The Post's growing subscription business — and its subscribers — into a mini focus group that gives feedback about what ads they like.

"The big lure to me is the attention to subscribers that we have," he said. "Yes, we can clean up ad tech for everybody, but the vast majority of our subscribers are consuming the vast majority of our content. We still ideate on new ad technology with advertisers and agencies but we're not launching anything that hasn't been subscriber-approved."

Each month, a group of eight to 12 subscribers come into the publication's tech lab where they test new prototypes of ads that are lightweight and don't clog up a website with data.

For example, after hearing that subscribers wanted contextual ads that don't use "creepy" retargeting technology, The Post rolled out an ad format last week called Informer that digs through all of The Post's pages to find content around a topic for an advertiser through machine learning. A brand like Fidelity can target financial-planning content, and the tool will pull in the most popular set of articles about financial planning into a branded carousel ad format.

"The users have this desire to have contextually aligned ads and consume a certain vertical," Turner said.

In another example, the focus group voted that the wording "selected by" that appears at the top of pages containing sponsored content was the most effective way to differentiate branded content from editorial stories.

"What we kept finding is that advertisers would keep asking for one thing and we would say, 'We don't know if we should build that,'" Turner said. "We have the luxury of thinking about long-term [revenue] and that's where this idea came in — let's bring in our subscribers and really test and see what they like."