Why Bloomberg Media is dropping programmatic ads

Bloomberg Media CEO Scott Havens writes about why it’s dropping programmatic advertising at the end of the year:

Since stepping into my role as CEO in January, I have asked the team to fully commit to thinking “audience first” with every action and decision we make, by investing the time to understand our customers across every platform we operate and to focus on building features, products and businesses that super-serve them.

We connect with some of the most valuable audiences in all of media – high-achieving, highly-informed and highly-coveted by marketers. As such, we need to be more attuned to the user experience of these modern leaders across the entire Bloomberg Media global product suite. That means making impactful changes to an advertising business that has grown for nine straight quarters.

Recently, we’ve decided to take a major step in developing a modern digital experience that supports this “audience first” mentality and creates an optimal environment for our trusted brand partners to reach the world’s most influential leaders.

Starting January 1, 2023, Bloomberg Media will no longer allow third parties to sell ads to our audience through open-market third-party programmatic, or other non-direct sold “demand channels,” across our website and apps. Going forward, if brands want to reach our audience, they’ll need to work directly with our world class media team.

Here are the key reasons why we’re doing this:

1. We want to create a better ecosystem for our users. Reducing the volume of ads, and the number of ‘ad calls,’ will allow for easier consumption of content, and speed up our platforms.
2. We want our brand partners to have the cleanest environment from which to engage our audience of 100 million+ global decision-makers and through this direct relationship, utilize our reliable first-party insights about modern business leaders. It also means our partners’ campaign creative will have more real estate to reach the right people in a far more effective way.
3. We don’t believe it makes sense to allow marketers to reach our valuable audience at a low cost with sub-optimal creative. We prefer to create a more mutually beneficial relationship by partnering with brands directly.
4. We’ll use our valuable real estate to market our talent, global events, podcasts, shows and custom content from our studio. This will also provide more space to promote Bloomberg Philanthropies work and other Bloomberg LP initiatives.

Our recent success has put us in a position to make this decision, manage any immediate revenue impact, and invest in the future of our brand health in a dynamic, concrete way. I am confident that in doing this we’ll have a larger, more engaged audience that will ultimately lead to a stronger advertising business and a healthier consumer subscription business.

We’re already taking real action to get to know that audience better. We launched our registration platform on Bloomberg.com in June, helping us to better understand the users and more deeply engage them through personalized content and tailored marketing outreach. We also just announced the Bloomberg Audience Accelerator, an advanced ad product that leverages this first-party data provided by users and brings the insights to-life with enhanced precision and performance for our clients.

Our global footprint allows us the opportunity to provide critical news and information to modern leaders any time, anywhere, and on any platform they choose. Now, by putting the audience at the forefront of everything we do, we believe we will unlock the next phase of growth in our business, further enhancing Bloomberg Media as the most influential business media company in the world.

This is the new future of Bloomberg Media.