Podcast

The Sun MD Ben Walmsley: In Digital Advertising Less is More

Alessandro De Zanche

Aug 6, 2024 — 1 min read

I was looking forward to talking with Ben Walmsley, Managing Director of The Sun and former Commercial Director of News UK for the "Not just ADZ" podcast.

Besides the pleasure of catching up with Ben and hearing how he is doing, I wanted to discuss with him some of the most pressing topics in media monetisation, which News UK and News Corp in general and The Sun in some instances, have been at the forefront of (despite the old assumption of it being slow, like many huge international corporations).

We spoke about how The Sun faced the exact opposite issue of many media companies: rethinking their ad-funded model after they lifted their paywall.

We also deep-dived into how reducing the ad load on The Sun (from the tags on the page to the actual number of ad slots) benefitted the user experience, the value of the single ad unit, and their overall advertising revenue.

I then asked Ben to tell me more about News UK’s decision to remove external content recommendation widgets from News UK’s titles and substitute them with their own content recirculation engine. Successfully.

One of my favourite moments was hearing about the importance of consent and how the idea of a “head of consent” at News UK came about. For someone like me, who started writing that “consent is the new oil” in 2019, it was music to my ears!

But what was the underlying approach that allowed Ben and the wider News UK organisation to reach those achievements?

1) Entrepreneurialism
2) Experimentation
3) Alignment

And not necessarily in this order.

This is a great conversation to watch for any media owners wanting to understand not only what was done, but also why and how.

Spoiler alert 1: Ben made it clear that “it is not easy”.

Spoiler alert 2: My reaction to that statement was highlighting the fact that the industry has been sold the dream of “easy” for too long. It requires time, effort, resources and, more than anything, a clear vision.

What Ben showed me in our chat is that it is possible.

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