Brands have boosted their profits by £268m over the past four years by optimising their adspend on news brands, a study from the marketing body for national news media has found.
The exact measure used is profit return on investment – the revenue generated by ad campaigns divided by the profit margin of a given brand. This gives an indication of the share of the company’s profit delivered by a particular campaign.
Newsworks commissioned the consultancy Benchmarketing to carry out the new research, The Bottom Line, which involved analysing 1012 cases from 2011 to 2020, including during the pandemic.
It follows a 2017 study called Planning for Profit, which found that brands were missing out on £3bn of potential profit ROI by underinvesting in news brands.
That figure has since fallen by 9% to £2.7bn, and Newsworks has forecast that it will drop to £2bn by 2025.
Jo Allan, chief executive of Newsworks, said: “It’s great to see an impressive shift in the last few years, despite the knock-on effect of Covid. If advertisers continue to utilise news brands effectively, their bottom lines will only improve.
“This research offers compelling and tangible evidence for advertisers who are looking to increase profit ROI and benefit from being in brand-safe, quality environments.”
Sally Dickerson, chief effectiveness officer at Benchmarketing, added: “This project is unique in assessing news brands’ role in overall campaign effectiveness. Significantly, it also isolates news brands’ digital spend as a structural factor.
“With the rise of misinformation, digital news brands offer an attractive brand-safe environment for advertisers. This research proves that they also deliver solid business returns when utilised at the right level."
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