For the third in our series of Industry Immersion Sessions we welcomed Terry Hornsby, Director of Digital Solutions, from Reach. He talked to us about the impact of GDPR on Programmatic, the Trinity Mirror acquisition of Northern & Shell and merging to become Reach and finally what the ever changing world of digital means for candidates.

The impact of GDPR was something that everyone was aware of and to an extent concerned about; but this was especially felt in the Programmatic industry due to the reliance on collecting and using of data. Terry, however, revealed to us that so far this has little to no effect on Reach. Across all of their websites they only had an opt-out of 2%. He attributed this, in part, to doing extensive testing and preparation prior to May 25^th. Some companies, due to lack of preparation, found themselves with up to 35% opt-out! On the whole it has had much less of an effect on the industry as a while, however this could change with further regulations coming in next year…

This process of preparation would have been especially hard with the added headache of merging the inventory of Trinity Mirror and Northern & Shell. On 1^st March 2018 Trinity Mirror’s £121.7m acquisition of Northern & Shell’s UK titles was approved and on 28^th June 2018 they announced all assets would come under the banner of Reach. For Terry this meant integrating existing teams into his already large team that consists of Trading & Data, Business Analysts, Ad Product, Tech Ops, Ad Ops and Yield Managers. The merger into Reach meant that internally this process was a lot easier due to the fact that the sales teams were selling one product and utilising one data set. They now have 55+ sites and 41 apps which have more than 37m unique impressions a month which is a huge reach!

What does this mean for candidates? Reach is now an impressive proposition – “The newly combined sales team will give advertisers access to over 45 million people in the UK a month. As well as this valuable scale the portfolio represents diversity via nine politically and culturally different national newsbrands, the opportunity to reach people in the most trusted media environment via our 140 regional newspapers, and brand safety via our network of 60 professionally produced websites.”[1] The growing need for technical and analytical candidates to support this network has led to a growing focus on sourcing graduates with relevant experience or degrees and most importantly the right mind-set.

Finally we came on to the subject of third-party AdTech companies and what differentiates them. Terry revealed, due to the similarity of the products, that the people and the customer service are the most important factor when choosing a tech partner. This is something that is applicable across the industry and shows how important relationship building is.

I would like to thank Terry for his time and sharing his deep knowledge of the industry with the team. If you would like to come in and chat to the team about your company/ industry please get in touch: rob@themediaexchange.com | 0207 636 6777

 

 

[1] https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/06/28/reach-merges-trinity-mirror-and-northern-shell-sales-teams