Josef Najm, director of programmatic and partnerships at Thomson Reuters, and Mibbie Plouvier, head of global programmatic strategy at SAS, join The Current Podcast to describe how their partnership has evolved and how trust plays an important part in that evolution. 

Episode Transcript

Please note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.

[00:00:00 ] Ilyse: I'm Ilyse Liffreing, and welcome to this edition of The Current Podcast. This week, we're excited to be joined by two guests. Joseph Najim, Director of Programmatic and Partnerships at Reuters, And Mivi Plouvier, Head of Programmatic at software company SAS.

[00:00:17 ] Ilyse: Together we'll explore the publisher and advertiser dynamic at a time when some advertisers remain cautious about appearing alongside certain types of news. The business model for news is under pressure and publishers are looking for better ways to monetize their journalism with effective ads. We'll dive into why things may be changing for the better.

[00:00:36 ] Recent research indicates that it's safer for brands to advertise next to quality journalism, regardless of the news topic. Reuters, in 1851 and owned by Thomson Reuters, is one of the world's largest publishers, with journalists in over 200 locations writing in 16 different languages. SAS sits at the intersection of data [00:01:00 ] and AI.

[00:01:01 ] Delivering analytical insights to brands. We kick off things with Joseph and Miby describing how they first met and how their partnership has evolved since then.

[00:01:11 ] Ilyse: It's so great to have you here today. First off, how did you first meet and how would you describe how your partnership has evolved? 

[00:01:20 ] Joseph: Great. Thank you so much for having us. It's a pleasure to be here. maybe and I met about five years ago when I joined Reuters coming from the buy side, I was just leaving a stint at Diageo and, coming in as the programmatic sales specialist at the time, maybe was working in Paris and she was, I believe, the global programmatic lead and everyone was just like, “Hey, programmatic guy, this is a programmatic person.”

[00:01:41 ] I think you should connect with them. And at the time, we were doing some business with SAS, or maybe a little bit. And hearing that she was from Paris. and also knowing that I had worked at L'Oreal. I wanted to connect with her from like a French connection perspective and also knowing that she was American.

[00:01:55 ] So I shot her an email reaching out and asking her some questions like how things were going. 

[00:02:00 ] Mibbie: It was a fun connection. because I was new to Paris. And Joseph reached out and was telling me all these fun, French antidotes of how Parisians and French people are more like coconuts, and Americans are more like peaches. And it was a great analogy to start the intro, but we've had a great relationship

[00:02:17 ] Joseph has been resilient and calling on our business and the more in trust we built up, the greater the partnership has become and we've been able to do some really great things together. 

[00:02:27 ] Ilyse: guess it is like a pretty small world programmatic, 

[00:02:33 ] Ilyse: so it's no secret that the publishing industry is under quite a lot of pressure along with the eventual death of cookies. One issue publishers continue to come across are brands avoiding advertising on news for concerns around brand safety.

[00:02:49 ] Now, these concerns have been challenged as of a May study from Stagwell that found that even ads next to hot button topics performed as effectively as those appearing next to [00:03:00 ] news, like sports and entertainment. Can you give us some context around what you're seeing on this topic? 

[00:03:07 ] Joseph: Yes, this is a very important topic, and being at Reuters now for five years, I've had the opportunity to see a lot of different brand briefs and questions that come in around

[00:03:17 ] how can we partner together? And in 2020, this kind of all came to a head when COVID and the pandemic took place. So what we found was, a lot of advertisers turn to the solutions that they have around. Advertising, ad tech platform, blocking tools like keyword lists, pre bid filters, monitoring tags, blocking tags, blocking words like COVID, China, Wuhan.

[00:03:38 ] And then it just precipitated after that. and almost The spiral effect because the news cycle and

[00:03:42 ] the realities of that was happening continued. So, just in the year of 2020, so much happened. whether it was George Floyd's murder, the beginning of the Black Lives Matter. movement. the, the election, as well. A lot of people forget the election took place there, too. And now, four years later, history is continuing in this really [00:04:00 ] real time. Just to kind of put it into a global perspective, two thirds of the world's democratic populations are going to the polls. this year, not just the U S and a lot of people just think it's the U S, but really important countries like Taiwan, for example. and we're covering that. and we're also covering two global world conflicts. Israel and Gaza, as well as Russia and Ukraine.

[00:04:18 ] when we're doing all this, it costs a lot of money and it's important to find brand partners that are willing, to support trusted journalism and at the same time understand that when they're partnering with news publishers, that audience that they're reaching is a really important audience, It's an attentive audience, an audience that's willing to engage.

[00:04:37 ] I always like to think back, like, when the pandemic happened, where did we all turn? We turned to the news. And I'm really appreciative of a lot of these studies that are coming out with Stagwell, for example, but even going back to 2020, released this Trust HALO report, 84 percent of consumers had a positive or neutral impact when they saw an ad adjacent to a trusted source. And I fast forward to now and folks are talking about Gen z audience and trying to reach [00:05:00 ] that audience. Gen Z cares about the facts. They care about trust. So, finding partnership with SAS and being able to present this audience and showing that you can have ad adjacency next to the hard news and reach that audience has been leading to successful business outcomes for both of us.

[00:05:14 ] And It's really been great partnering with Mibbie on those activations.

[00:05:18 ] Mibbie: and then from our perspective, I'd say I think it's easy to find comfort in blocking certain words. but. What we like to do is partner with trusted news sources and award winning news sources because we know that no matter what news they're reporting upon, our brand is going to be safe around it. And we know that we're

[00:05:35 ] going to be okay, no matter what the news is. And I think with the current news cycle and how constant it is, you could almost just go down a rabbit hole of blocking everything. So from our perspective, it was let's partner with key publishers, that we can trust and then we don't have to worry as much about trying to continue to block things or worry about. Being somewhere we don't want to be. 

[00:05:55 ] Ilyse: and on that point though, even like the bad news,

[00:05:59 ] I don't think it, [00:06:00 ] it doesn't hurt your brand as research has shown. and brands are still very fearful about that. Was that your original, like, hesitancy in advertising or? It Okay. 

[00:06:12 ] Mibbie: it's, we take the security and knowing how, brands how we're going to be around the right kind of content and Reuters reports on the news in a very fair way. So for us, even if it's bad news, we're okay with being there.

[00:06:26 ] it took a while to get there internally, but that was several years ago and I think it was around COVID when everybody was a little fearful of the news, but we're very confident with the partners we have. and for us, it was also how can we make these things happen programmatically. Because

[00:06:43 ] we can buy things a lot easier. and more smoothly if it's through our platforms. So that was, Reuters was very good about helping us out in that sense too. Yeah, 

[00:06:51 ] Joseph: I think, it goes back to the consultative approach.

[00:06:53 ] when I first presented to SAS and to maybe, in team. It was always with the thinking of, okay, [00:07:00 ] culture. Just like Reuters. We have a history. They have a history of innovation too. And at the end of the day, as maybe said, the fairness of how we go to report that unbiased nature, it really creates, and fosters an environment for 

[00:07:12 ] Trust with the audience, trust with the content. So when they have a trusted message, that they're really trying to deliver to that audience. we just knew that it was going to be a perfect synergy between the two. so I really never had. concerns, but I will say, and this is the importance of kind of stepping in and having that partnership with that publisher partner, that news publisher partner.

[00:07:30 ] If the situation gets a little bit out of control, from a hard news perspective, it's important for the news publisher to step in and say, hey, maybe we don't run this campaign right now, but we will come back and we'll make sure that the creative message is appropriate to what's taking place, but also at the same time, hey, we're going to, we're going to protect your brand.

[00:07:47 ] And I think in some cases, we're you know, it happened, for example, with Applebee's, running against the CNN, ad when, I think it was Rus