MarTech Interview with Ryan Stewart, Head of Publisher Acquisition at MGID

Greetings Ryan, Can you provide a brief overview of your professional journey and how it led you to your current role as Head of Publisher Acquisition (North America) at MGID?

I’ve been in the media industry for more than 20 years and have worked on both ends of the supply chain, from Viacom and Fox News to Taboola and now MGID. This has given me a broad perspective, and I’m proud of my reputation for giving straight-talking advice to help publishers maximize long-term revenues rather than relying on impressive but unsustainable temporary uplifts.

As Head of Publisher Acquisition, what personal strategies or approaches have you found most effective in navigating the challenges of the digital advertising landscape, particularly in the context of evolving privacy regulations and the shift towards cookieless advertising?

The days of being able to buy against audiences at scale wherever cookie proliferation is coming to a close, so advertisers need to hunt down audiences at their source. They can be found in modeled audiences from media owners’ user data, contextual audiences derived from media content and usage patterns, and behavioral audiences built through ID-matched cross-platform activity.

Which is most appropriate will depend on the campaign and its objectives, and a portfolio approach to audience solutions will be necessary to maximize reach and adaptability. Much like the early days of programmatic, there’s a significant learning curve, so start testing now to avoid being caught out on deprecation day.

Based on your experience, what advice would you offer brands looking to improve and adjust their targeted campaigns in a manner that respects user privacy while still achieving meaningful engagement?

I always recommend a quality-over-quantity approach, but navigating the line between the two can be difficult with standard metrics such as views or clicks. Attention has emerged as a promising alternative that reveals not just whether an ad was seen, but whether the user was engaged. Combine attention with AI-powered content optimization, and placements can automatically be adjusted to maximize attention without cramming the page with as many ad slots as possible — which is terrible for the user experience and overall perception of digital advertising.

In your opinion, what are the key considerations for brands when it comes to leveraging contextual advertising to build meaningful engagement in a cookieless landscape?

Don’t underestimate the granularity of contextual audiences. Many people still have a perception of contextual audiences from the era of manual article tagging and broad brush segmentation, but modern AI-powered contextual solutions drill deep into the sentiment and meaning of content — including audio-visual elements — while also layering in anonymous sites usage data to reveal multi-layered interest groups.

How can brands strike a balance between reaching their target audience effectively and avoiding aggressive blanket blocking tactics that may alienate potential customers?

Brand safety is always a delicate balance, but it’s safe to say that many of the automated techniques on the market right now are overzealous in their blocking. If brands are looking for incremental reach, they should scrutinize their brand safety processes and consider easing off the controls on media erroneously flagged as high-risk, such as news. A high-quality, trusted news media environment has been shown to uplift positive brand associations, even if the content would be labeled as “negative”.

Considering the evolving digital landscape, what do you envision as the future of native advertising, and how can brands adapt to these changes to stay relevant and effective?

The barrier to widespread adoption of native advertising has always been a fear of new formats. Having to adjust a creative for non-standard sizes can be a leap too far for resource-constrained creative departments.But with the power of AI, assets can be reworked into countless formats through simple prompts, allowing advertisers to unlock the creative and performance potential of native advertising with minimal effort. Hopefully, the days of seeing the same old banner format — with all the “banner blindness” that goes with it — will soon come to an end.

With the rise of ad blockers and privacy concerns, how do you see the role of native advertising evolving in capturing audience attention and driving engagement?

We need to consider the behavior that drives people to use ad blockers, to begin with. Navigation-interrupting pop-ups, poor site performance, straight up broken pages — we’ve all experienced these irritations on the open web. If lightweight, performant, and elegant native formats are embraced across the board, it will improve the ad experience and drive down ad blocker usage or circumvent it entirely by integrating in a way that is inherently unblockable.

As someone deeply involved in publisher acquisition, what insights can you share about the evolving relationship between publishers and advertisers in the current digital advertising ecosystem?

Brands, agencies, and publishers are all either buying or building bespoke technology platforms to leverage their data assets and bring greater intelligence to the buying process. But with so much of the supply chain’s future up in the air, there’s a lack of consensus over what insights and metrics are valuable. Brands and publishers need regular heart to understand what the other side needs and gradually move towards some degree of standardization and eventually a new normal.

Finally, as we wrap up, what final thoughts or key takeaways would you like to leave our audience with regarding the importance of contextual advertising and the future direction of native advertising in the digital landscape?

Contextual and native both work towards the same goal: seamless integration between an ad and its surroundings. This is the goal that guided advertising from the first days of print through to radio and television, but the digital era got sidetracked with the ability to follow users around the web, leading to an invasive and “creepy” experience where the ad creative was often incongruous to its surroundings, as well as the consumer’s reality.

We have the opportunity with contextual and native to go back to tried and true core principles of effective advertising while supercharging the process with technology that takes advantage of the wealth of data created by digital environments without having to touch personally identifiable information. There’s a lot of work to do, and not every business model will survive the transition, but we should all be excited for a future of digital advertising that is built on mutual trust.