News UK - TFAQs

The questions fall under three different categories

• Pricing

• Placement

• Data

Pricing

What is your business model and how do you make money?
News UK owns news and media brands that include The Times and Sunday Times, The Sun, The Wireless Group of radio stations including TalkSport and Virgin Radio. News UK also owns pioneering ad tech company, Unruly. Our revenue is comprised of copy sales, subscriptions, transactional brand extensions (e.g. Sunday Times Wine Club) and advertising sales.

Can you outline the full details of the agreement on a booking form / contract?
Yes, our insertion orders outline the booked volumes, targeting, start and end dates and rates.

Will you share who your trading partners are?
Yes, we work with all major agency holding groups and a broad range of direct advertisers. We accept demand from a variety of advertising technology companies that can be found of our sites’ ads.txt files.

Placement

Do you own the inventory you sell?
Yes. We own the inventory from the News UK portfolio, which is all classified as owned and operated. Our ad tech business, Unruly, sells inventory on third party sites and has a separate submission.

If you don’t own your own inventory then how do you access inventory and which platforms do you use?
N/A.

Do you specify your media placements and positions?
Yes. We have specifications for placements and their positions published on our commercial website (https://newscommercial.co.uk/digital).

What insights do you provide back to advertisers?
We provide reporting both in-flight and post campaign. Our post campaign analysis includes screenshots of all placements/creative and commentary on optimisations including recommendations for future campaigns. Standard metrics are provided alongside viewability broken down by device-type and audience. For branded content campaigns we also provide standard page metrics including page views, unique users and dwell-times. The reports have combined sources from our ad server, IAS and Google Analytics.

Does the inventory you own or access include UGC content?
No.

What brand safety measures do you use?
News UK takes brand safety extremely seriously and we endeavour to deliver all campaigns in a premium brand safe environment. News UK works with ADmantX to apply a vertical approach to brand safety versus a standard approach. On top of the predefined categories including accidents, negative feelings, parental protection, natural disasters, crime, illegal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, weapons, military and terrorism. Our content is also analysed to identify the emotions and sentiments on how it has been written, this allows us to customize protection to safeguard the client's brand with more than black lists and white lists.
We have a fully dedicated process behind brand safety that has been published on our commercial website and is part of our terms & conditions for all insertion orders. We have completed a 3rd party audit with ABC to become fully JICWEBS DTSG certified.

Which industry standards have you been certified against?
News UK are fully accredited for the IAB Gold Standard and JICWEBS DTSG.

Do you have a policy in place for ad-misplacement?
Yes, our process can be found on our commercial website and is part of our terms and conditions for all insertion orders.

Are you happy to share your optimisation tactics?
We optimise our campaigns to meet KPIs outlined in the booking, for example a viewability threshold. Additionally in-flight optimisations are based on the best performing placement and creative by the means of engagement. This can include click-through rates, completed views, viewability and interactions. The means of optimisations are the targeting parameters which are device type, ad position, contextual, vertical and audience.

Data

Under GDPR what legal basis are you providing your services under?
Legitimate interest and consent. News UK is currently using Sourcepoint as a Consent Management Platform (CMP) and the IAB Consent Framework to provide consent under the GDPR. Our approach is consistent with that of other premium publishers in the UK. For more information please visit https://newsprivacy.co.uk.

If consent is the mechanism then can you prove how you obtained it?
Using our CMP (Sourcepoint) we are able to record if a user has given consent or not. This is both for 1st party cookies and any other cookies used. Consent being passed may also be viewed as part of the IAB framework on any live bid consent string being made on our websites.

Are you using the IAB Framework?
Yes.

What other 3rd party data partners require consent for your business to deliver its service?
We require our data management platforms to have consent. We currently use Salesforce DMP and Lotame.

What do you do with data you obtain from advertiser’s campaigns or data tags?
We store campaign data securely in our ad server, Google Ads Manager. This data is used for optimisation purposes and to make recommendations on any further bookings. Data is also used at a high level to bucket into advertiser categories for internal sales strategies. Use of any data from appended pixels to creative is not used by News UK unless shared for a specific reason.

Are advertisers permitted to appoint their own 3rd party partners for verification and measurement?
Yes, subject to verifying any consent requirements.

Will you provide a link to your privacy and data policies?
https://newsprivacy.co.uk

Will you share how you build audience, contextual and targeting segments?
Yes.

To find out which other companies have completed the FAQs, please visit our members directory here. 

Please note the answers given are self-declared and are not verified by IAB UK or independently audited, unlike under industry-owned programmes such as JICWEBS. To view the latest JICWEBS Certifications, visit https://jicwebs.org/certification-process/signatories/