In pursuit of ad revenue, many publishers are investing in AI tools and testing new platform integrations to squeeze a few more dollars from the open exchange.
But Dow Jones is betting on a more tried-and-true strategy: direct relationships, first‑party audiences and a disciplined approach to using data to enrich ad campaigns.
The company behind The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch is still a direct‑first business, even as programmatic and automation reshape the market, said Jennifer Castillo, executive director of ad operations at Dow Jones.
That approach is less about resisting change, Castillo said, and more about protecting a publisher’s greatest asset: the value of its audience.
“Your users are your bread and butter,” she said. “If you don’t have users, you don’t have traffic, and you won’t have any money.”
First-party first
With that ethos in mind, Dow Jones has spent the last several years turning its subscriber and audience data into monetizable products, while balancing campaign activation with user privacy and consent requirements.
This approach aligns with Dow Jones’ “client direct” sales strategy, Castillo said. It gives the publisher actionable data it can point to in order to prove its audience value in brand‑safety conversations with advertisers who sometimes need convincing that the news is a suitable environment for their ads.
But Dow Jones won’t activate its first-party audience data with just anyone. It saves that data layer for direct, private marketplace (PMP) and programmatic guaranteed (PG) deals with its buy-side partners, rather than the open exchange, where its audience data is more exposed to programmatic platforms.
Besides, open-auction bids don’t carry the premium CPMs that Dow Jones can get from data-enriched private deals and programmatic direct.
“For us, the focus is always better‑yielding opportunities,” Castillo said. “PMPs and PGs are where we can layer on our first‑party data, and those are signals we’re only passing in the private space.”
Meanwhile, Dow Jones uses the open auction “to fill whatever goes unmonetized,” Castillo said.
However, while Dow Jones prefers to remain direct-first, it will defer to the buying preferences of its close agency partners, Castillo emphasized.
“If the client is focused on programmatic and those are their preferred pipes, then we focus on a programmatic‑first strategy, whether that is a PMP or a PG.” But, notably, the publisher keeps its most valuable audience data outside the open auction.
That division between direct deals and open auction is possible thanks to Dow Jones’ long‑standing relationships with agencies and brands, Castillo said. Those relationships have been built over years of Dow Jones selling its publications’ tightly defined audiences of business‑ and finance‑oriented readers. And those close agency ties keep Dow Jones on RFP lists and give it room to insist on controlled campaign execution, she added.
From brand safety to brand ‘tolerance’
But even with strong demand and close agency relationships, Dow Jones runs into a familiar obstacle for news publishers: brand‑safety systems that treat the news itself as a risk.
“The challenge with being a news and politics‑heavy publication is that you hit that brand safety wall,” Castillo said. “It’s not unsafe content, but news and politics are often categorized as unsafe for advertising, which we do not believe.”
Here, too, Dow Jones’ first-party audience data proves invaluable in pointing out that keyword blocklists and blunt classification models actually end up excluding some of a site’s most engaged and valuable readers from campaign targeting simply because the article they’re reading mentions a sensitive topic.
To better serve the needs of both publishers and advertisers, Castillo argued that the brand safety conversation has to move beyond generic notions of “safety” toward a more nuanced discussion of suitability and tolerance.
In practical terms, that shift means more frequent and frank conversations with agencies and advertisers about what truly constitutes reputational risk and where lines can be reasonably drawn without wiping out entire categories of content. It also raises the bar for the kinds of targeting signals and monetization partners Dow Jones wants in the mix.
For example, Dow Jones partnered in 2024 with Ozone, an audience monetization platform founded by a group of UK-based publishers, including News UK, Guardian Media Group, Telegraph Media Group and Reach plc. Ozone’s contextual targeting tools sit directly on a publisher’s site, analyze articles and assign content categories that align with a brand’s expressed content tolerance levels.
According to Castillo, Ozone performed well with Dow Jones’ sister brands in demonstrating that news environments can serve as suitable placements as long as advertisers are clear about their tolerance for different kinds of coverage. Which led Dow Jones to expand the tech across its wider publisher portfolio.
For ad ops teams under pressure to experiment with every shiny object, Dow Jones’ strategy offers a focused alternative: Start by proving the value of your audience, keep direct relationships at the center of your business, and let those priorities determine which new tools and partners are really worth considering.
