Recently I shared what I heard in Madrid on the Spanish Media Study Tour and onstage throughout the week. One pivotal moment included hearing from Tom Armstrong, vice president global advertising at The New York Times, who joined me on stage after my presentation.

His three answers to falling traffic: Make the products so good people seek them out by name (“I want The Athletic,” “I want to play Wordle”), get good at daily habit, and build direct relationships. 

The result is 50 to 100 million people a week without relying on off-platform drivers, 13 million paying, and 150 million registered. 

“Our value to advertisers is that we can connect them to those relationships. And those relationships are strong,” he said. “There’s intent, there’s trust, there’s high engagement.”

I asked why the ad discipline pays: fewer ad slots, no pop-ups, the proprietary Flex Suite for most of what is sold, a rule of never doing anything that hurts the reader. 

“Well, I think it makes our readers trust the ads more and makes them more receptive to ads. We put the reader first. If you look at our revenue split, most of our revenue comes from subscriptions. It’s about 65%; 35% comes from advertising ... . We obsess over the reader experience. We obsess over our journalism, and we obsess over the ad experience because we know how annoying that bad ad experience can be.” 

And: “We’ve removed so many ad slots. It’s a very low ad load. And so when an ad does appear, it’s impactful. .. . They perform extremely strongly, way above industry benchmarks.” 

Digital advertising grew 21% in Q2 2026, “all driven by marketer demand,” much of it big partnerships that require integration, Armstrong said. 

The next bets are video (production doubled in Q2; the Watch tab runs full-screen vertical video ads with no clutter), games (tens of millions of players a week), and turning the biggest podcasts into shows.

Asked from the audience what he would do differently:

“Removing ad slots to make the reader experience better was a controversial decision internally because it was a difficult thing to do because you lose revenue. And I think, looking back now, there are sort of tough decisions like that that we made that, at the time, could easily have gone the wrong way, but actually, over time, have proved to have been good decisions.” 

And to the question of whether The Times starts from a privileged position and what a smaller publisher in a pageview market can do, Armstrong suggested “finding out who your sort of most engaged users are, even if traffic is low, I think you can still command higher CPMs and do interesting integrations around them. You don’t have to have the scale of The New York Times, I think, to be successful with that.”

Three award-nominated cases followed, all answering the same complaint from buyers (fragmentation, opacity, no proof of outcomes). And, in two of them, the same number: 80%-90% of digital ad spend in their markets going to Google and Meta. 

None of them is an events-and-branded-content story. All three make quality display buyable and accountable, which I think you can read as a useful correction to my own headline. What the argument is against is selling cheap, low-quality, anonymous volume. Premium ad inventory is part of the future.

1. Merel Gianotten (DPG Media): a self-service ad manager built in-house 

DPG has more than 80 brands across news, magazines, radio, and television in the Netherlands and Belgium, reaches more than 90% of both populations, and still “more than 80% of all the digital ad spend goes to Big Tech platforms. Let that sink in: 80%.” 

Merel’s diagnosis: middlemen and opaque tech fees that leave less money with the publisher, privacy, and brand safety the platforms don’t prioritise.

DPG’s answer is Ad Manager, an end-to-end self-service platform built in-house and AI-powered. An advertiser buys all of DPG’s digital inventory, its exclusive high-impact formats, and its first-party audiences directly, and builds more in a data studio.

2. Dipti Patel (Ozone): one booking across 36 markets

Her setup: A planner gets a €100,000 display brief on a Friday afternoon. 

“Who do you call?” 

Meta, usually, because nobody calls 15 agencies in six countries to be live by Monday. 

“Our industry is super fragmented, and this fragmentation is actually costing us money,” she said. 

Premium World, second place in INMA’s Global Media Awards this year, is one point of contact and one booking for international campaigns across hand-picked, audited premium publishers: five markets to 36 in a year, “revenue that would otherwise have been destined for the platforms.” 

The work behind it is publisher selection with no exceptions and market governance, “relatively unglamorous work, but it is unglamorous work that is actually delivering results.”

3. Hughie Devine (Mediahuis Ireland): declared intent inside trusted journalism 

At the start of 2025, Independent.ie was watching advertisers that had bought advertising from them for decades come off display across every category, with 90% of display investment going to Google and Meta. 

The fix is first-party and simple. A survey inside a standard mobile ad unit asks readers whether they are in the market for a car, a mobile contract, or a mortgage. A yes pools them into an in-market segment, the segment is retargeted with high-impact formats and a clear call to action, and conversion tags follow them to the sale. 

Volkswagen: 5,509 site visits from declared in-market buyers, 1,375 configurator starts, two cars sold and about €120,000 in verified sales, after which VW “put us on every single marketing campaign for every single car.” 

Year one: 20 brands and €204,392, all of it new advertiser investment, click-through rates of 0.19%-0.32% against a 0.07% industry average, and gold at INMA’s Global Media Awards. 

Hughie made the point: “How much has the word trust come up this morning and across the conference? We paired this with trust as well.”

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Banner art: Adobe stock image by Studio KN.

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