• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 4, 2015

The dirty little secret of massive growth in online advertising is that this economy suffers the same income inequality we see everywhere else. Digital advertising continues its double digit growth story, but that largesse continues to feed mainly the coffers of Google, Facebook and a scant few others. Premium publishers, some of the biggest name brands in the business, are not seeing the same kind of growth in their ad revenues as the online economy at large, said Gannett Chief Digital Officer David Payne in his keynote last week at Mediapost’s Publishing insider Summit in Key Largo, Fla. Major brands are not getting their fair share of the expansion.

Why? Well, one of the things Web-endemic publishers like Facebook and Google have that most other major media do not is personalization. People are coming to these providers for information that is specifically relevant to their lives and needs.

“Personal relevance drives growth,” Payne argued. For a news provider like Gannett, the challenge is taking a century-old genre of general interest information and personalizing it more effectively across platforms to become as indispensable to people’s lives as their social media stream.

The key will be data of all sorts -- from the content itself to personal preferences, user behaviors and profiles, etc. But just as important is unification and a common system. Payne described the Gannett digital platform, which will get all aspects of the company to run on a common system, use a single user login, a single ad server, common APIs and more. The goal is to be able to use a single platform to launch over 720 products into 120 properties.

News needs to be a habit, and that requires much more personalized experiences. “We are on a mission,” Payne said. “We want to know everything we can about people coming to our Web sites.” Traditional anonymous users rolled up into a comScore or Nielsen number won’t cut it. “We need to know everything we can and migrate them up the stack to a known user with all the attributes I can get from them,” Payne said.

Just as critical as knowing the user is knowing your own content with that same level of detail, in order to marry the right piece of content to the right user in real time. The mobile device opens up new possibilities on both user data and content ends. Publishers  can now ask for permission to access locations, information in the operating system, cameras and more. They can even start mapping locations to physical beacons.

But having that level of access to people at every moment of the day changes the genre of news itself. “The notion we always had that you create sections and port that to mobile -- that is dead, done, gone,” Payne said. “We are in the business of boredom management.”

This may be a provocative and shocking statement from a traditional news provider. But Payne seems to get what only a few publishers so far seem to fully appreciate about the mobile environment. News is no longer occupying that morning newspaper read or early evening half-hour catch-up. Old content genres are now divorced entirely from old consumption rituals. You are now competing for mindshare with game and social apps that are right beside your icon on the phone deck -- apps that are more personally relevant and fun than your app. What will people choose when they pull out that phone because nothing else is occupying their attention at a given moment in the day?

“Habit is imperative,” Payne said -- quite rightly. People are consulting their phone to grab a handful of top apps, and if you aren’t among them, you aren’t in the game. His thesis is that to be there you need to “satisfy an itch” and be highly personal, contain a range of rewards for use, be fast and fun, and integrate easily with other features on the phone.

The cold, hard truth of apps is, you are trying to elicit habitual behaviors. “You are hooking people,” Payne said.