• by Alan Hart , March 26, 2019

This week on “Marketing Today,” my guest is Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, a nonprofit trade organization that plays a strategic role working on behalf of digital content companies in managing direct relationships between consumers and marketers. In doing so, DCN provides research and advocacy in guiding established media companies, including The New York Times, NBC, Condé Nast, and ESPN, as well as digitally native organizations like Slate, Vox, and Business Insider. 

During the course of our discussion, Kint outlines DCN’s premium digital advertising marketplace, TrustX, and discusses the duopoly of Facebook and Google as well as the issue of trust -- or lack thereof  -- when it comes to those two platforms.

Talking about privacy practices in the digital realm, Kint says, “If you look at the data around user trust, in the digital environment and digital advertising, whether it be banners and buttons or on mobile or any format, it’s really, really low relative to television and magazines or any other format. Why is that? Because consumers have never gotten comfortable with the way the digital advertising experience works, and this idea that they’re being tracked across the web only makes that worse.”

Kint goes on to add, “And so it’s something, as an industry, we have to solve for.” 

Highlights from this week’s “Marketing Today” podcast include: 

• Kint describes the career path that led him to Digital Content Next, and he provides an overview of DCN and its focus on premium publishers. (1:49)

• The great wall of Facebook and Google: Kint discusses the duopoly’s impact on content creators. (4:40)

• Kint’s take on today’s publishing models -- and what those models might look like in the future. (8:50)

• What happens when billionaires buy media companies. (12:02) 

• DCN’s stance on privacy practices. (15:55)

• Kint on DCN’s subsidiary, TrustX: "That’s exactly what TrustX is focused on: one hundred percent transparency, you know where your ads run, and you know where your money is going.” (19:47)

• Kint: “The pressure and the discussion around journalism and the press, and protecting it as an institution, has fueled me even more so in the last couple of years.” (29:27)

• Kint talks about veteran Filipino journalist Maria Ressa and the online news platform, Rappler, she co-founded with three other female journalists. Ressa was among the journalists honored collectively as Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2018. (30:44)