Turning competitor intelligence into a commercial strategy

The need

Work out which monetization approaches were worth pursuing

The commercial team believed there was scope to strengthen how advertising around news was packaged and sold, particularly through bespoke sponsorship and a stronger response to advertisers' brand-safety concerns.

Before asking leadership to invest, it needed to understand how competitors' offers actually worked, what advertisers were buying and what publishers needed behind the scenes to deliver them.

The starting point

Strong knowledge of its own advertising business, but limited visibility into how competitors operated

The organization understood its audience, advertiser relationships and existing commercial capabilities.

What it could not see from the outside was how comparable publishers made different monetization models work in practice, including the role their brand, audience and operating model played in making those approaches viable.

The important question was which parts of competitors' experience could realistically transfer to the client's own business.

What we did

Looked behind the competitor offer

We first worked with the commercial team to establish the options it wanted to investigate and what leadership would need to know before supporting a change.

We then interviewed executives who had recently left selected competitors, focusing the conversations on operating experience they could discuss without disclosing confidential or commercially sensitive information.

For bespoke sponsorship, we explored what advertisers were buying, how the offer was sold and what the publisher needed to deliver it. For brand safety, we examined how different publishers responded to advertiser concerns about placing brands around news content.

We distinguished what interviewees had experienced firsthand from their interpretation of why something worked and recorded the period their knowledge covered.

Rather than creating a series of competitor profiles, we compared approaches on a common basis: what was being offered to advertisers, the commercial purpose behind it, what it required the publisher to do and how strong the available evidence was.

We then worked with the client's commercial team to test those approaches against its own audience, advertiser relationships and capabilities. That allowed us to identify which elements could build on what already existed, what would require changes and what still needed further investigation before investment.

What they got

A set of commercial options with the conditions behind them made explicit

The work gave the client a global view of the different approaches available, supported by regional perspectives and a forward-looking assessment of how the market might develop.

The leadership recommendation was built around the client's choices rather than the competitors themselves. For each opportunity, it set out why it merited consideration, what would need to change inside the business and which investment questions still needed to be resolved.

Leadership could see what adopting or adapting each approach would require, rather than being asked to approve a competitor idea.

Why it mattered

The client could evaluate monetization opportunities as practical commercial choices rather than attractive examples from elsewhere

The research gave the internal team intelligence it could not obtain from public competitor material alone, but the value came from combining that outside view with what the organization knew about its own business.

The result was a basis for decisions about approach, investment and longer-term planning, grounded in outside intelligence and the client's own commercial knowledge. It also made clear which assumptions still needed to be tested before anything was implemented.