👇 Rob reveals the 'why' for a Navigator session 👇 #navigatorNYC
Navigator New York on May 6th is coming together quite nicely. I'm particularly proud of this agenda. While the website provides all the specifics, it doesn't explain why I chose a particular topic or speaker. I will share my thoughts on various sessions between now and Navigator to provide some additional context. The session with Janice Liu from The Mantis Group was one of the first I put in my agenda grid. That's because of my conversations with her colleague, Sarah Thompson, about what publishers don't even know about their own data. Long have I heard that as a publisher, I'm sitting on a gold mine of data, but the industry has only really wanted it for ad targeting. That gold mine is deep enough for most publishers to live off of, and that approach actually comes from a very cynical place: that my relationship with my audience could only be about ad targeting. Janice and Sarah opened my eyes to the potential of publisher data that extends beyond ad targeting. New relationships with brands are to be formed. There is the ability to enter conversations with AI companies armed with a genuine understanding of the data they want from us. There's more we can do with data, and we're just not doing it. A relationship with an audience is the foundation of publishing, and we haven't leveraged those relationships to their full potential. Come to Navigator to discuss and debate what that potential looks like.