The relationship between the media and advertising has been a success story since its origins: journalists give news and advertisers make known – in different spaces and formats – their products or novelties and contribute to financing rigorous information and of quality The precise balance between information and advertising, however, is essential. Several subscribers and readers have written to me because they consider that there is too much advertising in the digital edition and it is not always of a quality typical of La Vanguardia.
“How do I defend myself from the advertising that floods the newspaper every time I access it? It’s annoying that all the news is full of ads,” complains Alejandro Soto, a subscriber from Costa Rica. Domingo Gabriela, who unsubscribed for this reason, explains that he has subscribed again to “support the press and for the quality of its opinion articles, but I continue to consider the amount of advertisements that make reading impossible calm”. Two more subscribers, Josep Juanmartí and Barbora Sedlackova, begin their messages by praising the quality of the newspaper, only to regret that the advertising modules that appear at the end of the articles are far from these standards.
From Godó Strategies, the Godó Group company that manages the advertising of La Vanguardia and the rest of the group’s media, they point out that one of their missions is to “try to put yourself in the user’s shoes so that they have the best possible experience”.
In this sense, Sergi Puncernau, digital director (CDO) of this division of the Group, emphasizes that numerous intrusive formats have been stopped being used (such as pop-ups or those that block the entire screen, which now appear very exceptionally ).
At the same time, however, he admits that in the “changing digital ecosystem” a large part of advertising is managed instantaneously by “a myriad of companies and technologies”, which prevents a prior control of all ads, although many inappropriate campaigns are blocked.
In this environment in which newspapers compete with the internet giants for the attention of readers and for the income of advertisers, the newspaper cannot be left behind to finance the best journalism, but always looking for a balance that can be assumed by readers and subscribers
