News IQ

Emotion-Based Buys: News IQ’s UK Version Goes For The Heart

News UK is expanding News Corp.’s News IQ platform to its UK edition, adding reader emotion, opinion, and preference data to support emotion-based ad targeting. Advertisers can optimize campaigns around emotional states and responses to content, with the platform tying together first-party data and other signals to build a single view of users. In a test conducted with 594 readers by LSE professor Paul Dolan, video ads viewed after emotionally charged articles were 45% more likely to be completed, and readers who finished a positive article were 32% more likely to finish a video ad. News IQ, which launched in the US in December, runs on AppNexus and the Salesforce DMP. News UK began adapting the platform for the UK market nine months earlier, and plans to use the data for internal marketing decisions as it moves toward a broader beta, aided in part by GDPR considerations and Cannes Lions exposure.

Nexstar Buys LKQD; News Corp Launches Ad Platform; YouTube Safety

Nexstar Media Group announced it would acquire LKQD Technologies for approximately $90 million, expanding its video advertising infrastructure to reach around 115 million US online video viewers across desktop, mobile-web, mobile-app and connected TVs. News Corp unveiled News IQ, a unified advertising platform leveraging first-party data, media properties, and data science tools to reach about 140 million US users in a brand-safe environment, complementing its existing Unruly video ad platform. YouTube outlined a four-step plan to improve brand safety in 2018, including more human reviewers (targeting up to 10,000), expanded machine learning for problematic content, regular transparency reports, and stricter ad eligibility with stronger manual review. The week also touches on broader industry themes such as ad fraud mitigation, programmatic growth, and cross-platform measurement for video advertising.