The Week Kick-off: Real world events return as cookies crumble

The media world is beginning to take steps back towards normality, and we last week covered two industry events live in Europe. Web Summit drew more than 42,000 attendees to Lisbon, Portugal, while magCulture provided a celebration of pioneering print in London, UK. We’ve also launched a brand new report into the post-cookie options available to publishers… so join us for all that and more as FIPP kicks-off another week in media!   

Frances Haugen and more women at Web Summit 

One of the world’s best-known tech conferences kicked-off its first in-person conference in two years last week, and FIPP Reporter Sadie Hale was on-hand to cover the event. Welcoming 42,751 attendees from 128 countries, 2021 represented the first time in Web Summit’s 10-year history that there were more women in attendance than men (50.5%). 

Over the course of the four-day event, 748 speakers delivered 1,333 talks, including fireside chats, Q&As, keynotes, roundtables and masterclasses. Among these speakers was one of today’s biggest names in tech, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who told the audience she felt that Facebook would now be better off without Mark Zuckerberg, and said: “I believe in the power of archives, of documentation. Every human being deserves the dignity of the truth – that’s what my mother says. I am doing this in the hope that we can make decisions for the public good.” 

Frances Haugen on Centre Stage during the opening night of Web Summit 2021 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Web Summit via Sportsfile

magCulture Live

If Web Summit represented the mainstreaming of media tech voices, then last week’s magCulture Live shone a light on everything new and emerging from the UK’s independent magazine scene. In an action-packed day, more than a dozen speakers – many of them the founders and publishers of new magazines – took to the stage to talk about the publishing process from conception to launch. 

As you might expect from an area of the industry that is by its very nature built on emerging talent and new ideas, many of the themes discussed included gender, equality, and identity. Sachini Imbuldeniya, Founder and Executive Creative Director of Studio PI, said: “Since the birth of the internet, people have been saying magazines need to adapt or die. But I don’t want to talk about publishing or advertising models, I want to talk about discrimination in our industry. Twitter might tell us what’s happening right now, but magazines provide us with a deeper knowledge, a deeper insight.”

You can find out more about magCulture here.  

FIPP Congress

And speaking of real-world industry events… Don’t forget that the 44th Edition of the FIPP World Media Congress will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, next June! Taking place in the historic Cascais Citadel, on the outskirts of Lisbon, the 2022 FIPP Congress promises to be a welcome return to meetings, networking and interacting with colleagues from across the world.

Featuring a host of world-class speakers across two stages, this event is your chance to take stock of the impact of more than 2 years of the coronavirus crisis, with a strong focus on the opportunities in years to come. You can find out more here

Third-party cookies and what will replace them

The cookie is about to crumble and FIPP’s new report – released last week – explores the options available to publishers in the post-cookie world. Exclusive to FIPP members, the report can be downloaded here, and looks at numerous trends and activities, including: 

  • The evolution of cookies, from the 1990s to the present day.
  • How consumer attitudes to cookies have changed with rising awareness of data privacy issues.
  • Why publishers are in a great position to use first-party data instead of relying on third-party cookies.
  • Interviews with FIPP members and other industry professionals about what opportunities they see in the demise of the third-party cookie.
  • What Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) system means, and whether it represents a (partial) solution.
  • How the ad-tech industry could respond.
  • Ongoing data privacy issues, and why they should not be ignored. 

US magazine titles retained 95% of sales through Covid-19 

New research by Press Gazette, based on analysis of Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) figures, shows that the US’s largest magazines retained 95% of their circulation through the Covid-19 crisis. Strong print subscription bases and growing digital issue readership have helped the likes of Vanity Fair, Vogue and the New Yorker grow over the past year, and the top 50 circulations are still dominated by print. Full report here

And finally… 

Back to the UK, and the man who brought the ‘And Finally…’ phrase to a whole generation of news watchers, Sir Trevor McDonald is now the new GamesMaster, reprising the role from the late Sir Patrick Moore. The cult gaming brand began life as a 1990’s television show, and subsequently birthed a spin-off magazine, published by Future. The show is being brought back to life by E4, and will return to screens this month.

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