Three major things that I take with me from the INMA World Congress in Berlin 2026 are based on what Pippa Leary from Newscorp Australia said in the final session of the event on Friday afternoon. 

If there is one terrifying but necessary statistic every publisher needs to internalize today, it is this: 70% of the world’s population is Millennial or younger. 

For traditional news organizations that have spent the last two decades optimizing for a "scroll and read" desktop experience, this demographic reality is an existential ticking clock. 

Pippa Leary, Managing Director and CEO of News Corp Australia, delivered a masterclass on how legacy publishers can actually win in this new era.

Her core message? Stop playing defense against algorithm changes and start building the "third center of gravity" alongside Google and Meta.

Here is News Corp's playbook for surviving and thriving: by mastering first-party data, empowering sales teams with AI, and entirely rethinking visual storytelling.

The need for a complete first-party data stack

In a highly sophisticated advertising market, there is zero market for non-targeted ads. This was the entry point for Pippa's keynote. 

If publishers do not have a mapped, addressable audience, media buyers will simply not come to them. First-party data is no longer just a nice-to-have; it is a publisher's protective moat and their absolute gold.

Slide from Pippa Leary's presentation at the INMA Study Tour in Berlin 2026

If publishers do not have a mapped, addressable audience, media buyers will simply not come to them. First-party data is no longer just a nice-to-have; it is a publisher's protective moat and their absolute gold.

As a member of an EU state, I recognize that the privacy laws are quite different between Australia and the EU, and that gaining the same addressability under GDPR is a challenge. But it is a foundation that the media needs to aim to build through login strategies and data partnerships.

To manage this, they rely on a robust Customer Data Platform (CDP), specifically the Adobe Platform. However, Leary noted that for smaller publishers, the barrier to entry has drastically dropped. I think that for any publisher within the EU that doesn’t have a login wall, there is a need to combine a CDP with a DMP (anonymous data).

Simplifying the complex for the sales team

A world-class data stack is practically useless if your sales team cannot easily extract value from it to sell to clients. Sales teams are not data scientists; their job is relationship-building and pitching. 

And if they can’t answer a question, they will actively avoid getting in a position where those questions arise. It is all about boosting the sales confidence in your teams.

To bridge the gap between their complex CDP backend and their frontline sellers, News Corp built a visualization layer called Intent Connect, powered by an internal AI agent named Kai.

Here is how News Corp simplified the sales workflow:

Conversational Queries 
Instead of navigating complex dropdown menus to build audiences, a sales rep simply types, "I am looking for SUV intendants."

​Intelligent Expansion
​Kai scours the network, sizes the exact audience, and proactively suggests adjacent segments to expand the reach.

​Unearthing Hidden Insights
​Kai digs into the first-party data to pull out behavioral insights about that specific audience segment.

​The Winning Pitch
​Sales reps are trained to walk into a pitch and tell a brand something they never knew about their own customers. That level of intelligence wins the brief.

Looking ahead, Leary warned that agencies are building their own AI buying agents. Publishers must aggressively organize their data schemas today so that when these automated agency buyers come looking for inventory, the publisher's data is readable and ready to be bought.

I would however go even further and say that publishers need to integrate with their advertisers, and match buy-side data to sell-side data. Here a unified data/audience taxonomy and unified data methodology will be crucial. 

The way we have helped publishers is to use both anonymous and identified signals to enrich both advertiser traffic and publisher inventory in a unified way. Based on standardized taxonomies like the IAB taxonomy. 

And then be able to feed this match into intuitive sales tools, and link the data to AI agents that can assist your sales teams by being proactive experts on the local market.

Aligning content formats with younger audiences

The revenue delta between video and display advertising Pippa described the revenue delta between video and display advertising as stark. In Australia, the CPM ratio is roughly 5 to 1 in favor of video.

With intense downward pressure on traditional display ads, having armies of journalists punching out standard text stories simply doesn't make financial sense anymore.

In Sweden the demand for video content is significantly higher than the available inventory, and we also see higher CPM-levels, but I am unsure if it matches the 5 to 1 level of Australia.

Pippa also said that publishers need to pivot to visual storytelling, but putting a standard video inside a text article is no longer enough. The video is the story, and it needs to be vertical to drive engagement with younger audiences.

The Death of Autoplay
Mobile environments (where almost all audiences live) have strict viewability standards. Autoplay is out. Editors must now craft stories with massive hooks in the first two seconds to earn a "click to play."

The Adaptive Video Player
News Corp deployed an intelligent video player that automatically senses whether a user is on mobile or desktop and serves the appropriately formatted player. This single upgrade resulted in an instant 30% increase in video supply due to faster load times and better user experience.

The "Scroll vs. Swipe" App Interface
To solve the conundrum of engaging Gen Z without alienating loyal readers over 35, News Corp developed a dual-interface app. Older, known users are served the traditional "Scroll" experience. Younger users arriving via social media are instantly served a TikTok-style "Swipe" experience using existing vertical video content.

The Newscorp Blueprint: De-invest to Re-invest

Publishers cannot simply pile visual storytelling and off-platform social strategies on top of their existing text-heavy workflows. Leary advocates for a ruthless strategy of "de-invest and re-invest." 

Resources must be moved away from commercial and production efforts that no longer yield high margins, and redirected toward vertical video, off-platform engagement, and crucial backend tasks like cleaning up metadata.

For the first year of any new off-platform visual strategy, Leary's advice is clear: do not focus on immediate monetization. Focus purely on experimentation and driving massive engagement. 

Once you have captured the attention of that critical 70% of the population, the revenue will follow.

End-note: Unpacking the off-platform survival guide

Pippa ended her talk with their strategy for going “off-platform”, so I will also end this newsletter with the same topic. 

She said that for publishers who have been burned by 15 years of chasing social media referrals only to have their traffic wiped out by a single algorithm update, moving off-platform feels like a massive risk. 

But as Leary pointed out, with 70% of the world’s population being Millennial or younger, staying strictly on-platform is a guaranteed slow death.

To mitigate the algorithmic risk, News Corp developed a diversified, five-pillar justification for their off-platform strategy. If you are going out into the social wilderness, you need to know exactly why you are doing it and how it serves the bottom line.

Slide from Pippa Leary's presentation at the INMA Study Tour in Berlin 2026

The 5 pillars of News Corp's off-platform strategy

1. Brand Awareness (The Marketing Cost)
Treat your presence on platforms as a pure marketing expense. The goal here isn't immediate monetization; it’s ensuring your brand remains visible to a generation that doesn't organically visit publisher homepages. She emphasiszed the need for clear branding when utilizing off-platform for brand awareness, ensuring a unified format design.
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2. Referrals & App Downloads (The Workaround)
​To bypass aggressive algorithmic suppression of external links (especially on Meta), News Corp places the main photo or video natively in the feed, but drops the link to the story or app download as the first comment - quite a clever strategy, I must say.
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3. Engagement Share (The Revenue Stream)
​Platforms like Meta and YouTube share revenue based on engagement. Because professional publisher content is vastly superior to the average user-generated content, it can generate 5 to 8 times the engagement rate, turning this into a highly lucrative mathematical formula once you figure out whether photos or videos work best for your specific brand.
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​4. UTM Links (The Unshackled Affiliate Strategy)
Publishers no longer need to be constrained by their on-platform traffic to drive e-commerce. By placing Urchin Tracking Modules (UTMs) in off-platform content, like a TikTok video reviewing a hair dryer, publishers get paid for any clicks and conversions within a 30-day window, regardless of where the video was watched.
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​5. Direct Sales Sponsorships (The Premium Package)
​Social-first creators have massive reach, but they lack the deeply entrenched, always-on agency relationships of legacy publishers. News Corp leverages its sales relationships to sell "native amplifying modules," bundling its highly engaged off-platform inventory with its premium on-platform placements to offer unmatched reach to advertisers.​

The Golden Rule of the Pivot
​The shift to off-platform dominance requires a strict philosophy of "de-invest and re-invest." You cannot expect immediate returns while you figure out your off-platform footing. As Leary told her bosses regarding the first year of this strategy: "Don't even talk to me about money right now." The priority is purely about dialing in the formats, establishing brand consistency across social feeds, and earning massive engagement. Only once you have proven you can capture the audience's attention do you turn the dial toward monetization.

Final words

I think that sometimes it takes someone else to explain what you do. And I think Pippa Leary really explained the requirements for a modern media offer in a precise and detailed way from a publisher and media perspective. 

I have been a missionary of first-party data for the last decade, and then you see someone break it down into well-explained, and easy to understand snippets. Kind of makes me jealous.