Advertisers are showing renewed interest in directing some mobile spending towards independent media companies, but the shift is not a wholesale retreat from the largest platforms. A survey by EMARKETER and Datum Intelligence found that 63.9% of brand and agency respondents had moved mobile budgets from walled-garden platforms to independent partners over the previous year. The findings point to a search for clearer information about targeting, costs and the route advertising takes through the supply chain, rather than a decisive change in where most digital advertising money goes.

Schibsted Media is seeking to turn that interest into business by offering advertisers campaigns optimised with algorithms built around the publisher’s own audience data. The Nordic media group is working with London-based Nodals AI, whose technology uses audience and campaign signals to estimate which advertising impressions are most likely to deliver a chosen result. Schibsted’s portfolio includes Norway’s VG and Sweden’s Aftonbladet, as well as TV4 in Sweden and MTV in Finland. Schibsted said it completed its acquisition of the broadcasters from Telia on 1 July 2025.

The approach reflects a change in advertisers’ expectations. Audience scale and local knowledge remain valuable to publishers, but brands increasingly want evidence that their spending is producing measurable outcomes. Meta’s Advantage+ tools, for example, automate elements of campaign creation, creative testing and targeting. Meta says the systems are designed to help businesses improve campaign performance, although the company’s own test results do not provide an independent comparison with publisher-led alternatives.

Nodals says it builds separate models for individual media owners, drawing on signals such as reader interactions and campaign activity to help direct advertising towards desired outcomes. Schibsted’s first-party information, including logged-in audience data and engagement with articles and adverts, gives the company material to train those models. The publisher’s direct relationship with readers may also reduce its reliance on search for traffic to its largest sites, according to Schibsted’s advertising data director, Christer Ljones.

Schibsted has been incorporating the technology into direct sales after initial testing, and is developing native advertising products priced by clicks rather than by the number of times an advert is shown. The model is intended to appeal to established advertisers, including grocery retailers in Norway and Sweden, that want to combine brand exposure with performance measures. Nodals describes its technology as supporting click- and acquisition-focused campaigns, but its product claims do not independently establish how the system performs against Meta’s tools.

The opportunity comes against a backdrop of continued concentration in digital advertising. EMARKETER forecasts that Meta, Google and Amazon together will account for 62.3% of global digital advertising spending in 2026, with Meta narrowly exceeding Google in worldwide advertising revenue for the first time. Those figures are projections, not final results, and underline the scale of the competition facing publishers even as some advertisers consider shifting budgets.

Schibsted’s ambition is therefore incremental rather than a claim to outperform Meta across the board. Ljones has said the company is looking to attract additional spending from existing advertisers, protect budgets already placed with it and re-engage clients it had lost. The proposition is that publishers need not win every campaign comparison: securing a meaningful share of spending where advertisers are seeing weaker returns elsewhere could still make the investment worthwhile.

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Source: Noah Wire Services