Mike Beyman. Picture: Press Gazette
For US media trade title ADWEEK, the Super Bowl is its Super Bowl .
ADWEEK chief strategy officer Mike Beyman explained that as well as being the pinnacle of US sport: “It’s also the biggest moment of the year for advertisers. The advertising oftentimes is as watched and engaged with as the actual big game itself.”
Providing analysis and coverage of all that marketing is an all-hands-on-deck effort for the 100-strong ADWEEK team on a day that it crosses over from B2B media to reach a wider consumer audience.
Speaking to the Press Gazette Future of Media Explained podcast he said unacceptably slow site performance during the Super Bowl a few years ago led ADWEEK to review its hosting and CMS infrastructure – and switch to WordPress VIP, the managed website hosting platform owned by WordPress parent company Automattic.
After the 2025 Super Bowl , Beyman sent a note to his colleagues at WordPress VIP saying: “Congratulations, you made the product team bored because we had zero issues. That is a huge win for us.”
How ADWEEK makes its money
Events and subscriptions are growing revenue streams for ADWEEK but gratifyingly, given its title, advertising remains the biggest slice of the pie. However, the form that advertising takes is changing radically.
Beyman said: “If publishers are just still doing their traditional display advertising and hoping that kind of awareness content is going to be the thing that is driving the conversation, they are really in a bad spot.
“Ultimately, the traditional display units are going to be slowly replaced by performance, and making sure that there is a return on investment for the click.
“Just throwing wallpaper up and hoping that ultimately the RPM maximises is a concept that is going to be very much archaic…
“The ultimate goal of a publisher needs to be to think about how they can maximise their inventory, maximise their opportunity, be performance oriented, and share something that’s different and unique with the advertisers. There are a lot of really exciting companies working to make the traditional display unit more interactive. The team over at Firsthand is a really exciting proof point of that.
“The market is asking for actual, verifiable leads. They’re asking for real performance metrics. And they’re asking for spray and pray, run of site or even just broad stroke demographics. They’re asking for us to be able to target, say, senior marketing leaders in regulated industries that happen to be in the Midwest. And we can certainly do that. But that’s not something that even two years ago, we were actually being asked to do, or frankly, even capable of being able to do.”
ADWEEK also has its own in-house creative agency creating branded content and providing bespoke marketing solutions for clients. And it recently launched Marketing Vanguard , a paid-for membership network that provides in-person networking and learning opportunities for its members – supported by sponsors.
Google traffic went faster than expected
Like most US online newsbrands, ADWEEK has seen a sharp decline in traffic due to Google algorithm changes and the rollout of AI Overviews.
Beyman said: “As early as the middle to end of 2024 we thought that traffic was going to decline with Google fairly quickly. It went faster than even the most kind of ambitious expectations.
“And so we made a very concerted decision for the editorial team to stop just chasing every single story and to either only report on stories that were exclusive scoops or really just important to the audience.
“Investment grade journalism is a line that our CEO Will Lee uses all the time, stuff that really moves the markets, moves the conversation and is able to drive outcomes for our audience.
“That means that the team is oftentimes reporting and producing less, but what they are producing is of significantly better quality.”
WordPress allows quick rollout of new website features
In addition to improved site performance, Beyman said moving to WordPress VIP has enabled ADWEEK to quickly roll out new features – like its Super Bowl live blog.
“We could literally write just kind of quick quips about a variety of things. And that’s something that even 18 months ago was not necessarily able to be done.
“If you wanted to publish something, you had to publish an incredibly detailed and thoughtful analysis and story. But in practice, that’s not how the audience is engaging with the content and in real-time moments that’s not necessarily helpful and relevant.
“Our CMS has been very helpful, too, in terms of just streamlining a variety of basic things.”
He said WordPress VIP is also working with ADWEEK on finding new ways to surface and monetise its content on LLMs.
“I more or less talked one of the WordPress VIP senior leaders’ ears off about what I think the future of the industry is going to be and the ADWEEK vision of being able to meet audiences where they are in LLMs.”
Beyman said this will involve contextualising and vectorising content (turning content into numbers to help computers understand it) and also coming up with a system that controls licensing and payments from LLMs.
“I asked, why am I finding a third party? Can you guys just build this for me? And he brings on a very senior engineer on the product team, and we have a very thoughtful conversation around what a future pipe might look like…
“I’m very confident that they will be a key component to whatever kind of pipe is ultimately built.”
Human-created journalism is still core
And how is ADWEEK using AI technology itself behind the scenes?
“It certainly helps with research, with note-taking and with kind of the heavy lift. But one of the things that’s very important, and it’s very clear to our editorial team as well as to the entire organisation, is that our content is made by human beings.
“Anyone that is questioning and dabbling with that, especially if you are a content creator, you’re really missing the point of why you are in business to begin with, which is actually going out and doing the hard work of journalism…
“If you’re just outsourcing that to AI and creating slop, you’re likely not a brand that’s going to have a reason to continue to be creating content in the long term.”
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