Jake Sullivan, Senior Director, Advertising Monetization at U.S. News & World Report shares how they turn first-party data into actionable insights, connecting direct and programmatic advertising for better performance and reader experiences.
Before Jake Sullivan started building finely tuned first-party data strategies at U.S. News & World Report, he kept rhythm as a saxophonist, held pitch in an a cappella group and even stepped in as a beatboxer when the group needed one.
Music was his first stage. But today, Sullivan, who serves as senior director of ad monetization, U.S. News & World Report is orchestrating a different kind of harmony, blending user experience, data strategy and advertising performance.
Sullivan has spent nearly seven years at U.S. News & World Report, evolving from a programmatic specialist to a full-spectrum ad strategist. His focus now? Using the raw material of user behavior to develop first-party data products that both drive revenue and also create a smoother, more personalized experience for readers.
From registration prompts to customizable rankings and filters, he’s always seeking ways to add new touch points that enhance the audience journey and meet the needs of advertisers.
“We want to enrich our readers’ experience first and foremost,” Sullivan said, “[and] package those interactions thoughtfully.”
Andrew Byrd: You’ve been at U.S. News & World Report for a while. What does your role look like today? 
Jake Sullivan: I started with programmatic and PMP sales before moving into a broader advertising role. Now, a significant focus is on strengthening our first-party data platform and integrating it with the rest of our stack.
We use tools such as our DMP, CDP and content recommendation system to ensure that every touch point a reader has with us—whether that’s registering, subscribing to a newsletter, saving schools to a list or filtering a rankings page—feeds into high-fidelity audience segments.
The DMP helps us organize those signals for targeting, while the CDP and recommendation architecture make sure the experience feels personalized on the frontend. By layering all these data streams together, we can build differentiated segments in areas such as education, health, finance and travel that outperform simple contextual targeting.
AB: Are the tools you just mentioned built in-house or are they third-party solutions?
JS: It’s a mix. Over the years, we’ve worked with different DMPs, starting with Salesforce Krux, then moving to Permutive and now ArcSpan. Alongside those shifts, we’ve built and evolved our own first-party data platform, which we call U.S. News Intent Intelligence. The DMP underpins that platform but operates separately. It’s where we do more advanced analysis, segmentation and activation based on the data signals we collect.
On the CDP side, we use Blueshift. The CDP acts as a user-level unification layer, essentially serving as a data warehouse that organizes data at the individual level, in contrast to the DMP’s segment-level view. From there, the CDP powers much of our personalization and content recommendation use cases.
Recently, we’ve been connecting the CDP and DMP more tightly. For example, we built an automated pipeline that extracts high-value user-level data from Blueshift, aggregates it to the segment level and pushes it daily into ArcSpan. That way, valuable insights we capture during things like account registration—intended majors in education, for example, investable assets in finance or health interests—don’t stay siloed in the CDP.
That way we can activate our ad campaigns through the DMP. A lot of my focus now is on breaking down those silos and building bridges between platforms so we’re making the most of every signal.
AB: You encouraged U.S. News & World Report to streamline its direct and programmatic business. Why and what advantages are you seeing?
JS: Publishers can learn a lot from how buyers and agencies purchase media. Instead of pushing our own custom audience definitions or separating conversations into direct vs. PMP, we’ve shifted to leading with our first-party audiences. More specifically, what makes these audiences unique, scaled and high-fidelity. That’s where we differentiate, not in page takeovers or ad formats that any publisher can sell.
To support this, I developed a tool called Audience Snapshot, and we later collaborated with ArcSpan to white-label it. It lets us show advertisers—using their open-auction campaign data—how our first-party audiences perform across KPIs like CPM, CPC, CTR and viewability.
Buyers often discover segments they didn’t expect would perform so well. That creates stronger conversations, aligns our direct and programmatic teams and builds more trust with partners.
AB: How did the idea for Audience Snapshot come about?
JS: I’ve always been the connective tissue between our open auction data and the rest of the business. We see hundreds of millions of impressions every month. While I do a lot of yield optimization—things like dynamic flooring or constant Prebid configuration testing—I also kept thinking: How can we use this data to shift spend from the open auction into PMPs and direct deals?
I realized we had this window into advertiser performance that we weren’t using for upsell. With tools like Supermetrics pulling GAM and GA data, I could see which advertisers were spending heavily, how they were performing against different audiences and where CPMs were inflated.
That’s what led to the Audience Snapshot. We’re packaging those insights into a tool that helps our sales team show buyers where they’re overspending in the open market and how a direct deal could deliver the same audiences more efficiently.
AB: The industry is evolving quickly. What trends or strategies is your ad ops team watching that could impact the business over the next year?
JS: We’re focused on staying true to our core, such as delivering credible, unbiased and robust content across verticals like education, finance, health, travel and real estate. At the same time, we’re exploring new formats and environments to meet audiences where they are. For example, we’re launching vertical video versions of our ranking lists and using AI to condense content into engaging snippets without compromising editorial rigor.
We’re also building smarter propensity models to serve the right content to the right audience, whether that’s short, digestible videos or long-form opinion pieces, and deepening on-site engagement through tools like “add to my list” or favorites. These touch points increase authentication and allow us to retain users independently of search referrals.
Additionally, we’re exploring partnerships with AI-driven platforms that compensate content creators, experimenting with crawler management and rethinking user-acquisition strategies. Overall, it’s about striking a balance between innovation and growth while preserving the long-term health of our content ecosystem.