“It takes two to make a thing go right/ It takes two to make it outta sight” – Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock
How Hearst Newspapers and Aditude modernized ad ops, unified data, accelerated decisions, and turned collaboration into revenue results.
Back in the pre-pandemic days of yore, at AdMonsters Publisher Forum (as it was called then), I would moderate a breakout session called Pubs Talk Back. Three publishers would sit on a panel in front of a room of ad tech vendors to talk about what makes the publisher-tech dynamic work.
And whenever I asked the right questions, they’d often talk about what didn’t work. No holds barred.
I’d ask any publisher what they wanted from their next ad tech partner, and they’d all respond the same way. “I don’t need another line of code.” “I don’t need another piece of tech.”
In a sea of ad tech sameness, any publisher is gonna choose the one bringing them value. What do you offer that the other vendor can’t?
And while that secret sauce always comes down to better monetization, the honest answer lies in partnership and collaboration.
When Collaboration Is the Differentiator
That’s what Hearst Newspapers got when they turned to Aditude.
With 45+ demand partners — a changing programmatic market, fragmented analytics, and a need to move faster — they needed a solution that could surface trends before they became revenue swings.
They also needed someone who’d do more than ship features. They needed a partner willing to dig into the problem with them and understand the business underneath. They needed someone who could help them stay one step ahead of shifts that could cost them real money.
They found them.
As Michael Irenski, Senior Vice President, Programmatic Strategy, Newspapers and TV at Hearst, told me, “It really felt like with Aditude, we were building a Hearst Newspapers product at the end of the day. We were moving off proprietary tech to new tech, and it felt like it was still ours even though we were doing things together.”
Receipts, Please
Collaboration is nice, but publishers need results. And for Hearst, the numbers showed up fast.
“We had already developed deep visibility into our core KPIs,” Irenski said. “But the moment I recognized the true power of the partnership was when we saw a major DSP buyer dynamically shift spend across multiple SSPs.”
Usually, that’s a half-day investigation, a few calls, and a slight panic. This time? Hearst saw the entire shift in near real time.
“Through our collaboration with Aditude, we built a suite of advanced custom reporting tools that let us detect hourly spend fluctuations and respond with precision and speed,” he said.
Hearst could instantly see how the DSP was reallocating, so they adapted their strategy by intelligently reallocating across alternative supply routes. Revenue remained stable, and in some cases, even grew.
Some SSPs thought Hearst had changed their setup because the signal into the ecosystem looked so unusual.
With their new tools, Hearst was able to cut partner deployment times from weeks to hours and new-feature testing from months to days — all with zero downtime, even during make-or-break Q4.
What used to take them six months now only takes two weeks. And because of that, they’re making significantly more money in that interim period than if they had waited to build it themselves.
The real change? Hearst’s visibility into the broader DSP marketplace. And with that clarity and macro-level intelligence, they can finally have more strategic conversations with their SSP partners.
When Flexibility Is the Feature
Getting here presented Hearst with the age-old publisher question: Should we build it ourselves, or find a partner to collaborate with?
And what unfolded is a blueprint for what real collaboration between a publisher and an ad tech partner can look like.
Aditude rolled out its Cloud Wrapper, complete with bid pre-fetching, custom refresh logic, and the type of configurability most enterprise publishers assume they’ll have to build themselves.
Then they layered in Exec Analytics, their unified, partner-level reporting suite, and suddenly Hearst could see not just what was happening across their demand stack, but why.
“Hearst needed granular control across dozens of demand partners. That meant giving them configurable bidder settings, partner-level analytics, and the ability to optimize at scale at their fingertips,” John Shankman, Chief Strategy Officer at Aditude, said.
And that kind of flexibility wasn’t custom-built. It was core to Aditude’s tech.
“We built flexibility into the foundation,” Shankman added, “So when Hearst needed something specific, we could deliver custom integrations and features quickly, without disrupting their operations or our platform roadmap.”
Collaboration In Real Life
So, no publishers, you don’t have to build it yourself to own it.
“What I love about this partnership is that every conversation with Aditude feels less like a vendor check-in and more like a strategic lab for innovation, where both teams are deeply invested in building the future together,” Irenski explained.
Inside that lab is a shared vision and mutual respect for the expertise each side brings. The teams challenge one another, problem-solve in real time, and co-create solutions that push beyond what either could accomplish alone.
“We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all,” Shankman added, “The shared ownership feeling comes from giving publishers real control, along with technical and strategic counsel. Hearst is in the driver’s seat with our tech and analytics, and our team is riding shotgun.”
And most importantly, with the right partner, you can have enterprise-grade infrastructure and full autonomy, without the overhead of managing engineers, servers, and integrations.
Reclaiming Their Time
For the Hearst team, the transformation wasn’t just technological — it was cultural.
“It’s difficult to watch talented people spend most of their day pulling data or analyzing something that’s already behind the decision cycle,” Irenski said.
With deeper, faster visibility, Hearst’s team no longer reacts. They predict. They experiment. They take calculated risks because they have the data to back them up.
“We’re no longer just optimizing — we’re innovating in real time,” he said. “That freedom to experiment, powered by precision, is driving our next wave of growth.”
Hearst and Aditude’s evolving partnership shows that true collaboration can deliver rapid innovation and publisher empowerment at a scale once thought impossible.