Month: April 2019

“The No. 1 business priority for The Telegraph is our subscription first-strategy and we are always assessing how we can best support this within our business,” said a spokesperson in an emailed statement. “We continually look to see where a resource is best placed to ensure ongoing investment in both our journalism and our subscription-first strategy.”

After years of relying on advertising as its core revenue stream, The Telegraph outlined its plan to become a subscriptions-first business in 2017 when CEO Nick Hugh took the helm. It generated 3.5 million registered users in 2018, 500,000 more than its target.

Any subscriptions business that embraces subscriptions over ad-funded general news, must dedicate resource into journalists that can create valuable content that converts subscribers. Churning out clickbait-style headlines that get picked up by search engines and perform well on social platforms and attracts fly-by readers, won’t cut it.

“Over the last year or so, the Telegraph has been recognizing the need to re-skill,” said Douglas McCabe, CEO of media analysis firm Enders Analysis. “For a number of years, it had underinvested in quality journalism, and so has tried to address that.”

In 2018, the publisher added 39 new journalism roles, and 44 more will be added over the course of the year, according to The Telegraph. Some of these new roles were added with the launch of a new women’s sports vertical, launched in March.

Publishers have hunted for experts in areas like product design, user retention and data crunching, ever since the pivot to paid started in earnest over the last year or so. Meanwhile, the trend toward subscriptions has created entirely new roles at publishers, like the chief customer officer, with a remit to examine the reader experiences more like multichannel customer experiences.

At most newspapers, sales teams have very different jobs today compared to five years ago. The rise of programmatic advertising has seen to that, as have the rise of multi-device selling. For publishers like The Telegraph, that have refocused their commercial strategy on paid subscriptions, there will likely be a lot more changes to come.

“The function [commercial roles] will likely change by as much again over the next five years,” added McCabe.

Since 2012, The New York Times has changed 85% of its commercial team and 40% of its newsroom: The cultural change of a clearer subscription focus runs very deep in a publishing organization, added McCabe. Switching focus to acquiring and retaining a core audience of paying subscribers requires different editorial, commercial and data skills compared to those needed to build and retain a mass audience outside a paywall. Some of the skills needed for a subscriptions-heavy future are easily translatable from more advertising-focused publishers and roles, and others are new.

The three core areas that need urgent specific skills changes are marketing, editorial and data analytics. These are the areas that will, therefore, see more flux in all publisher prioritizing subscriptions over ad revenue.

Most digital operations will have groups of people — data experts — who are split across the broader digital team, and be shared between marketing, product and ad operations, according to Michael Silberman, svp strategy at subscriptions firm Piano. They’ll spend a lot of time wading through Google Analytics data and doing analysis on ad inventory, making connections between audience size and revenue. “Those folks doing that kind of analysis will have skills that are completely transferable from an ad model to a subscriptions one,” said Silberman.

People doing audience development who may have also worked within the media buying team and so have experience in funneling traffic to help hit ad campaign sales targets, will also have easily transferable skills, he added. “Understanding the audience and finding ways to bring them in for those commercial purposes, and finding lookalike audiences — those skills don’t disappear in a subscriptions model.” They may even become more important in a paywalled environment where a decline in inventory may require knowledge of how to finely tune the ad targeting so that the same level of effectiveness is achieved with a smaller but more engaged audience than it would with a mass one, he added.

The post Why The Telegraph’s pivot to paid results in sales team shakeup appeared first on Digiday.

Additionally, because of TV networks’ heightened digital pitch, more digital buyers are expected to attend TV networks’ upfront presentations this year compared to prior years, said another agency exec.

TV networks are taking digital more seriously because ad buyers are taking it more seriously during the upfront negotiations that follow each year’s TV upfronts and NewFronts presentations. Historically, advertisers would strike upfront deals with TV networks first, then use their remaining money to secure commitments with the digital platforms and then publishers that had presented during NewFronts. But last year, Hulu and YouTube cracked into that early TV window of the upfront negotiation cycle.

The divide between TV and digital could narrow further in this year’s upfront cycle with the line between advertisers’ TV and digital budgets continuing to blur. “It’s all being considered at once now,” said Manny Hernandez, vp and head of display activation at Essence.

The flattening of the playing field between TV and digital can benefit certain NewFronts presenters, primarily platforms like Hulu, YouTube and Twitter that have original shows and large audiences to sell to advertisers in a similar fashion to the TV networks. By offering brand integrations and category exclusivity for advertisers interested in these shows, the platforms are able to create the kind of scarcity that originally warranted an upfront marketplace and that the digital ad market generally lacks.

Individual publishers presenting at NewFronts have to make a harder, but not impossible, sell. These publishers also pitch original programming slates to create their own scarcity. However, ad buyers can be skeptical of those slates. Publishers have a history of presenting shows that they will only produce if an advertiser commits to sponsor it, or they may present shows one year that do not premiere until the following year. “That’s the challenge: What’s real? What can I buy, and what can I buy now versus what can I buy next year?” said the first agency exec.

That’s not to say that ad buyers are uninterested in hearing from publishers during NewFronts. But they are less interested in hearing solely about their content. Content was always a proxy for audience; the reason to advertise against a show was to reach the audience tuning into that show. Since digital enables advertisers to reach audiences regardless of the content they are consuming, ad buyers want to hear more about the publishers’ audiences and to what extent they may have audiences that are hard to find elsewhere, which would translate into incremental scale and could supplement for scarcity.

The publishers presenting at NewFronts “have first-party data that they own that I don’t think they have brought to bear in as meaningful a fashion as they could,” said Chris Apostle, chief media officer at iCrossing.

Frustrated by how audiences have fragmented across not only TV and digital but also within digital, ad buyers are looking for publishers to use their audience data to help advertisers find the people they want to reach. And if publishers are able to stretch into newer arenas like podcasts to find those audiences, that’s all the better for buyers.

“We’re not going in looking to buy video. We’re looking to buy audiences,” Apostle said.

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The Times, which has been participating in the NewFronts since 2014, has historically used the platform to plug shiny new formats including virtual reality, or its storytelling prowess. But with advertisers still leery of news as a category and publishers trying to compete for advertiser budgets on turf that’s unfavorable for platforms, the Times decided a suite of contextual ad announcements deserved stage time; while the two-hour presentation also included news about its cable TV show, The Weekly, information about its investments in voice, and talk about its podcasts, Murphy had the second-most stage time of any Times employee, after the Times’ head of advertising, Sebastian Tomich.

“This is a bet for us,” Tomich said after the morning presentation. “I think there is an argument, and it’s early to make the fully formed argument, that the industry has course-corrected so far into precision audience targeting that there’s actually diminishing returns, and you can get more, at least for now, if you try a bit of focus on context.”

For the past several years, news publishers have had to fight against advertisers’ leeriness of news as a category. In November 2018, 43% of 400 media buyers Digiday surveyed said they avoid advertising next to news. That suspicion of the category has forced publishers to get more sophisticated in how they pitch contextual advertising.

“News is still challenging for some advertisers given the increased focus around brand safety,” said John Wagner, executive director of published media and digital direct at media agency PHD. “Intentions are a step to ensure advertisers feel safe and supported in a challenging environment.”

The Times has attacked the issue from several angles. Some, such as its recent embraces of lifestyle and service journalism, are partly the result of the Times’ embrace of subscriber revenue.

Others are the fruit of an increased investment in ad products. For example, in February 2018, it began offering advertisers the chance to target ads against the emotions that a Times story might evoke in a reader. Advertisers have since run “dozens” of emotion-based campaigns, Murphy said, which have on average produced a 40% improvement on click-through rates over control. A number of other large publishers, including ESPN and USA Today, have deployed ad products that allow advertisers to target readers based on their emotional states.

The Times built the model for emotional targeting by using machine learning to process information crowdsourced from a group of Times readers. It will use a similar tactic for the motivational targeting announced today.

While many attendees found a lot of promise in the Times’ presentation, some expressed skepticism that the new products would deliver what they promised.

“I question as to whether there is an ‘intent to buy’ that is proven,” said Peter Clark, the CEO of the media buying and marketing services group CHR Media Group. “They make these big assumptions that an ‘ad’ of any sort, sitting beside ‘content,’ really will drive alignment to brand value. It seems borne out of their history of selling ‘ad pages’ that simply sit beside editorial and the wall between the two that is so structural to their prior success.”

Yet as the Times keeps subscriber growth as its top priority, and with its newsroom just weeks into a months-long investigation of digital consumer privacy, it had no choice but to choose a less invasive way of selling their subscriber base to advertisers.

“It would have been really weird if, one year ago, two years ago, we’d gone the way the rest of the industry and said, ‘We’re sharing our subscribers’ personal information. We know everything about our subscribers, and we’ll let you pinpoint them as a marketer,’” Tomich said. “We’ve gone in the opposite direction. And that feels right.”

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