- The recording has been started. Excellent. So let me say welcome. So I'm professor Andrew Stephen. I'm, the L'Oreal Professor of Marketing and the Research Dean at Said Business School at the University of Oxford and I'm co-director of the Oxford News Marketing Program, which is what today's session is related to. And we're very grateful for the support of Meta in supporting and sponsoring the Oxford News Marketing Program and today's session. And my partner in crime and co-conspirator on all of this is Seth Rogin. Seth, do you wanna say a few words of introduction?

- Good morning from New York, everyone, and thank you Andrew very much. I'll take co-conspirator anytime; that's a fine title. We are very pleased to have you and I want to join Andrew in thanking our friends at Meta for supporting the program. This is an event that we've been looking forward to for some time; both today's program, as well as the one on Friday. To really do a quick bootcamp, if you will, around the concepts of business strategy for the news industry, around marketing. Today, looking at the basics and most foundational concepts of marketing and on Friday diving deeper into the future of news, that I think will be a very rich conversation, as well, exploring both the technology and the business models that may apply looking forward and looking out, which is of course, a rich dialogue we can all very much enjoy. So there you see a bit of the preview that Andrew's put up as well. For those who don't know my background, and of course Andrew's pedigree comes without saying, I was 13 years at the "New York Times" and then was the CEO of a startup that was a joint venture of Gannett, Hearst, Tribune, and McClatchy for of the largest news organizations in the world. And these days I'm CEO of a media consultancy called Magnolia Media Partners, where we help news and other media organizations figure out this puzzle of monetization in marketing.

- So what we're gonna do- So today, as you can see on the screen, we're sort of gonna talk, and we decided to sort of split today and Friday in sort of the present and the future, if you will. So today we're sort of thinking about well, how can we do a better job of marketing the news and news products and news organizations today? In essence, we'll talk quite a lot about our assets that we can work with to just enhance what we're already hopefully doing a good job with. Then on Friday, we're going to think about looking to the future. How do we strengthen this business? Make it more resilient, more sustainable to all sorts of disruption in the future, which also includes thinking about other business models. And so we'll talk a little bit more about what's coming up on Friday at the end today, but the idea really here is thinking about the now and the future and really ideas and practical tips and tricks, so to speak, of how we can all do more in the spirit of the mission of our organizations. So that's the idea. Seth and I wanna sort of share some of our perspectives and points-of-view, but we do want this to be interactive, so please feel free to pop anything you want into the chat. We're keeping an eye on that and we'll come to you, whether it's questions or comments or anything else you wanna share, maybe some experiences of your own from your organization and your part of the world. So please do kind of use the chat to cue us to those things and we'll make this as interactive as we can. We've also got some polling and few other bits and pieces to kind of gauge your views on things as we go through. So that's the plan. So let's dive right in. So what we want to really focus on to start with is marketing assets. Now, some of you I can see on the call, were part of our Oxford News Marketing Program for Europe into the latter part of last year, so that will be sort of familiar to you. But for others, we really wanna talk about kind of what you've got to work with; intangible assets that you've got to work with to really strengthen and grow and support the businesses that you are running. And then we're gonna take a deep dive on essentially two of these assets. Talk about customers, or customers, readers, audience, viewers, however we are going to talk about them; I guess I'll just call them customers. And then we also talk about branding. So that's the agenda for the hour or so. So let's jump right in. So maybe I'll tee this up and then Seth will chime in with some thoughts, as well, from his perspective. So, there's lots of different assets that organizations have, obviously. And when we think about marketing, we tend to work in the realm of intangible assets, as well as people, so I guess we're all tangible. But from an accounting standpoint, intangible assets; not the way that we'd think of buildings and equipment and so on. So there's a very strong human dimension to what we think about when we think about our marketing assets. But like any asset in a business, we have to protect them. We also have to nurture them. We have to grow their value. We also have to realize, and this is, I think particularly true for marketing, that we really don't unlock the value until we figure out how to leverage them. So, there's sort of inherent value, say again, in a building or a piece of equipment, but unless it's used, we're not really getting the value out of it. So again, when we're thinking about something like a brand or the knowledge our people have or perhaps insights from data and various other things, we have to really strategically think about how do we unlock the value so that we really are maximizing the potential? And then of course, how do we grow these things and protect them and cultivate them and everything else? So, let's have a look at sort of the framework that we like to use here at Oxford and this applies in lots of different contexts and industries; and there's these five assets. And like I said, we're gonna focus a lot more on customers and brand and reputation, the first two, and we'll get to why those two, if we have to pick two. But you can sort of get a sense that our customers, obviously we need demand. We need to generate revenue and grow that. So they are inherently important to any business. We're gonna talk more about brand, as I said, and explain why we think that that is particularly important, including in news and media organizations. But we might call it reputation or credibility or various other things instead of brand, but at the end of the day, it's a very core intangible asset that we can use and build and rely on. Then the other three, I think we sometimes don't think as much about, but are really, really important. And, we'll come to insights from data in a second, but first I think your people and partners are key. Obviously, say in a news media organization, journalists, editors, the people who are out there sourcing things and writing the stories and presenting the news and communicating it to the audience, they're obviously a massive asset that will link up with other things, too. Then your products, your services, perhaps experiences, digital experiences. These can all be important, as well. Which then brings us to insights from data. Seth, did you wanna talk a little bit about that one? Because that that's one that I think has been growing in its importance in all sorts of industries, but particularly, I think, in sort of digital news. So what do you think?

- Certainly, and I think right now, when we talk about insights from data, particularly from news organizations, we think of data often very specifically as data as advertising targeting, rather than some of the other insights that we're getting. And we all know the targeting environment is about to change dramatically. It already has with things like GDPR and CCP, and now we're gonna have this next wave of the diminishment of cookies and the like, and so as that data pool changes, our business will change, and that's certainly something worthy of a discussion today. But in addition, there are a number of other insights that become both marketing assets and marketable assets whether that is the reader behavior that is within your site and property, whether that is other polling and information that comes from within, how are you marketing yourself as a data insight provider? Is there a premium level of data insight that could be provided to brands, to political campaigns, to financial services that could certainly be of interest? Is there data and insight that could be provided to other backend data insight companies that could then license that information without ever violating, in any way, the trust that your readers have placed within your business? This, to me, is a very rich area of potential monetization, but also an area that news organizations often overlook. And not because they're not interested in it, but because they're just stretched. As news organizations, all of our budgets are stretched to the point where we have to make tough choices every single day. And the idea of hiring up a data science team in an organization that's laying off journalists, or can't afford another marketing person, that's a tough thing to get our minds around. And so what I hope, and obviously these are some brief classes that we're doing today, some brief discussions, but for those that either have been able to engage in the larger program or will be able to in the future, we'd love to dive into this piece of the puzzle. There are a number of different revenue streams one can get from your own data and insight and a number of competitive advantages. If you think of what really sets your organization apart, other than the report itself and the credibility, and we'll dive into some of those other brand assets, your relationship with your readers, both current and potential, as well as potential could be former, is a true asset to your organization and one that we don't often tap into enough. And if you think of the news organizations that are doing some very strong business and branding right now, they are making it a very top priority to tap into this insight from data. And one of the most powerful media organizations on Earth, which is the Hearst Corporation, which owns television networks, magazines, websites all over the planet, actually gets, I hope I'm not violating anything with them, but the great bit of their revenue from the data business. In fact, if you followed their trend, they went about acquiring data companies over the last several years and if you were to visit their corporate headquarters, there are now fewer floors tied to media business and more floors that have been tied to the data business because the data business is funding the journalism that they care so deeply about. So by diving into the data business, they actually have found a way to have it fuel the mission, rather than dilute it. The other thing that I would just say, Andrew, before we come back to this slide is as I was hearing what you were saying and looking at the other four circles is that it's important that we not only think about each one of these and that whether or not we have them, or we're aware that we have them, but how each one has been challenged and is being changed before our eyes right now. So when you think about something like your people and partners, your people and partner mix has probably changed, I hope it has, dramatically over the last five to 10 years. It may have changed dramatically over the last 12 months based on all that's happened in terms of the pandemic, based in terms of the way that people are working, the way that they're integrating. And part of that people and partner piece of it is also the structure of how those people interact. And so, as we're diving deeper into these, think for your own business, not just who are my people and partners, but am I making best use? And that's not a predatory thing to say best use of people; it's actually, we are all just organizations, right? Clubs of people who go out to do our best work. And so, are we best deploying those teams? Are we best tapping into the remote element of that work and best understanding that, and then finding alliances, which is a favorite point of mine, finding alliances where you least expect them to really build the business?

- Yeah. Thanks, Seth. And the other thing you can think about with any of these assets is not just sort of the, I guess the more positive framing that I use in terms of how can you unlock more value out of them, but it's also which ones are under more threat? Or which ones need to change more rapidly than others, or need to be refreshed or updated? And so, you think about that with people, for example, if you combine insights from data and people, there may be sort of an obvious implication there, which is about new skills that are needed or new capabilities that people need to either learn, or you need different people for these things; data science, for example. So there's a lot that you could unpack here and I think that the two big questions if I would sort of say, practical things to take away from even just thinking about these five, other than thinking about where your organization is at with all of them is how do you increase the value of each of these sort of asset categories to help you do better marketing and help the business perform better? But then also, how do you think about it from a what's under more threat or what needs to change more, or how do you, in some sense, protect what you've got because of challenges either within the organization, the industry, or just broader macro issues, as well. So there's a lot there. So let's kind of go a little bit further. But before that, we thought it could be interesting to, and here's one of those interactive moments, to kind of get a sense of what you think about these assets and how they might relate to your company, to your organization. So we're gonna do some polling here. So a couple questions, but the first one is "Which of these marketing assets is the most important for business success today?" So basically if you had to put your money on one, what do you think it might be? So if you go, you can see there at the top of the slide, if you go to menti.com and put in that eight digit code, you should be able to tell us what you think. So go ahead and do that. And then we'll have a look at what you're all saying. Which of these is the most important today? Bring that up. All right. So we're getting some votes in; always fun to see this. Okay. Seven people, eight people. Of course, it's a hard question because all of them are important, but... You know, if you had to pick one. Hopefully Seth and I haven't sort of led the witness too much.

- I was just wondering if I'm allowed to vote, but.

- You know what? If you want, we don't know. Vote as many times as you like. Vote early and often. Okay. Well, let's have a look. Let's see how we're going here as more come in. So hopefully you can all see that, right? So we've got sort of the 40% on customer, 20 on brand and reputation and insights from data, and then 13, and then seven on people and product, service, experiences, respectively. Okay, well, let's just... We've got another one we wanna ask you in a second, but Seth, any kind of quick reactions to what we are seeing here?

- Well, I mean, I think this is a very fair distribution and one of the central elements, I think, of our discussion needs to be about being customer-centric. And so, having customers rank highest is a sign of awareness. But to your point, there isn't a bad answer here. I think branding reputation is an area I'm very glad to see be very strong because we all know that the branding and reputation work the news industry has done, the legitimate news industry, not those who are posing as the news, has really not succeeded over the last many years. And that's not a criticism of us all; it's to say there's more work to be done and it's why we get together here today. And it's why we get together and it's why the Oxford News Marketing Program exists is to really study this element of how these items are interrelated to each other. But in my mind, that element of brand and reputation and customer centricity are tied at the heart of all of this; but there is no wrong answer. My hope one day is to see that brand and reputation element of it and the customer centricity for news, begin to win marketing awards, the way consumer packaged good products win those awards today at the Cannes Lions at other places. But the truth is the prizes don't matter. The real prize is in the businesses growing and thriving and I think all things stem from those two elements at the heart.

- Yeah, and as we'll get to talking about in a minute, they're all interrelated. And back to kind of actually what Seth here was saying with insights from data, for instance, you can use that to better understand the customer, better understand what they're interested in, understand if they want personalization, for example, or whatever it is that they want. Then you can improve the value of your customer asset through another asset in this set. So they're all important, but you can think about them as pieces of the puzzle that will fit together. But ultimately, in support of the business and the business needs customers and it needs to keep those customers, and we'll talk about the right customers. So it's good to see what we see here. Let me pose another one to you. I've got another one here. Where do you need to invest more in your organization? So you've told us what's important, but where maybe needs improvement? Okay. All right. So it's quite interesting, really. So people and partners seems to be a big one. Product, service, experience, a big one. I don't know, Seth. I'm quite interested that no one has said brand and reputation.

- I am too. Although I actually would love to ask if anybody, I don't know, is anyone able to chime in, Andrew? I would love to hear-

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Someone who said people and partners. And my gut is that you're probably thinking that because that impacts all of the others, right? If you have the right team, you can impact all the others. But if anyone has more to say, if you chose your people and partners, and you'd like to chime in and tell us why, please share.

- Yeah, please just unmute and go for it.

- All right. Well, if no one is bold enough to... It is a secret ballot, so I do wanna respect that. But I think it's very interesting and it's heartening to see the investment in people and partners. My assumption is also that because all of us come from within the industry, I've yet to meet someone in the news industry who feels overpaid. I've yet to meet someone in the news industry who feels as though they have enough colleagues to get the job done. And I've yet to meet anyone in the news industry who doesn't feel we could do a better job of chasing talent to bring folks in. And it would be very interesting to see, maybe after you have this discussion, if your feelings are the same, because the staff piece, of course, ties into all of this. I would say that the branding piece and the staffing piece are very closely aligned, right? As we think, not just of our brand for consumers, but our brand for talent acquisition. Do young people think right now, who are in high-tech industries, the most sophisticated piece of marketing, are they thinking of the news industry as the best place to share their time and their effort and their wisdom? And so the branding piece of it and the talent piece are very deeply connected, so great to see the feedback. Thank you all.

- Yeah. Okay. We'll ask you a few more questions in a little bit, as well, about brand actually. And I mean, yeah, my take on that is quite interesting. I'm not going to assume that no one says brand needs more investment because you don't think it's important, obviously. But maybe that there's a bit of a sense of the investment is where it needs to be. And so one of the things, when we... We're gotta talk about customers now, but then we'll talk about brand towards the end. Maybe we might change your views on that a little bit, because I guess the way Seth and I think about it, is there's actually quite a lot within that brand asset and sort of sub assets that you can think about, which touch on a lot of the other things as well. So maybe there are ways that can be invested in more, or maybe just differently, not necessarily more money, so to speak, but in working that asset and growing that asset in different ways. So anyway, we'll come to that. But first, just to kind of wrap that up, we're gonna talk about customers and brand and reputation. But as the arrows on this slide are trying to indicate, all paths lead back to these. So if we had to have a hierarchy here, that's sort of the way that the hierarchy might be, by this set up. These are certainly all interdependent, not independent assets to think about. So let's talk a little bit about customer, or customers. So a really simple kind of perspective, I would say here for the purposes of today, is just thinking really simply about customer valuations. So one of the things that I have done from a research standpoint and studied over the years is a thing that's used in a lot of the different industries, maybe a bit in the news industry, but not so much, is customer lifetime value. So basically saying, what is the value in today's currency of a customer based on all the expected future cash flows coming from them? Just the way you would value a company, or you would value an investment class or a stock or a share, or some kind of financial asset. And in that way of thinking, it's not so much important for now, how would you calculate that? But rather there's these two components and so it's useful from a customer management standpoint to think about, okay, well, we've gotta acquire customers and we've gotta retain customers. Now we wanna acquire the right customers. The customers are perhaps more likely to be retained because they like whatever it is that we are offering to them or they perceive value in it and they're willing to pay for that or willing to watch the ads for it or whatever it might be in terms of the revenue model underpinning the business. And we wanna lower the cost of acquisition as well. So particularly in subscription businesses, this is really important sort of equation to think about. We wanna get the right customers who are willing to pay the subscription fee that we're asking them to pay and we want to acquire them, these magical unicorn people out there, as efficiently, cost-wise, as we possibly can. So we try to lower our acquisition costs and find them in the right places. That's one half of it. The other half, of course, is retention. And when I say half, actually these are, I would argue, not equally weighted in their importance, and we'll get into that. But then we gotta figure out how to keep them and keep them subscribing or renewing or coming back every day, or whatever the relevant activities are that are value creating from a business standpoint. And we also gotta think about doing that efficiently. So how do we make sure that we're locking them in, essentially, into a good relationship with us, but not having to spend too much on those things. So not having to, say in a subscription business, have to offer discounts to get them to renew, but they just want to renew because maybe the product is so great. The quality of the journalism, for instance, and other content is valued highly enough by them that they wouldn't think otherwise. So you don't need to say, "Hey, your subscription is coming up for renewal. If you're renewed today, we're gonna give you X percent off." That might be something that has to be done, but you wanna minimize those sorts of tactical promotional activities, 'cause any cost incurred on acquisition retention is going to come off of the lifetime value of that customer. And so then you're left with whatever is after that; so just a general perspective on this. Now Seth, do you have any examples of-

- Yeah. Well, I would just actually point out that I think retention is probably the item that is least thought of within the news organizations that I talk to. Not because they don't care about it, but because they're stretched in so many different directions. And so we often think of our marketing and our advertising as being acquisition focused. How can we get someone to sign up? And once they're on, because we love our product, the user will love our product so much that they will most certainly stay for a very long time. But if we turn the tables and think about how we behave as consumers, it's a very different model and performance pattern, if you will. Once we are acquired by a product, that onboarding time is extraordinarily important. And so if you ask people who are experts within the subscription business, they will tell you that the first 21 days are key to retention. And it's why sometimes those low-cost free sample programs actually wind up hurting user retention. Because once someone has paid 99 cents for something or some smaller amount of money, when they're then charged a larger amount, it causes them to rethink the value proposition. Whereas, if you can just convince them to pay the right subscription rate up front, it will cause them to be retained in a longer field. And so pricing has a huge effect on this level of acquisition and retention. And so exploring those pricing models is important. We'll actually have someone joining us on the program on Friday who has built a subscription model business built on a one time upfront payment. They offer a discount, but you must buy the full year upfront. Why? Because that causes that retention. They are able to retain that customer, build a relationship over a 12 month period, and prove the value of the product over and over again on a daily basis. When I think of the retention piece, I think there are really three elements. There's the retention in terms of your own efforts that you are doing to make sure that you are building that relationship, proving the value to the reader, making sure that you're reinforcing that value on a regular basis. There is the effort not to also repel them, by which I mean, often we are so eager to retain our readers that we email them three times a day to tell them how great they are, how important they are, here's all the products. And I don't know if you are like me, but one of my great joys is in deleting email I don't have to read. And so we all take some field and we do the same thing in our credit card bill, where we start to cut expenses that don't feel the most relevant, don't feel the most important. And by the way, I think that word relevance holds over across this whole conversation. We'll discuss it on brand in a moment. And the third is awareness that you are in a competitive retention space, meaning that whatever time you are spending not retaining your customer, your competition is most certainly working to steal them away. And you may not think of someone like maybe a Netflix or some other kind of subscription business as stealing your business away. You may think of your competitive circle as being other news publications or publications that position themselves as news, but in truth, we're all fighting for share of wallet. And people only have so much to spend each month on subscription products, even as that total share seems to be growing within the global community and the more developed nations. But we are fighting against an entirely different, as the news industry, in an entirely different competitive set, than we were five years ago and most certainly 10 and 20 years ago. And so awareness of those efforts. Everyone who is selling your customer a subscription product delivered to their home, whether that is video, whether that is content, or whether that is a tangible product is fighting for the money that could be funding your journalism. And so that should affect the way we think about the acquisition piece, the way we use data and insight to acquire those consumers, and then how are we using data insight and our marketing muscle on a regular basis to retain those consumers? Because one thing that I'm sure is true, Andrew, from your research on around lifetime value and the like is that it is much more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain the one you have.

- Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, I mean that's sort of a marketing truism by now. But the other interesting thing, it's kind of two things I pick up on there. I alluded to this before, but you don't wanna acquire anyone, you wanna acquire the right people. Now who are the right people, right? So they're the ones who obviously wanna pay. They maybe have a higher likelihood of sticking around, higher retention rate, we would say. But they're people who sort of appreciate and value what you have to offer them. So they're just inherently more suitable for the business. And this is particularly true if we sort of think about more segmented or niche type media plays, as opposed to just a big general newspaper, for example, or a big general news broadcaster. But even then, you sort of have your sub-brands of different sorts of offer to people. But attracting the right ones is important and it actually also helps you on the acquisition of other people front through referrals or recommendations or word of mouth, and we shouldn't forget about the power of that. And that's because if you get customers who are very relevant and have a really kind of good, let's call it customer product fit with the organization, if you can get them in, then they're gonna understand it better. And so, they're gonna be able to explain it to other like-minded people, their friends, their colleagues, their family members, and take advantage of the sociological principle called homophily, birds of feather flock together. So we tend to live in clusters or live in bubbles, sadly, in some sense, but we do kind of run in circles of people who have similar interests and similar viewpoints to us. And if you acquire people who really understand your product and what you stand for, then they're able to articulate that to other people who might not have discovered you yet or might not be motivated enough, but then there's that social element that can help. And then the other point I wanna say on retention that I think is really worth remembering is back to what Seth was saying about competition. So here at Oxford, as part of our future of marketing initiative, one of our partners is an organization called the Institute for Real Growth, which is basically an organization that was spun out of WPP and has a number of partners like ourselves and Meta and Google and LinkedIn and various other organizations to work with chief marketing officers. And one of the studies that they put out was sort of, in terms of rethinking marketing, is this principle they call abundant markets, and it's really relevant here. So what it basically says is redefine your market, redefine your competitive set, particularly if you think of yourself as market-leading. And so, an example they might use in say, consumer goods, but I'm sure you can see parallels to the media business, in say consumer goods, you might be a brand manager at an FMCG company for shampoo used for a certain purpose. And you might say, "Look, we've got 65% market share of the dry and scaly scalp hair shampoo for men aged over 53 and a half years old." Very narrow definition of the market. And you might pat yourself on the back and go, "Well, we're amazing. We've got amazing market share." The problem with that is you're not looking around at who might be threatening your business and the alternatives or the substitutes that your customers might actually be attracted to. So you need to redefine the market by expanding it. And in the subscription business, say for news, the competitive set is every other subscription offer out there. And not just expanding it to say, "Oh, well, okay, people subscribe to the 'New York Times' or to the 'Telegraph' or to whatever digital news platform." It's not just saying, oh, well. Let's kind of go, oh, well, we're competing with Netflix, as well, Netflix and Apple Plus and Amazon Prime Video or whoever. Actually you're competing with the company that does dog food subscriptions and the company that does subscriptions for everything and anything, physical products, whatever it could be, because people are now, and research is sort of showing this, people have a subscription budget. Because as Seth said, you look on your credit card statement every month and you see all these things and it might be seemingly small numbers, but then if you add them up, you start to realize we subscribe to a lot of things in this household. So people are then starting to pare off subscriptions and therefore not be retained based on sort of a total budget of these monthly fees that they're paying for all sorts of things. And so that notion of sort of expanding your definition of your market, of your competitive set what we would call abundant markets as a perspective becomes a really helpful strategic thought exercise. 'Cause all of a sudden, you start to think about what the customer values in you in different ways, because now you are having to compete on a whole different dimension. So it's hard to do because we want to think of only our little neighborhood, but we need to expand that. And it comes back very much to retention. It's very relevant in a subscription business model, but it's, I think, equally relevant in a ad-supported business model where we're thinking more about we just want attention. So we are competing, we've been talking for years actually, in that sort of type of business around just competing for attention against everything and anything, right? So it's the same principle applied into, say a subscription type framework. But when we think about customers, just to kind of bring this bit to a close, back to basics is really important here. And the way that you acquire the right people and lower the cost of acquiring them and get them to work for you in referrals and recommendations and community and word of mouth and so on, and retain the right people and have them keep on coming back and therefore get more predictable cash flows to support the underpinning business model is by delivering them value and making it very clear what that value is and what you're about. Which then, I would say, is a somewhat clumsy segue into brand slash reputation. So there's lots that we wanna talk about here, but I want to bring you all back into the polling system first, before Seth and I share a few things. So again I'll ask you to go back into Menti and let's see how much you think brands matter in the news business. So again, if you've got the browser still open, it should be the same code and I'll click onto the next one. If not, go back in. But what I'm really keen to see here is your view on sort of as a one to five scale basically, is how much you think brands matter. So no one said they needed more investment in brands, but it's a different question to that, I think. So hopefully we'll get you all sharing your views on that. Okay.

- Should we have music during this or something?

- It does feel like almost we need thinking music or game show music, doesn't it? All right. Well, we've got, as you can see on the screen, slightly fancy animation, shall we say. The highest of production values, not really, but a little bit of a visualization here. So we're seeing, and we had about 16 people polling before, as well, so we're saying basically, I mean the top two boxes, a lot and extremely, account for what's that? 81%. So that pretty much says it all. Oh, there's another one. There we go. And definitely no one at the other end of the scale. So, okay, so we agree that brands matter in the news business. Now, Seth, why do you think- I mean, I fully agree with this, but I'm curious what you, from your experience, why you think brands really matter. 'Cause I suspect you probably would've said extremely on this.

- I would most certainly have said extremely and I salute the group for what they're saying. It'd be interesting to hear from one of the moderately folks, 'cause I love someone to disagree with us, because I think that's always very interesting to hear those perspectives. When you think about brand, it is even more important these days when our products are virtual. A brand was a tangible item when it was a printed piece. Brand may in some ways be tangible now on a mobile device, if you think of it in terms of push alerts and the like, but so much of what people are buying is their trust in the product and it's relevance in their own lives and how we establish that brand is key. And if you want proof of how brand matters in the news business, look how powerful it has been for the people who aren't really reporting the truth, but position themselves as such, how successful their businesses have been by branding themselves as news, right? By calling themselves things like fair and balanced, even if they're not, or something like that. These issues, these concepts, have been co-opted in many ways by non-news organizations that are informational sources, let's call them, sometimes sources of persuasion. But we see that they are powerful business drivers. And the important next step is really to find out what pieces of your own organization are your brand assets, really to understand that because understanding that, really being tough on yourself in terms of understanding how powerful those assets are within your own organization, how they are prioritized, is a great North Star to understanding how to drive business strategy overall.

- Yeah. And so, I wanna ask one more thing from everybody. So to what Seth was saying, so if we think brands really matter here, what are the characteristics of a strong and valuable brand? So this is a... Enter in some words, one here. So you can do up to three characteristics, curious what you think. Then we've got some thoughts on this as well, which we'll then share. Please go for it. Okay. It'd be interesting to see what, as the rest of you are typing this in, kind of emerge because this is where the rubber hits the road in terms of then building and maintaining and strengthening these brands that we agree are very important because the devil is in the details in terms of what actually makes it a strong brand. What are the dimensions of that? And I think we're gonna see what we are seeing here already, clearly trust, trustworthy-related things are bigger in the center of this word cloud. I think, in some sense, industry specific, but actually not just for your industry. Okay. So there's probably a few more people typing things in, but what we can see here is, I think, it fits pretty well with what Seth and I are about to talk about in terms of our sort of list of these things, of these characteristics. And of course there's no one thing that needs to be, so for instance, what we are seeing here is words related to trust and credibility, right? So we're seeing trustworthy, trust, transparency, reliable, credibility, precision, sort of being the quite prominent characteristics that you've all input here. And I think that's great. But I think the thing to keep in mind before I throw to you Seth, for your thoughts, but one thing I always say to people in any type of industry, actually, when they're thinking about brand characteristics is to always remember that it's a bundle of characteristics that can one, make the brand attractive and valuable to customers. And two, be a very valuable to the business asset and mechanism that can help you in tough times. And on that last point, so the brands, one of the things we always talk about is if you've got a strong brand, then even if there's a mistake or a crisis, or say in certain industries where there's product recalls, for example, stronger brands tend to weather the storm a lot better than weaker brands. And so you might say, "Well look, really our brand strength is built on trust and credibility." But really try and think of a bundle of these characteristics. And of course some will be more important than others. Some will need more investment or focus than others. But it's always going to be a combination and think of it in terms of what's most relevant to the customer, to the audience, to the reader, to the viewer. And how is it perceived in their eyes? So it might be great if your newsroom says that we are the most trustworthy newsroom around, but if the market out there completely disagrees with that, then who cares what the newsroom says, or who cares what you on the business side have to say. It really has to be sort of what we would call consumer-based or customer-based brand perception. And where there is a gap between what they think and what you think, then that's part of the marketing challenge is to close that gap one way or another. Seth, what are your thoughts or reactions?

- Yes, certainly trust and being trustworthy is the core of any news organization. What I would ask everyone, whenever you are in a meeting with the two sides, and we all know most news organizations because of the way that they are structured to maintain standards, there is this never-ending sort of conflict or wall between the two sides of the organization, both with the same standards at heart, one would hope, is if trustworthy were enough, we would be hiring more journalists. If trustworthy were enough within our brand, we would be deluged with subscribers. So the great part of an exercise like this is that these are all the right answer. What I would encourage everyone to do is to look at the ones that surprise you most here and ask if they apply to your brand. And I was very excited to see something I hadn't seen before as the words started to populate, which was fun. Because we're not just selling hard news anymore, right? We are selling lifestyle and sometimes if you look at a model like my alma mater at the "New York Times," one of their highest products for customer retention and expanding customer spend is an app that's all around recipes and cooking. And they are doubling and tripling down on that. They're doing the same for an app around technology called Wire Cutter and they're doing the same for a property where they just took some of their senior-most business executives and reassigned them to a sports-only product called The Athletic that they just acquired. And it's because of this sense of not just the hard news, but a bit of sugar with the medicine, that they're seeing they're retaining customers better and growing that subscriber base. And of course, many on wall street and beyond laughed when they said a few years ago that they would be at 10 million subscribers, I believe it was by 2030, and they've achieved it by 2023. And so we see this sense of needing these multiple aspects of the brand to be important. Now that can also be mind boggling because you're gonna sit in a meeting and say, "Well, we can't be all of these things." And so it is on all of us as the leaders within these organizations to prioritize, but also to challenge our organizations to say, "Well, I was just in this meeting of other news executives and fun came up." The other one that I love here, I thought I was leading the witness to relevance and I don't see it up there on the screen, 'cause it's my favorite of all of them, right, is useful. How is this information that I am selling as a service actually useful in the life every day of my consumer? Because when we say that our competitive set and our anti-retention competitive set is a list of other services that people already know they're getting value from, how is what we are doing each day, not just from an advertising marketing point-of-view, but from an executional marketing point-of-view, how is our product proving that it is useful in the lives of our readers, our paying customers, every single day? No one sits at Unilever and says, "Am I sure that Tide laundry soap is useful every day to the person who is using it?" They know that it is helping to clean their clothes. And many, by the way, even Tide sometimes is a subscription product in many countries. But in our lives, where we're selling a more ethereal product, a less tangible product in many ways, having that North Star in our mind of is our product useful? Is what we did today useful in the lives of our readers? I think an excellent thing to point out. Of course, the credibility and the trustworthiness is at the heart of what we do or else we have nothing, but I think it is important to figure out what these secondary targets are and they may well be the great differentiators because every one of your competitors is saying that they are trustworthy, whether they are or not. Every one of your competitors is gonna say they are credible and have high ethics. When someone doesn't have high ethics, they don't call it out to the consumer, right? And so it's not a brand differentiator, even if it's an important and valuable part of your brand. And so in terms of differentiation, that level of enjoyment, that level of usefulness or relevance may actually be at the key, even if it feels that it's not at the core of the mission of the organization. And I think part of the tough conversation that needs to be held within some news organizations is that we are so convinced and invested within our own nobility that we feel as though a word like fun or usefulness feels beneath our mission. And in fact it may well be the thing that fuels its sustaining, because if we challenge ourselves to think as product marketers and not as news merchants, then we can really help to amplify and grow the monetization side.

- All right. So let's share some of our thoughts, as well, further Seth. Let me just bring back the PowerPoint here and talk a little bit about this. So, and we'll put the link. This is an article that we put on Oxford Answers, which is our sort of news content site for things out of the Said Business School. But it's a piece that Seth and I wrote last month, which is sort of related to the broader program with the Oxford News Marketing Program. But specifically looking at some elements of branding. And so, if you haven't seen this, please at some point, go take a look and see what we have to say, but there's really eight points that we go through when we think actually about what brands need to have and what we need to think about to support those brands in the news business. Seth, did you wanna touch on any of these just to highlight a few? I think we've talked about some already.

- Sure. As much as it will sound as though I'm contradicting what I said earlier around aligning around things that are not necessarily purposefully tied, I actually think a statement of purpose is something that's very important when we're looking to market our products, because that purpose may well have changed. Not the purpose of our journalism; I think that stays strong and is even more needed now than ever based on so many of the challenges that are happening and so much of the disinformation that's out there. But stating that purpose so that your entire organization is aligned is key. And the reason why I say that is because one of the biggest pieces of feedback that we got from the first round of the Oxford News Marketing Program were the struggles within organizations to align around the business initiatives without feeling as though you're tampering with the credibility and trust and the mission of the journalism. And so bringing a group together to restate your purpose, it may sound like a soft effort, but it actually may work to streamline efforts for years to come and to ease and accelerate your transition to being a subscription and a higher level monetization organization that needs that constant cash flow in order to fund the journalism. And so, while we all may feel we know the purpose, I would ask you to actually talk to someone who's new in the organization and without leading the witness, ask them what the purpose of your organization is, and I guarantee you, if you ask five people, you will get five very different answers. And if you then ask five senior members of the team, they may also have different positions. They may be somewhat aligned, but there will be variances. And so we assume, because we work in a noble business, that everyone understands where we're heading and why we're doing it. It's very important to have this statement and if you look at many of the best news organizations, the most successful news organizations from a financial point-of-view, they have published statements of purpose. They have both internally and externally and we think often that these purpose statements are meant for readers and others to understand our level of high standards, and in fact, they serve a great value inside organizations to say, this is who we are, this is why we're doing it, and this is what our standards are for how we're going to do it. The other one that I would point out Andrew, just before passing back to you, is number two and three are often conflated. Where you see credibility and reputation. Credibility is what is generated from within your organization and the high standards of your newsroom. And I believe if you didn't care about that credibility, you wouldn't be on this call right now because you love journalism. There are easier ways to earn a living than to work in the news industry right now. We're all here because we care very deeply about this industry and what it does for the world and what it does for those that can be reached and that need to be reached. So that credibility comes from the standards from within and proving that. Reputation is not the same thing. Reputation is the external perception of your credibility and of your purpose. And so we all know that in a world where we say reputation arrives on horseback and leaves on a Ferrari, or there's some twist on that, on a regular basis, right. We earn our reputation through our credibility, but that reputation then is in the hands of everyone on social media and everyone that you speak to and all sorts of word of mouth, as well as in the hands of your competitors, who are then quoting and judging your work. And so we hope that you're managing not only the credibility piece of this, but reputation is not something that news organizations had to worry about managing until very recently. In the past, it was that these two were the same and they are now very different legs of the same stool.

- Yeah. And I mean, I would highlight a couple of other things here. Four and five about audience understanding insights, and then sort of using data. Brands that make really good use of data to understand their customers, current and future customers as well, or their audience, if we wanna think of it that way, tend to outperform. Now, why is that? Well, because they're basically using data and insights to be more customer-centric. I mean, it's not really a mystery that we would expect more valuable, higher performing brands are those that tend to be more customer-centric. But the key there is actually being customer-centric in a empirical evidence-based, data-driven way. And so I think these are a list of sort of important brand characteristics, or things to do to underpin strong brands in the news business. So ways of thinking about data, not just from a sort of advertising performance standpoint, or a sort of a revenue management standpoint, or content performance tracking sort of stuff, but rather, really trying to think, "Okay, well, how do we better understand our customer so we can make it very clear to them that we are relevant to them?" And then also keep on improving and innovating to stay highly relevant to them because they're sort of a moving target, as well. Again, back to that retention piece. So, I would look at sort of the first three on that list as obviously vitally important and what we saw on the poll before about trust and trustworthiness. They're sort of the table stakes. You would think four and five, and maybe seven with technology, they're maybe a bit different, but I would say again, if we think about that wider set of potential competitors, particularly if you're in a subscription business, they're very tech; Netflix, et cetera. They are tech savvy, they deliver data-driven personalization at a massive scale, and they make very, very good use of their data to derive relevant insights to help them be more customer-centric and relevant in people's daily lives. So you are up against them. You're up against the technology-enabled sort of competitor businesses and indeed the biggest technology companies in the world, in some cases. So that's also something to keep in mind but then the challenge from a practical standpoint, I think, is how do you bring that to life so that it becomes also part of your brand, so that your brand has a reputation for being tech forward, or more sophisticated? Not a clunky UX, for example. A more slick app, good recommendation systems, whatever it might be. Those sorts of digital product elements that sort of are meant to support the core product, if you will, can be potential elements of a more distinctive brand proposition in a news business. So yes, you need to have the top part of the list and what we saw in the word cloud before. But actually I think being more, obviously customer-centric, driven by data, and using technology to fuel that type of experience can put you in a different competitive playing field and be a differentiator; make you more distinctive on various things. So-

- To answer the- I'm sorry, if I can just chime in for a moment. I actually think that number five ties back this idea of audience performance data, which we've sort of had as a thread throughout the conversation, ties back to the word cloud that we just had. And that thing of fun or usefulness, those unexpected brand qualities, it's very important when we're doing audience and performance data work and looking at that, that we're not leading the witness, if you will, when we're looking at the data. Because if what we go into the data and performance of our business and say, "How many people were interested in hard news? Who liked the coverage of the weather?" Those sorts of things, we're going to find what we go to look for. And therefore, we will have misled ourselves in terms of understanding where to prioritize the work. And so, as we start to tie together the sort of strands of the conversation, remembering back to that piece about user retention, it's important to look at well, what are our most retained readers actually enjoying within the site? And by enjoying, I don't mean always the fun, but sometimes it is that, but what is it that's actually driving value and use and high frequency use for them. And then also understanding use patterns within those most retained consumers, because it may well be- I think we assume that the users we retain will be our highest volume users, but the data doesn't always show that. And many news organizations report back that they see a spike in page use during the sampling period, and then a fall off. The difference is which readers actually, during the fall off, cancel their subscriptions. And some, like all of us who are very busy, may simply not have the time to go through the sites and see all of the sort of never-ending flow of content that's being created by many news organizations. And so slow usage may not mean low retention level. And so I think it's important when looking at this audience of performance data is really taking a step back and letting the data tell the story to you, rather than leading the data to tell you what you already think you might know about the business. And then the last one I would tap into, as I alluded to earlier in the conversation, because it's actually where I think there's just so much untapped potential within our industry, is in partnerships. We are an industry that has been built really for more than a century around walling ourselves off from each other. A dialogue like this may very well not have happened a few years ago, because whether it was based around geography and owning a marketplace, whether it was around owning an audience, whether it was around fear but also audience retention, we are an industry that tends not to partner with each other. And I would ask you to look around the virtual room today and do it when you're at the next conference and find that person who may have been the legacy competitor to your business and see if there's a way you can benefit each other. I think that social media really lends itself to that. We're seeing that on some of the social platforms where they can drive sampling for some organizations. Have you thought of reaching out to some of the other businesses that sell subscriptions that you view as a competitor right now, or as so outside of your world, and offered a six week sample of your product for someone who is already paying a subscription model on another business? They'll have done the customer acquisition work and all of the expense for you and what it will cost you is virtually nothing, other than the effort to get the effort up and running. And they will drive new already qualified subscription payers to your new site. It's not just about understanding where our competitive set has changed; it's understanding where our potential alliance set has changed as well. And so if there's anything, I mean, personally for me, that I would encourage you to bring back to your organization and then understanding these brand assets, because they're key to understanding the purpose and the mission of your business, it's that there is a huge opportunity for us all when we partner together. I say that also having said earlier that I ran an alliance of a number of different competitors. And what we found is that we were able to win new advertising business; remember advertising? We were able to win new advertising revenue from clients that were not considering running with the individual news organizations that we represented, but were interested in those competing news organizations in aggregate because we built the scale and the data and technology to serve them. And so they wound up winning advertising revenue at a level that they couldn't do independently, even though the meetings were contentious. Even though these businesses don't really want to be seen as working with each other, the truth is for many of us, we will benefit so much more by standing together, both as news organizations together, but also as subscription businesses together.

- Well said. Okay. So let's move on to sort of wrapping things up and summarizing a little bit. But the article that we wrote that underpins that is there, the link is in the chat. Thanks Christina for that. So please, please have a look and let us know if you've got any thoughts on it, because we're always curious to hear what people have to say. Okay. So just moving now to some concluding remarks. Really just by means of... We sort of thought a few things. In terms of, I would frame this as priorities for strengthening the business today. Of course, there's gonna be several priorities and we're gonna highlight a few based on the the sorts of things that are being talked about already. We've talked a ton about customers. In even asking you, you said this is sort of the most important of the set of marketing assets in that initial framework. So, okay. If we think it's really important, then we need to keep on focusing on that. And in some sense, get to a model where all paths lead back to thinking about strengthening and growing that customer asset. In other words, customer centricity is the... All roads lead to customer kind of idea. So to figure out how do we deliver exceptional value to the current customers so we can retain them and then have them become your advocates? As I mentioned a bit earlier around these people can help you attract more people. And that can be very, very valuable in the advocacy kind of stand standpoint. But exceptional value is related to what we were just talking about with brand. Don't forget that people want to affiliate with brands that they believe in, that they love, that they think are useful or fun or meaningful in their lives; whatever it might be. And so I think the practical priority on that front is figure out what it is about your brand and how you are positioned in your market that your best customers, your highest value, highest retention type customers and heavier user customers, as well, I suppose, what is it about you that they really identify with? And that's an insight that you can then use in lots of different ways to inform any tweaks to the branding, to inform new products, new offers, new experiences or services you might offer, all sorts of things. And it might not be that you've got journalists in bureaus all around the world, or it might not be that you have hard-hitting investigative reporting, or whatever hard news kind of things. They will value it, but that might not be the reason they love you. If you can get into that, then that can start one lock a lot in terms of new ideas to kind of keep moving, keep growing. Again remembering that that competitive set is expansive and very different in many respects in terms of what they're capable of. So I think that's one point. The next one is sort of related to something we said earlier, but find the right new customers. So, you can go fishing and catch a fish, but you wanna get the fish that you want to eat, so to speak. So you want the ones who are gonna see the most value in your offer. Again, those people who love the brand, but you need to understand why. So when you're thinking about acquisition, I guess a more focused on nuanced perspective on that is important. Now it's hard to resist the urge to just get anyone and you get that through price promotion. Or you get that through sort of raise the bottom type approaches. They won't be the right people and actually Netflix themselves, think about a related business model here. For the first time they've lost subscribers, as we saw reported, I think last week. And in part, that was because there's a lot of competition for subscription services in streaming of course, but they keep on changing their pricing, as well. Because if you're too cheap, then you'll get everybody and anyone, but then they're not necessarily gonna appreciate you and then they'll leave. And as Netflix has seen from a investor standpoint, having a drop in subscribers is really not good for their market cap, for the stock price. So from that perspective as well, getting the right customers so you're more likely to keep them is gonna be better from that perspective of the business, if you are that type of business, than sort of constantly having to replace customers and they come and go as they please kind of ideas. So that's, I think, another point to keep in mind. And then, with brand, as we've been saying, build and invest in it; and the subbrands, and we didn't really mention it today, but there's a lot of personal brands, journalist brands, in news organizations. And they can be very valuable in and of themselves. And so investing in the right places at that level, as well, can be quite important. So even though some of you, all of you actually, no one said that it was really important to invest more in brand. I think rethinking how you could invest in brand might open up some possibilities there that will support the other sorts of investments that you wanna make in things like data insights, customer, people, and so on. And so really that's the wrap up. We just wanted to first of all thank you for joining us today. Hopefully this was an interesting discussion. Coming up on Friday, we have sort of session two, or episode two, of this series, where we're gonna look more to the future. So how do we kind of strengthen the business for not only, I guess, today, but really for the future? Think about some new business models and a few other ideas there to be better off for the future. And we have a guest joining us as well. Seth, did you wanna talk a little bit about our guest?

- Sure. So I'm not sure how many folks will be aware of a company called Puck News, which has been rising in profile. It is an organization that was launched by a gentleman named John Kelly. John was a top editor at the Sunday "New York Times" magazine, and then was at "Vanity Fair" and launched many of the digital properties that have succeeded best for Conde Nast Publishing and since then, went out to start his own. And this is a venture capital-funded, subscription-based news media product that has a different business model in terms of the way it compensates journalists. It compensates them somewhat with equity, as well. And so John is someone who thinks about news from how important and critical it is to society, but also how important and critical it is to reinvent both the marketing and the business model of it, as well. Andrew, we can see your calendar there, as well. And so it it'll be a great, rich conversation. John is a very opinionated guy, he thinks on a very global level, and we look forward to having you back for that discussion.

- All right. And the reason I was looking at my calendar is to remind you all the time for Friday. So that will be same time. So 2:00 British Summer Time on Friday afternoon. So hopefully you can join us for part two and if you've got any colleagues or anyone else who you think might find the discussion interesting, please do share the invite, share the zoom link with them. They're more than welcome to join us and be part of what we have to talk about on Friday. But that's it for now. So again, thanks for joining us and yeah, hope to see you all on Friday afternoon. That's all then, take care.

- [James] Thank you.