roundtable 2015: local media association innovation panel

2015 Innovation Mission

Top Takeaways

1. Change Your Culture or Suffer the Consequences.

2. Mobile Requires Resources and a Strategy NOW.

3. Content Strategies Must Change.

4. Invest in Data and Analytics or be Left Behind.

Four Top Takeaways

It all starts with leadership…

• CEO’s at disruptive companies are accessible and transparent.

• Most host Friday town-hall style meetings.

• Company values are clearly communicated.

• Signs throughout the building convey the company vision/mission and values.

• Accountability is part of an innovative culture.

• Goals and review processes are in place.

• A culture of experimentation is a key component.

• Building audience trumps revenue in the early days.

• Perks are important (free food, play areas, etc.).

• Offices are collaborative – open and transparent space.

Change Your Culture or Suffer the Consequences

Five Things You Can Do to Immediately Change Your Culture:

1. Have the CEO, president or top person in the company host a monthly meeting/Q&A and invite all employees to attend. Provide refreshments and food.

2. Provide some kind of food/drink for free on a regular basis. This might just be coffee/soft drinks or a monthly pizza party.

3. Work on establishing your company’s (or department’s) values. Involve employees to get buy-in. Get creative and post them everywhere.

4. Poll employees to find out what is missing from their work experience.

5. Institute a quarterly review process that is tied to goals. Short and sweet.


CASE STUDY: BIG FISH WORKS – MARK POSS

– “After attending five IMs, culture has been the

huge, consistent takeaway for me. If the right culture

isn’t in place, nothing else will work.”


CASE STUDY: BIG FISH WORKS – MARK POSS


CASE STUDY: DESERET DIGITAL – ERIC BRIGHT


• We check our phones 150 times per day

• 90% of of us sleep with our phones within reach

• 800 billion photos per year are shared on mobile devices

• More than 50% of Mashable’s 42M monthly visitors come from mobile

• 74% of Cosmopolitan.com’s 35M monthly visitors come from mobile

• 80% of pinners on Pinterest are using a mobile device

Mobile Requires Resources & A Strategy NOW

• Yelp has 71M reviews on their mobile app.

• McClatchy crossed the 50% mark in 12/14; some are over 60%.

• The disruptors have hired mobile strategists - we need too as well.

• Mashable is having great success monetizing Instagram (native and sponsorship packages) – they have a whole team dedicated to this emerging opportunity.

• Cosmopolitan.com editor Amy Odell: “Mobile and social are everything to us!” They hired two people to work on their Snapchat Discover program. They are now reaching 11M each month and monetizing these efforts.

• Chelene Martin, Director of Global Partnerships, Yahoo!: “You need to have an app strategy or you will die.”

Our advice: Hire a mobile strategist at your company to figure out your plan and identify opportunity areas. This area requires expertise that is not often found at traditional media companies.

Mobile Requires Resources & A Strategy NOW

• “Get over driving traffic to just your own web sites” – Amy Odell, editor, Cosmopolitan.com. “We are engaging with 11M unique visitors each month on Snapchat. And we are monetizing that audience. Most of these visitors do not engage with us on our traditional sites.”

Content Strategies Must Change

Hearst/Cosmopolitan.com:

• Cosmopolitan.com editor does not report to the editor-in-chief of the printed magazine. She reports to the head of digital.

• There is some interaction with the print side but not a lot. They have 25 people working on the digital editorial team. This allows them to run the dot-com as a separate and disruptive business unit.

• Video is a critical part of their strategy – “Viewers like to watch people interact with things as opposed to talking heads,” said Odell.

• Shareable content is a huge focus (similar to BuzzFeed and other online news disruptors). “People share things that make them look smarter, that show they care about what’s happening in the world,” said Odell.

• Hearst is increasingly sharing across brands as well. “Why I Left My $95,000 Job to Move to an Island & Scoop Ice Cream” resulted in 71.3K shares company-wide.


The Mashable Collective: a team of creators, animators, designers, producers, videographers, photographers, and experiential engineers. Charged with interacting with their community on the networks that they are already living on. Currently they are focusing on Instagram, Vine and Snapchat. Up next is Meerkat, Periscope, Storehouse, Phhhoto and video options from Pinterest and Facebook.


Mashable:

• “Instagram is an intimate way for us to engage with our community online and offline” – Jeff Petriello, head of The Mashable Collective.

• Community Challenges & Follower Friday are two popular promotions on Instagram that are generating revenue.

• Their editorial strategy includes embedding Vine videos with every post.

• For live events, they are using Snapchat in a big way.

• They are using a free analytics platform to measure all of this – Iconosquare. “It’s robust and free,” said Petriello.


Tout

• This was an impactful visit on the trip.

• Tout is working with thousands of publishers from big brands to many smaller media companies.

• They help publishers create video themselves.

• The platform is free (rev-share model).

• Video from the field can be published in 30-seconds or less.

• High quality video production has no correlation to # of views

• Good example to check out:

http://www.goerie.com/video-news


http://www.goerie.com/video-news

The McClatchy Company

• Rolling out new print & digital products in partnership with the Stanford Design School.

• “We’re investing more in video,” said CEO Pat Talamantes, “We are staffing this aggressively.”

• Recently built an enterprise-wide video player.

• Expect enhanced audience & revenue over time.

• Website redesign features two video players on each page.

• Obits section now called “Life Tributes.”

• Print redesign features more white space & new names.

• Web redesign features highlights & three quick facts.

• Mobile redesign: improvements to app & responsive site.


Building audience is different than journalism!

• Be obsessed with social shares.

• Get comfortable engaging & monetizing your audience on sites besides your own.

• Invest in video – this requires dedicated resources.

• Experiment with emerging platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram.

• Consider a redesign across all platforms.

"Building audience is different than journalism," said Mitch Pugh, Executive Editor, The Post and Courier, "Outlets like Desert News, which sent two executives on the Innovation Mission, have figured this out, producing engaging headlines like “22 songs Utahns love singing in the car” that appeal to advertisers and readers alike. We saw similar examples (though not purely native) from Hearst and Mashable, which create content from multiple departments and don’t wholly rely on a traditional newsroom to build audience. As we look for ways to continue to draw new audiences to our products, don’t be surprised to see more and more content produced outside of the traditional newsroom.


Local media companies need to be obsessed with collecting data, analyzing it and using it to drive strategy and growth at their company. This requires a serious investment. They also need to understand the opportunities with automated advertising and take advantage of them.

Invest in Data & Analytics Or Be Left Behind

Automated Advertising

• “Automated advertising has moved from a buzzword to an imperative” – TaneJillings, sales director, The Rubicon Project, “The automated advertising sales rep has turned into an automated sales team. This is just the beginning.”

• Large publishers are investing in trading desks and now smaller ones are too.

• This takes more of an engineering skill set than a marketing one.

• Hearst launched “Core Audience” – a trading desk started by their digital agency iCrossing. The brings the worlds of contextual placements and programmatic together. Local media partners are accepted with a minimum price point of $1K.

• Programmatic is complicated and outside of our core competency. Local media companies that don’t manage this part of their business properly will leave serious money on the table. It’s essential to hire someone to manage this.


Data and Analytics

• “Data can be and should be accessible to everyone,” said Sachin Kamdar, CEO and co-founder, Parse.ly, “The whole newsroom should speak the same language. Analytics should be empowering not punishing.”

• “We are obsessed with numbers” – Amy Odell, Hearst/Cosmopolitan.com

• “We measure everything imaginable” – Jeff Pietrello, Mashable

• “Insights-driven optimization is now our goal at Hearst” – Adam Solomon

• Radius released a predictive marketing tool last year that contains information on 21.8M businesses in the U.S. (all open businesses in the country!) Extensive info down to POS system, deal history, social usage, annual revenue & more.

• Companies such as Cox Media and YP are using Radius - it’s worth a look!

• Yahoo! uses data to drive strategy. That’s why they are removing banner ads from all Yahoo! platforms (consumers hate them - they don’t work!)


An investment is required to collect and analyze data (and then use it to drive strategy and growth). You will be left behind if you don’t. Your competitors are investing heavily in this area - it’s time to make this a priority.


• The Observer Group – hiring two news innovators (“Digital content strategy must be different than print”).

• The Record-Journal – making culture changes first (and then rolling out the rest).

• Metroland Media Group – hiring experts in native and social for first time.

• Dream Local Digital/Bangor Daily News – creating culture of accountability; testing new products; creating social communities.

Bold Moves from 2015 IM Participants

• Tout – almost every attendee is now using them.

• Parse.ly – several are in discussions about their analytics tool (used by GateHouseand others).

• Radius – many are in discussions; price is high but value is high.

• The Rubicon Project – several are using their programmatic tools or looking into it.

R&D Partner Impact

What Our Panelists Are Doing…

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic Advertising• Maximizing the value of remnant web advertising inventory

o 60%+ of newspaper.com impressions coming from outside

the market

o 90%+ of KUSports.com impressions from out of market.

o Traffic not of interest to most local advertisers

• Shifting our operations to take advantage of inevitable market

trend.

o 52% of inventory purchased programmatically, versus site

direct, by end of 2015.

o With our waterfall approach, CPM can near site direct

pricing eliminating urge to “block” local advertisers from

programmatic buys.

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Programmatic Waterfall Approach• Historically used Google AdSense to fulfill out-of-market remnant

inventory at rates less than $1 CPM.

• Began testing ways to maximize remnant revenue, most notably by implementing Google AdExchange (AdX) on sites. AdX allows for real-time bidding. Publishers can set minimum CPMs.

• In addition to AdX, began testing other providers — Adhance, Centro, PulsePoint, Tribal Fusion, Open X. Test new networks every few months.

• Developed and continue to test a “waterfall strategy” that maximizes fill and CPMs based on past performance as well as monitoring of real-time performance. Highest CPMs at top of waterfall and get lower further down.

• Current “waterfall” – AdX, Centro, OpenX, Adhance, AdX at lower CPM and lastly, Adsense.

• Launched waterfall in August 2014. Strategy has resulted in 90% improvement in monthly ave. revenue, from 2013 to 2015, in Lawrence and doubled Steamboat monthly average.

Programmatic Ad Revenue 2011-Present

Lawrence Monthly Avg.• 2011: $7,430• 2012: $10,418• 2013: $16,277• 2014: $20,484• 2015: $33,263

Launched waterfall

in August 2014

Google Consumer SurveysA viable alternative to the metered-paywall approach

Surveys Revenue 2013-Present

LAWRENCE:Avg: $25,155/mo.

Launch: 7/2/2013Peak: July ‘14

STEAMBOAT:Avg: $2,166/mo.Launch: 6/1/2013

Peak: Aug. ‘14

Every time a reader answers a survey question, Google and partner newspaper each get a nickel.

House Surveys• House surveys allow publishers to

create surveys that run at no cost on the publishers’ sites that have enabled Google Surveys.

• House surveys backfill on the websites — they deliver only when there are no paying surveys available.

• Originally only permitted for publishers’ use, now can be used for local clients and monetized.

• We are testing $.10 per response, 1,000 minimum = $100 per question. Up to 10 questions.

• Each house survey is reviewed by Google for policy violations before it is allowed to go live. Violations: Leading questions, push polling, yes or no questions, trying to capture individual data.

House Surveys

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Nancy LanePresident

Local Media Association

[email protected]

@localmediarocks

Questions?

roundtable 2015: local media association innovation panel

Leadership & Management