Formulating a Fully-Merged Audience Development Team

Aud Dev groups are transforming from fulfillment to strategic functions while shifting influence between planning and execution.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, June 1, 2009

Whether driven by economics, a purely strategic approach, or both, publishers are increasingly realizing the parallels between print and online audience development. Indeed, for some, the functions are falling under a marketing umbrella. For all, however, it has become clear that these are perhaps the final silos that need to be centralized. We’ve seen it happen in virtually every other discipline—from edit to sales to design—print and online functions are merging.

Yet publishers are understanding the broader strategic implications of a unified audience marketing approach—and it’s the traditional circulation marketing teams that can bring the testing, marketing, analytics and customer behavior knowledge to the table. And this is now happening in a decidedly front-end and strategic setting, rather than on the back-end fulfillment and execution stage.

It’s Always Been a Natural Fit

However, these days, the strategic benefits are often arrived at out of economic necessities. As publishers cut costs and streamline operations, staffing is one of the first places to look. “First of all, I think the most obvious is cost savings, the advertising market being what it is and postage going up and expenses going up,” says Brian Wolfe, Time Inc.’s executive vice president, consumer marketing and sales. “Any opportunity to consolidate and be more focused is a big driver, a big component.”

Indeed, Time Inc. has gone through it’s own consolidating, and the consumer marketing division shrank by 30 percent earlier this year when Wolfe announced that the online audience development and print consumer marketing groups would be merged.

Nevertheless, Wolfe decided that the digital division fit best within consumer marketing, not the other way around, despite the company’s emphasis on digital development. “At least in our case, we feel like consumer marketing should and needs to play a big role in the digital landscape going forward,” he says.

In the memo Wolfe wrote to his employees, he described a combined print and online audience marketing division headed by VPs for each of the brand groups. From there, an “audience development expert” reports directly to each of the VPs.

For the audience development expert role, Wolfe looked for folks with a varied background, but a solid history of consumer marketing skills. “We try to take people with different backgrounds, but we like consumer marketing backgrounds because they understand the consumer and have the insights. They’re able to work with edit, understand marketing and can run marketing promotion campaigns that get results. They can run a marketing plan to launch Pets.com, for example, and drive people to the site. Finally, we’re looking for people that can analyze data and build promotional and marketing programs from their understanding of that data.”

This analytical role, says Wolfe, freed up the VPs to focus on more strategic planning. “They can do strategic planning for rate base and work with edit on the Web sites. They’re freed up to work on more of what they want to work on instead of sweating all the marketing details.”

It’s Central

The marketing group is now centralized, both in the org chart and physically. “Before, the marketers reported in through brands. Now we have a centralized marketing group, and that’s a huge departure. We can shift people in and out of jobs as the work demands. They’re all sitting together and they know what’s being tested. It allows for much better sharing, learning and implementation of best practices, and a more balanced testing schedule. They share thoughts and wins and frustrations just because they’re closer.”

At UBM’s Everything Channel division, Kate Spellman, SVP strategic marketing and business development, describes an audience development group that is not only centralized, but has taken on a much more up-front strategic role in marketing. “Audience development used to be more of a fulfillment function—getting audience for a Webinar, for example. Now, as part of marketing, it plays more of an online marketing and analytical role. It’s much more on the front end. We sit down with the group and examine the metrics that we have to apply and look at how we leverage what’s happening with the rest of the group because we know what’s going on with print, online and field sales.”

Rise of Digital Data Analytics

For Time Inc., digital analytics is a relatively new endeavor. “Initially, we weren’t really planning that role, but we are now,” says Wolfe. “We’re bringing those skills forward in the evolution of the digital side.”

Accordingly, all the analytical and testing roles that happened on the print consumer marketing side are now leveraged for digital. “This is a discipline that consumer marketing has. In the print areas we’d set up tests and report on them using the data to make informed decisions. We weren’t doing as much of that on the digital side.”

This created opportunities for analytics positions, which are tasked with measuring site traffic—uniques, referrals, page views, time spent and so on.

“It’s all standardized reports. It sounds like a simple thing, but we never had that before. The reality is, those folks really work mostly with the site editors and site GMs,” adds Wolfe, “but the reason we like that it’s in consumer marketing is the people in the job almost all have consumer marketing backgrounds. These positions help attract the right people, and they’re great jobs for people to aspire to from consumer marketing.”

A Significant Departure

The centralized operation can now facilitate organized and consistent responses to marketing and business issues as they arise. “When the recession happened in late fall, we had some response fall off in certain areas and we changed our marketing—offers and creatives—to respond to that on the fly,” says Wolfe. “Now we’re able to do that on all the magazines across the board. “Before, each of the VPs would have done it. Some would have, some would not have. Particularly for best practices, you want to get it out to as many magazines as you can.”

Another departure for the group is less financial reporting. Wolfe notes that the marketing team spent too much time reporting on financial results. While still a critical function, Wolfe felt the marketers were better utilized on strictly marketing functions—while still being fiscally prudent. “We downgraded the financial function, took it out of the marketers’ responsibilities. We still have planning managers that do it, but we’re asking for much less so the marketers don’t have to get involved.”

In his memo, Wolfe put it this way: “We will be a marketing and operations division. We well meet our financial and compliance objectives, but will spend far less time on financial reporting and variance analysis. Ownership and reporting of the P&L will reside solely within our division. We will bring extreme focus to marketing and innovation and to the execution of our marketing plans. By doing so, we will continually improve our P&L.”

Again, for Wolfe, the economics and workflow issues of downsizing force some decisions on who does what. By eliminating a chunk of the financial reporting responsibilities, he shifted the focus back on innovation. “Sometimes by downsizing you ask for less because you have to. And that’s a good thing. You can get rid of work that’s not value added. The easiest way to do that is to force yourself to do it because you don’t have as many of the people to do it, and it forces you to make some hard decision on what to emphasize.”

New Priorities

At Time Inc., there has historically been close cooperation between circulation marketing and editorial teams. That function has extended into the digital realm. In our interview with Kimberly Miller, VP consumer marketing for the People Group, in the March issue, she talked about her interaction with the edit team: “What audience development means here is basically to understand the consumer behavior on each of the sites in terms of the analytics: What sections visitors go to, how many pages they look at, which channels are they spending their time in, how they come into the site—what are the referring domains? So looking at all of those measurements and coming up with some insights to understand the consumer behavior and then sharing that with the editors of the site so they can make improvements or develop the next tool.”

With the expertise on working with editors on the print side, Wolfe feels there’s an opportunity to leverage that across the platforms—not just providing expertise for digital and print, but identifying patterns and opportunities that bridge the two. “I think there’s always been close work between consumer marketing and the editors. I think now we’re just working in a much closer fashion. There’s much more involvement in edit, much more focus on consumer behavior across the products. For example, we’ve been looking much harder at pricing. I’m not sure if that’s more of a function of the reorganization or the economy, but it wasn’t looked at as much before. We’re taking a bigger role in digital and the strategic direction of digital, similar to the edit piece—some of the things that digital should be looking at and working on.”

Diving Into Data

According to UBM’s Spellman, there’s also a new focus on analytics. The division has always had a tremendous amount of data, but the access, analysis and manipulation has been underutilized, until now. A first move for Spellman was to hire Tricia Syed as director of audience engagement and marketing. Syed’s role will be to ramp up the analysis. “Ideally, I want to have more of a business intelligence group that can absorb the user behavior data, activity data and profile data,” she told AD. “You can start to classify your audience and that ultimately can spill over into ROI for the advertisers.”

Again, Spellman points to the strategic role taking a front seat for audience developers—and it’s all supported by the analysis. “For example, in one of our discussions on the Channel Web community, one of the marketers wanted to do a marketing newsletter on a two-week basis for a Webinar. We determined that strategy would not get the recruitment we needed. A better way would be to integrate into an editorial newsletter. Now it’s really working as one group to say, ‘Okay, what makes sense for the audience? What’s their behavior? We have the analytics now to say this works or doesn’t work.’”

Spellman adds that before audience dev was involved strategically, marketing was more of a hit-or-miss tactic, which was acceptable, but no longer. “We had that before, but now we’re paying attention to it more. If we sent out the emails and the messaging was a little off target, it didn’t matter as much because we were fulfilling, but now we’re much more targeted. We’re bringing the metrics to the front end of the equation. Now audience development is a strategic position rather than a fulfillment position. The database is a core competency, and we have to protect it and treat our members well.”

Involvement in Paid Content

With the laser-focus on examining paid online content as another much-needed revenue source, it seems there’s another opportunity for the behavioral and customer-focused expertise of audience developers to get involved. Wolfe says this is an emerging role within Time Inc., which has been particularly public in its exploration of paid online content applications. “All I can say is, yes, it is a very hot topic here. So we’re not different than anyone else, but we are spending a lot of time thinking about it and learning about devices, trying to understand how our content might fit on them and what the business models might look like. We have some of our more senior-level circulation marketers spending a fair amount of time on that because, again, they have the skills that can help there. They understand the edit and the way consumers use these devices and how to analyze the different business models. Circulation marketers have the skills needed to move forward in this area in spades.”

There Are, of Course, Challenges

There are, however, some things to get used to. Centralizing operations is a painful move, for any company, requiring significant shifts in responsibilities, job functions and cultural attitudes. “It’ a very different way for us to work,” says Wolfe. “Centralization means loss of control for lots of people. Giving that up has been very hard for some. For the VPs, for instance, there’s less control of marketing for their brands. We need to help them be comfortable while continuing to move forward.”