Monetizable Change for Newspaper Publishers – agility required for more than just sales teams
In the times of compelling competition for publishers, there comes an increasing expectation for their employees to step up to the game and prove their worth. Sales leaders are expected to make up for circulation revenue losses, print advertising losses and the lack of ability to monetize their Web properties appropriately. With these expectations comes a lot of pressure and some unrealistic goal setting. Logic tells that it will be next to impossible to make more on the same legacy products and systems. Therefor, there is an increasing need to introduce monetizable change. Monetizable change that allows sales professionals at newspaper publishing units to sell solutions, products and a vision that sets the organization up for the long haul and not just the here and now.
To bring monetizable change, sales units will need support and this is a given, considering that they do not have the skill set to create, program and develop products of the future. This means two things, publishers need to evaluate who they are in bed with, and they need to evaluate the agility of the teams handling their product development.
Who are you in bed with?
What we mean by this is forget the concept that you can be it all and do it all for your advertisers, alone. As publishers, or those working for publishers, your primary skill set usually surrounds your print products and the direct web entities that go around them, but many smart people before us and in our industry have proven that this level of knowledge and a business plan is not enough. The understanding of traditional publishing unit skill sets and the depressed bankroll to fund new and exciting projects, leaves us with one option and that is the option of content and application partnerships. What I am asking publishers to do is not unlike a Google, Microsoft or now even Twitter move, where they make it a practice to purchase (whole or in part) smaller companies who produce a product or hold a skill set not housed by them organically. I understand the venture capitalist steam to purchase businesses may not be an option, but developing mutually beneficial partnerships is. Partnerships for the benefit of applications and content syndication are necessary, and we are not just referring to the already existent Hot Jobs relationships that many have. First understand the areas your advertisers are interested in and where they plan to spend their marketing dollars. Then, once you’ve figured that out, the next step is acknowledging what role you can play in aiding them to fulfill their marketing goals and given the plethora of solutions available today, there is a good chance that your current internal offerings may not fulfill all needs. Therefore, it is that ‘needs delta’ that becomes your monetizable change.
All of the above are arguments on as to why we oppose pay walls for generalist newspaper products and as we’ve recently posted on the blog, the results from publishers who have launched their version of a pay wall are in and it’s not all good news.
The last thing we’ll say about these partnerships is that they require attention. Think of every venture as a mini-startup. Set your expectations, goals and resources accordingly.
Who’s handling your development?
If you choose to handle your product development in house, then you had better be ready to employ dynamic individuals who understand the impact their solutions have on the business, thereby calling for a sense of agility. Changes with online placement and positions in advertising, along with tools both Web site users and advertiser expect are making it increasingly difficult for incumbent publisher IT teams to keep up. It is because of this, along with the reality of who the competitors are, that we say if you are discussing a customer facing product and do not have more than a year to get to market with it, go externally to get it built.
It is important to note is that publishers are not the only ones who need to go through or are going through a review of their development talents. We recently posted a public statement by the MI5 in the UK where they stated that they were doing a full review on their incumbent IT staff, as they recognized many of the incumbents do not posses a technical skill set that can springboard them into the future. We can take this notion of performing talent assessments against the companies road map to even our creative teams. Be wary of taking your print creative team and tasking them with doing web design and banner ads. I guarantee that if you query your production teams today, very few of them will know what hover, pop-under, expandable and retractable units are.
So, all we’re saying is that as publishers we are very quick to have the conversation about the lack of futuristic know how of our sales professionals, but the evaluation of talent against the company road map, needs to be applied to every department within the organization. A publishers success in monetizable change lays in the hands of more than one internal company department.
