The Depth Era

Cory: 00:00:01

If I'm frank, I think one of the frustrating things in media, is there's a lot of time spent trying to fight the tide instead of seeing how do we get ahead of the tide.

Cory: 00:00:11

publishers needing to collaborate.

Cory: 00:00:13

And yet that's anathema because everyone is better than everybody else.

Cory: 00:00:16

Right.

Cory: 00:00:17

And we're all trying to protect our own.

Cory: 00:00:19

Okay, but in so doing, we've got like a prisoner's dilemma on some of the future of this.

Cory: 00:00:24

And so I do think the lack of innovation and quite frankly, willingness to collaborate and solve some of these problems at scale is a huge barrier.

Cory: 00:00:33

and just time and time again, showing publishers being on the, whether you call it nostalgia or sort of the, the wait and see train, and they lose every time.

Brian: 00:00:43

yeah, that is true.

Brian: 00:00:44

there is, there's a great track record for that.

Brian: 00:01:02

Welcome to The Rebooting Show.

Brian: 00:01:03

I'm Brian Morrissey.

Brian: 00:01:04

This week I'm joined by Corey Munchbach, the CEO of Blueconic.

Brian: 00:01:08

Blueconic of two presenting sponsors for The Rebooting's recent New Growth Agenda event.

Brian: 00:01:13

Which gathered together 40 top publishing executives discuss how the industry can move past the many external challenges it faces, whether that's declining search traffic or life after the cookie in order to put in place a framework for sustainable, equitable, and resilient media ecosystem.

Brian: 00:01:31

Now I'm not a believer in degrowth movements.

Brian: 00:01:33

I think you need growth to be sustainable.

Brian: 00:01:34

or you're going to resign yourself to ultimate extinction.

Brian: 00:01:38

but the kinds of growth that the industry had chased big traffic numbers, for instance, is clearly changing.

Brian: 00:01:44

I mean, Corey and I discussed how the weight of the publishing business is shifting from breadth to depth.

Brian: 00:01:49

That means depth of understanding of your audience, first and foremost, or really the many different audience segments you have.

Brian: 00:01:56

It means not treating all of your audience the same.

Brian: 00:01:59

It means using first party data to drive your business forward.

Brian: 00:02:02

Yes, through subscriptions, but also through advertising and crafting products based on a full understanding of the nuances of the people who are visiting you.

Brian: 00:02:10

And we've moved on from users and it might be time to move on from audience as a monolith.

Brian: 00:02:17

Blueconic is a consumer data platform that works with publishers to put in place the foundations for this kind of growth by zeroing in on the needs of the people who are attached to these publishing brands and give them value.

Brian: 00:02:29

I really enjoyed this discussion with Corey.

Brian: 00:02:31

I really appreciate Blueconic for their support and partnership.

Brian: 00:02:34

And I hope you do too.

Brian: 00:02:35

My email is bmorrissey@therebooting.Com.

Brian: 00:02:38

Now here's my conversation with Corey.

Brian: 00:02:47

Corey, thank you so much for joining me today.

Cory: 00:02:50

Thanks for having

Cory: 00:02:51

me.

Cory: 00:02:51

I'm excited to be here.

Brian: 00:02:52

So last week, New York city, at the Tribeca grill, some interesting arts on the walls.

Brian: 00:02:58

Apparently Robert De Niro chooses the art, himself.

Brian: 00:03:01

I can't, verify that.

Brian: 00:03:03

Anyway, we, we had the new growth agenda.

Brian: 00:03:05

You were, one of our partners.

Brian: 00:03:06

Thank you so much for that.

Brian: 00:03:08

And, you know, we broke into tables around topics and wanted to have very candid conversations under Chatham house rules that don't.

Brian: 00:03:16

Don't mention anyone's names.

Brian: 00:03:17

We gotta

Cory: 00:03:17

Lips are sealed.

Brian: 00:03:18

Yeah, but your, your table was, I was at a different table, but your table was, was talking about something that, I hear about all the time, right?

Brian: 00:03:27

I mean, we're coming out of the traffic era and publishers have to be audience focused, okay?

Brian: 00:03:32

And that sounds, that sounds, You know, that's like save the children.

Brian: 00:03:34

Sounds great.

Brian: 00:03:35

Who's, who's not, who's going to argue against it?

Brian: 00:03:37

Right.

Brian: 00:03:38

what were, what were the sort of three takeaways that you ended up, you know, taking away, from the conversations that you were having at that table?

Cory: 00:03:45

Yeah, well, let's start with the one person who went a step further than the save the children and actually challenged the premise and said, we need to stop calling it audience and start thinking about it as consumer, which was the probably the first person in all of these years of doing this and not to be.

Cory: 00:04:02

splitting hairs on the semantics, but we had a really good discussion about that and I think the orientation where you're thinking about Not just the people which is the shared premise of the audience piece of it but also in support of a particular business model and revenue and driving growth and much more of a business outcomes lens on the conversation than simply kind of the, the media first one.

Cory: 00:04:29

And I think that was actually something that everyone at our table who was approaching this from a variety of different approaches to revenue, some multiple revenue streams, others not, really came in agreement around was.

Cory: 00:04:44

Yes, it's the audience, but we need to be thinking about them as consumers in a variety of ways that they may consume our products.

Cory: 00:04:53

And that, I think is important to your point about.

Cory: 00:04:56

Not just thinking about traffic.

Cory: 00:04:58

that's a very non audience, non consumer lens.

Cory: 00:05:02

And that is a great way of starting to sort of start to make the distinction between what we're talking about here.

Cory: 00:05:08

So that was, I think, takeaway number one.

Cory: 00:05:11

that was a really good discussion.

Cory: 00:05:13

another was about how much of this requires alignment from top to bottom and bottom back up.

Cory: 00:05:19

And so that's inclusive of editorial, But management sales that if there isn't real clarity on what the priorities are and what is taking Priority over other things, not just a equal list, but really being able to sequence that out and having everybody understand what we're driving toward.

Cory: 00:05:41

this goes to the point of this is, this is a leadership question as much as anything else.

Cory: 00:05:45

And having a strategy, and knowing kind of what we're running at.

Cory: 00:05:48

So that was another big topic, that we spent a lot of time discussing.

Cory: 00:05:52

And then I think the third one was just about.

Cory: 00:05:55

How hard this is and because every company is a little bit different a lot of their financial situations are different therefore their constraints vary There isn't a one size fits all to this and again sort of save the children level of insight there Like of course, it's not but I do think there is you know in the discussions that we have outside of the spaces like the one

Cory: 00:06:17

you've created here where it's harder to get into The nuances and the differences, we end up spending a lot of time talking about the platitudes and not getting into where it's worked, where it hasn't, where we've made mistakes, where we have it, what's different, so we can actually

Cory: 00:06:31

learn how to address some of this stuff

Brian: 00:06:32

Well, let's let's do that

Brian: 00:06:34

here.

Brian: 00:06:34

I, that's what I say.

Brian: 00:06:36

Okay, so let's get into the details.

Brian: 00:06:38

Any specific, again, you can anonymize them, but any specific pain points, because you said, oh, that sounds great.

Brian: 00:06:45

And I don't think many people would, Object to moving from calling them audiences, or it's better than users, right?

Brian: 00:06:52

We went from users to audiences to, you know, talking about consumers.

Brian: 00:06:55

Maybe we'll even start to talk about people.

Brian: 00:06:57

because a lot of, by the way, a lot of traffic and an increasing amount of traffic is going to be, is, is non human.

Brian: 00:07:03

Right?

Brian: 00:07:03

there's a lot of bots out there and there's going to be even more bots out there.

Brian: 00:07:07

but let's talk about like where the pain points are, right?

Brian: 00:07:10

Because this all sounds like it makes perfect sense.

Brian: 00:07:14

So what, what, what, what came up as far as, as the, the stumbling blocks to making this a reality?

Brian: 00:07:22

Mm

Cory: 00:07:22

Yeah, one I'll start with the most, obvious, but probably the one that nobody wants to spend the most time talking about is.

Cory: 00:07:29

The budget piece of this, transformation is expensive, and takes a long time and it is just a resource heavy.

Cory: 00:07:37

And so a lot of the discussion was around how do you create the financial case, for making some of these changes and realistically, depending on your ownership structure and the health of the organization currently.

Cory: 00:07:49

Those are very real realities that anyone listening to this who knows anything about media and publishing is very aware of.

Cory: 00:07:55

One discussion that we had, we've had folks at our table who are working for publishers who are a hundred and something plus years old, others who are, you know, a hundred quarters old.

Cory: 00:08:04

and so the difference between the folks who are getting a start in this environment versus those that are on Iteration teeth of who they are as a media company and moving through, really that profile and again, the financial appetite and wherewithal that they have to make some of these changes over a period of time was just the honest reckoning.

Cory: 00:08:26

That was a good discussion of kind of laying the land there.

Cory: 00:08:29

So.

Cory: 00:08:30

if you're already deck ridden, taking on a ton more money to be able to make some of these changes is just not available to you.

Cory: 00:08:37

And so starting that conversation and right sizing the ambition and the approach to what the financial health of the business is, was a really important discussion.

Cory: 00:08:46

I don't think that takes place in a lot of rooms necessarily in that way.

Cory: 00:08:49

So that was a big one.

Cory: 00:08:51

another was around the.

Cory: 00:08:53

kind of sources of power.

Cory: 00:08:55

Let's call it the people aspect.

Cory: 00:08:56

But in an organization that is historically more run by editorial at this move to consumer and thinking about revenue is that is a different path than it is in an organization that is potentially born more in that orientation of how do we think about this as a revenue driving business?

Cory: 00:09:17

and again, if you've been around for 200 years, That looks a little bit different where those centers of power reside in the organization.

Cory: 00:09:25

and so that crafting of who is making the shots calling the shots on this and where does that impact how we can move forward talking about the organizational design around that was another big theme.

Cory: 00:09:37

And then the third part that makes it really difficult, is the technology, which is some have, lots of very old tech, a lot of homegrown things, just investments over the years that are perhaps not serving in the way that they need to.

Cory: 00:09:51

And, you know, we talked about the move away from traffic.

Cory: 00:09:54

It's a fundamentally different technology stack in a lot of ways than one that is more oriented around subscriptions and moving away from big reach story is so much more high quality, maybe niche audience.

Cory: 00:10:08

and a lot of folks don't have the technology.

Cory: 00:10:10

Capability both in the partners, but also in the skill sets to make that an easy or kind of quick transition for them.

Cory: 00:10:18

So those would be the three, the kind of financial health of the business, org structure, and then the technology capacity

Cory: 00:10:24

within the business.

Brian: 00:10:25

Yeah, it's funny because I can remember having, you know, covered this and been in this industry for so long.

Brian: 00:10:31

It used to be that the, this is like sort of my shorthand for it, I'll try it out, but it used to be that the, is the CMS that people wanted to bring, a couple of people at your table, were people that used to brag about their fancy custom CMS.

Brian: 00:10:43

And now, I think it's, you could call it a CDP, you could call it, I mean, you guys are in the CDP space, like in, I call it sometimes like a serum, but like basically where you house your core audience data, that to me is, is, that's where the weight is shifting, not like how you push the content out to, the quote unquote audience, but how, but what you know about the audience, you have to start from that.

Brian: 00:11:12

As the core, that just seems to make intuitive sense to me.

Cory: 00:11:15

It makes intuitive sense.

Cory: 00:11:16

But I also think the CMS being the center of this historically aligns with period of time where content was the king.

Cory: 00:11:25

And now that's also the shift away from maybe editorial needs to at least be on par with not ahead of the business side of things.

Cory: 00:11:34

And so I think in a lot of ways, that's a reflection of

Cory: 00:11:37

how this shift has manifested.

Cory: 00:11:38

It

Brian: 00:11:38

Were people, were people really, but like editorial is calling the shots.

Brian: 00:11:42

Where are these places though?

Brian: 00:11:43

Don't, don't name them.

Brian: 00:11:44

I'm like, my God, look, I come from the editorial side and I'm like, I wouldn't even do that.

Cory: 00:11:49

I'm sure this is one of those, you know, everyone has their religion on either side of it.

Cory: 00:11:53

But yeah, I mean, we, they talked about, you know, part of the reluctance has been to adopt certain technologies or different, different approaches because of the risk perceived by editorial, right.

Cory: 00:12:03

And threatening the quality of the journalism and all those things.

Cory: 00:12:05

Right.

Cory: 00:12:05

Again, I think it's like a matter of perspective, but getting to the point of what is hard.

Cory: 00:12:10

Yeah.

Cory: 00:12:10

Those tensions are part of what makes this hard.

Cory: 00:12:13

There isn't necessarily lockstep alignment right out of the gate for a lot of these organizations

Cory: 00:12:19

that they're working toward.

Brian: 00:12:20

So you work with different types, in different industries, companies in different industries.

Brian: 00:12:24

Are, is the publishing industry the most dysfunctional?

Cory: 00:12:27

I wouldn't say that.

Cory: 00:12:29

no,

Cory: 00:12:29

I mean, it has,

Brian: 00:12:31

Or is everywhere, because sometimes I wonder, I'm like, is everywhere this crazy?

Brian: 00:12:34

Or is it just here?

Brian: 00:12:36

You know what I mean?

Brian: 00:12:37

I don't know.

Brian: 00:12:37

Like I've sometimes used to feel this at companies I worked at.

Cory: 00:12:40

Here's what

Brian: 00:12:41

Is it crazy here?

Brian: 00:12:42

Or is it

Brian: 00:12:42

everywhere?

Cory: 00:12:43

every everyone has this.

Cory: 00:12:45

I say this right that every every organization thinks that they're a snowflake, but all snowflakes are made out of snow.

Cory: 00:12:50

So we all have our things that are similar and things that are different.

Cory: 00:12:53

What I would say about media.

Cory: 00:12:54

What makes it different is up until now, the shifts that we're talking about away from content toward consumer.

Cory: 00:13:01

are existential.

Cory: 00:13:03

I mean, your organization exists because of this.

Cory: 00:13:06

There's an existential threat that has been posed to media and publishing that I don't think is shared by really any other industry.

Cory: 00:13:13

and if you couple that with, The fundamental, kind of public good that much of media and publishing, at least a large chunk of it is is serving.

Cory: 00:13:25

You have a very unique dynamic at play there that doesn't exist in retail or C.

Cory: 00:13:31

P.

Cory: 00:13:32

G.

Cory: 00:13:32

or finance or wherever else that we work with.

Cory: 00:13:36

And so I think that sense of there is again the existential threats that have been posed.

Cory: 00:13:42

And the elevated role that these organizations play in a social context creates some pretty unique challenges that don't, they have echoes elsewhere, but do not resonate with the same, in

Cory: 00:13:56

other industries, I would say.

Cory: 00:13:57

Okay.

Cory: 00:14:06

Okay.

Brian: 00:14:13

I guess the advantage of when your house is on fire, usually those sort of things go, get put to the side.

Brian: 00:14:19

And this is a time when obviously there are a lot of pressures on this business.

Brian: 00:14:25

And.

Brian: 00:14:26

Change comes slowly and then all at once and anyone who watched the open AI demo and then the Google announcement with generative AI coming into search, this is going to be a far different industry.

Brian: 00:14:37

I just had, a coffee with a executive at a very large, media company.

Brian: 00:14:44

And one of the things he said to me that really, stuck was he was like, the way we make money in five years is not good.

Brian: 00:14:49

I know it's not going to be like how we make money now.

Brian: 00:14:52

and every single organization needs to sort of embrace that.

Brian: 00:14:58

And I, I personally, I get sometimes frustrated that there's a little bit of nostalgia in this industry.

Brian: 00:15:03

I don't know if it exists in many other industries.

Brian: 00:15:05

I mean, I get it, like wanting to go back to the way it was selling ads on pages.

Brian: 00:15:09

And, but you can't watch the open AI, the, the GPT 4.

Brian: 00:15:15

0.

Brian: 00:15:15

Translating into Italian in real time.

Brian: 00:15:17

And I said it at my table, it's hard, it's hard to see that and then say, yeah, people are going to be like going to web pages, hitting back buttons.

Brian: 00:15:25

And like, it's just difficult.

Brian: 00:15:27

I don't know what it's going to be out there, but that is difficult to know.

Brian: 00:15:31

Now, one of the things that I see a lot is publishers struggle with the loss of signal.

Brian: 00:15:38

Okay.

Brian: 00:15:39

And they struggle with competing.

Brian: 00:15:42

You compete with everyone, right?

Brian: 00:15:43

And you've got these closed loop attribution systems that are, I don't know how publishers like tell, tell a story or be able to compete with them.

Brian: 00:15:52

how do, how do they end up competing with, you know, something like retail media when they can't prove that the, that their ads are working as well as they would like to think they are.

Cory: 00:16:03

know, I think there's a couple pieces to that.

Cory: 00:16:05

One is, based on the findings coming out of the Google antitrust lawsuit that we saw even just last week.

Cory: 00:16:14

I think there's.

Cory: 00:16:16

A lot of let's call it fat in every source of advertising attribution coming back so i'm i'm not willing to say that the Retail media networks are just so far advanced further than what a publisher could be providing Right now.

Cory: 00:16:34

but this goes back to that financial piece of being able to invest and what, what that has looked like.

Cory: 00:16:39

But I don't know if there's such an added level of sophistication there that that would have been out of reach.

Cory: 00:16:43

If I'm frank, I think one of the frustrating things in media, and this goes back to your point about the nostalgia is there's a lot of time spent trying to fight the tide instead of seeing how do we get ahead of the tide.

Cory: 00:16:55

Like, this is crazy that we're still having these.

Cory: 00:16:59

First, it was Facebook and Google and letting the fox into the hen house.

Cory: 00:17:01

And now it's, you know, everybody making big moves and figuring out how to navigate this to better and less effect.

Cory: 00:17:11

But I came up, I think at one of the tables or perhaps in the debrief around publishers needing to collaborate.

Cory: 00:17:17

And yet that's anathema because everyone is better than everybody else.

Cory: 00:17:20

Right.

Cory: 00:17:20

And we're all trying to protect our own.

Cory: 00:17:22

Okay, but in so doing, we've got like a prisoner's dilemma on some of the future of this.

Cory: 00:17:28

And so I do think the lack of innovation and quite frankly, willingness to collaborate and solve some of these problems at scale is a huge barrier.

Cory: 00:17:36

And, and just time and time again, showing publishers being on the, whether you call it nostalgia or sort of the, the wait, and see, train, and they lose every

Cory: 00:17:46

time.

Brian: 00:17:47

yeah, that is true.

Brian: 00:17:48

there is, there's a great track record for that.

Brian: 00:17:50

yeah, I mean, that's a great point.

Brian: 00:17:51

There are antitrust issues with the, you know, colluding, colluding.

Brian: 00:17:55

But I think if you look at, you know, the existential threat of AI, there was like a brief glimmer where it was like, we're going to band together.

Brian: 00:18:04

We're going to, not again, not again.

Brian: 00:18:07

And then of course they just peeled them one by one.

Brian: 00:18:11

But, so obviously to me, one of the big stories of this and you guys are in the middle of it is, is a shift to, you know, core audiences.

Brian: 00:18:22

Like, how do you define core audience?

Brian: 00:18:24

Because I think for a lot of publishers, right.

Brian: 00:18:27

That come down from traffic to, to not just audiences, but core audiences.

Brian: 00:18:33

I mean, that can be painful.

Brian: 00:18:34

Look, it's, it's just, you know, reality.

Cory: 00:18:37

Totally.

Cory: 00:18:37

I think, quite frankly, there's an element of this for me that is almost excessively binary.

Cory: 00:18:43

One of the, that's sort of my observation, and we talked a little bit about this at the table, is.

Cory: 00:18:47

It's not just a move away from traffic.

Cory: 00:18:49

It's these violent swings from we're going to do subs, to we're going to do advertising, to we're going to do traffic.

Cory: 00:18:56

The best businesses have figured out how to diversify these against the right audiences, as you just described.

Cory: 00:19:02

And this is why I have, you know, whatever we want to call it, but I'm bullish on what does that actually mean in practice?

Cory: 00:19:08

And I would say that while we all can clap each other on the back and say, yeah, yeah, of course I agree.

Cory: 00:19:13

An audience centric or consumer centric approach is one that understands the value of different audiences and maybe one strategy is to drive traffic among a certain subset of your audience for others.

Cory: 00:19:27

It may be.

Cory: 00:19:27

Don't worry about it.

Cory: 00:19:28

If I only come back twice a week.

Cory: 00:19:30

I pay for my subscription.

Cory: 00:19:32

I'm super high value, but if you don't actually know those, those patterns of behavior and how to attribute revenue to them, which is an area of very deficient muscle in most media organizations, you end up, I think, actually missing.

Cory: 00:19:48

In, in so far as swinging away from traffic to something else, you actually overshoot it because there may still be a very valid role for traffic, building up an asset that could turn into a media network as an example.

Cory: 00:20:00

And so I think there's an L it's just all in all out.

Cory: 00:20:03

Part of it is.

Cory: 00:20:05

your point, it's painful just to go from one to the other.

Cory: 00:20:07

But every time we go from one to the other, we sort of throw the baby out with the bath water.

Cory: 00:20:12

And I think that's, that's a huge miss for these, especially larger scaled up media codes that could be doing a mix of these

Cory: 00:20:20

things more effectively.

Brian: 00:20:22

Yeah, and, and we saw that with, with honestly with subscriptions, I think, you know, a lot of people got over their skis with how, when they're in like lifestyle, right?

Brian: 00:20:30

the reality is, in, in lifestyle, you're most likely not going to have, subscriptions as the biggest part of your business.

Brian: 00:20:39

It's just, it's never been that way.

Brian: 00:20:42

It wasn't that way.

Brian: 00:20:43

It's not going to be that way now.

Brian: 00:20:44

And I think a lot of times there was.

Brian: 00:20:48

And this is, you know, I always say this industry can sometimes be like a children's soccer game where like the balls in one part of the field and there's just a clump of kids around it.

Brian: 00:20:58

and when the subscription ball was out there in the New York Times is building a big subscription business, you know, all of a sudden everyone was going to build these big subscription businesses and, You know, that sometimes it's not the case.

Brian: 00:21:10

And, and, and I think what's interesting, I think what you're getting at also is this idea of you don't have an audience,

Brian: 00:21:17

right?

Brian: 00:21:18

I mean, you have, you have segments of your audience and you need to build products that, that serve those segments,

Cory: 00:21:23

That's exactly right.

Cory: 00:21:25

I mean, that's where we've seen such amazing like our best customers will keep them also under wraps.

Cory: 00:21:30

So I don't blow up their strategies here, but they are public about talking about it themselves.

Cory: 00:21:34

Let them to their own horns.

Cory: 00:21:35

But, You know, adding an events business in some cases, which has been extraordinarily profitable, is that good for everybody?

Cory: 00:21:43

Of course it's not, but it might be for your audience and really what that fundamentally comes down to.

Cory: 00:21:48

And this, I think goes back to the comment at the table.

Cory: 00:21:51

It's not just understanding that the audience might have an appetite for that, but it's also knowing how to turn that audience into a consumer of it, i.

Cory: 00:21:58

e.

Cory: 00:21:59

monetizing it in a way that will actually make me pay for it.

Cory: 00:22:03

And the gap between those two things, a lot are very immature at even the audience element that you just described.

Cory: 00:22:10

And then even if you have a great sense of that, there's still a lot of immaturity at turning that audience conceptually into a consumer audience that is monetized effectively.

Cory: 00:22:22

and that can take a lot of different forms, as you rightly say, it, it, it shouldn't be all or nothing.

Cory: 00:22:28

but it also means that not everything is necessarily available to you, nor should it be.

Cory: 00:22:31

And, the ones that we've seen be the most successful have started that from who is this audience?

Cory: 00:22:37

How many ways can we sort of slice and dice it?

Cory: 00:22:39

And what's the monetization revenue opportunity that comes out of this, and where's their overlap, right?

Cory: 00:22:44

All of those questions that are, probably pretty intuitive.

Cory: 00:22:48

But having the data and the recognition that that's what needs to drive the strategy rather than the other way around.

Cory: 00:22:54

Here's a strategy, go find the data to support it.

Cory: 00:22:57

It's been a little bit of that kind of chasing its tail dynamic for

Cory: 00:23:00

a long time.

Brian: 00:23:01

Yeah.

Brian: 00:23:01

what what are the, what are some of the core habits that you've seen of successful publishers to implementing this kind of consumer first strategy?

Cory: 00:23:12

Yeah.

Cory: 00:23:12

So first of all, I mean, a lot of this is not rocket science by any means.

Cory: 00:23:16

it is starting the technology question with use cases.

Cory: 00:23:22

There were a lot, and this is not unique to medium publishing, but like we need a, an RK CDP or we need a, you know, CRM, whatever it is.

Cory: 00:23:30

And then very little sophistication around, but like why, and what are you going to do with it?

Cory: 00:23:36

and.

Cory: 00:23:37

That gets you half of the way there at best, but you don't have the tool that actually supports your use cases, your environment, so really being clear about what the use cases are.

Cory: 00:23:48

What's the current state?

Cory: 00:23:49

Why do we need to change the current state?

Cory: 00:23:51

What do we expect to get out of those changes?

Cory: 00:23:54

Immediately and over time that level of sophistication, companies that are coming into technology conversations with that are head and shoulders above those that are not the 2nd follow on to that is a commitment of a product owner of that technology so that they are clear on these maintaining a backlog and a road map.

Cory: 00:24:16

That's accountable to the broader business that it fits into trying to make this something that's either completely decentralized out makes for a lack of alignment in a lot of ways, right?

Cory: 00:24:27

This is a shared audience, so you need to have that.

Cory: 00:24:30

But also, I think it could be very challenging if.

Cory: 00:24:33

A technology is sort of forced down from on high and doesn't have the buy in from business units or whatever the case might be.

Cory: 00:24:41

So having a really well defined product owner or center of excellence, if it's a big enough organization to house this and then support the business.

Cory: 00:24:49

Those are two places that add immediate time to value, get there faster and then on an enduring basis, those use cases and then having that central

Cory: 00:24:59

management done in the right way.

Brian: 00:25:01

So with having this at the center of the strategy, right?

Brian: 00:25:04

does that mean that bringing people back to the owned property becomes like the sort of North star or I I'm interested in how you balance.

Brian: 00:25:12

As a publisher, as I hear the, the nostalgia, I think it's nostalgia for like the homepage, right?

Brian: 00:25:18

it's hard for me to believe that in five years time, tons of people are going to be like typing many URLs into browsers and, navigating that way.

Brian: 00:25:26

I think the surfing is, is over, but maybe, I don't know.

Brian: 00:25:29

Because you obviously where we're going and where we've been really is it's completely decentralized and you have to go to where the audiences are.

Brian: 00:25:39

I mean, I was just talking about this at the coffee I was having and this, this executive is like, Oh, we have to be totally liquid.

Brian: 00:25:46

We have to be everywhere and we have to, our brand can do the work, but expecting just people to come to, to our property is just most likely not going to happen.

Cory: 00:25:56

I

Cory: 00:25:56

think that's fair.

Cory: 00:25:56

Fair.

Cory: 00:25:57

Fair.

Cory: 00:25:57

Fair.

Brian: 00:25:57

Yeah.

Brian: 00:25:57

How do you, how do you balance that?

Brian: 00:25:59

Because I mean, you want to get, you want to get the data.

Brian: 00:26:01

Let's just say you have to know your audience better in order to serve them better.

Brian: 00:26:05

But then you run up against reality of, you know, more people are, are, if you're a lifestyle brand, more people are, you're reaching more people through Instagram than you are on your website.

Brian: 00:26:16

definitely are and you can make money off Instagram.

Brian: 00:26:19

You're selling you have a big Instagram ad business.

Brian: 00:26:21

but you want to collect the data, right?

Brian: 00:26:23

So like, what is that balance?

Brian: 00:26:25

And

Cory: 00:26:26

have an answer for you.

Cory: 00:26:27

I mean, I really think it depends.

Cory: 00:26:28

And this is where, you know, the element of sophistication comes in, which is, you know, doing the work to understand, like, how much do you know about that Instagram audience?

Cory: 00:26:39

Is it just driving them to a landing page?

Cory: 00:26:42

At least gives you some visibility that, you know, X amount of your revenue is coming from Instagram.

Cory: 00:26:49

You may not convert those people to anything beyond that initial article, but that's still information that tells you something different about your quote unquote Instagram audience.

Cory: 00:27:00

Maybe it's worth knowing that if your Instagram audience does go beyond that at first landing page, not to a home page, but just some other experience or what have you.

Cory: 00:27:11

Then that's an inherently more valuable than the folks who maybe just come to the homepage scroll and never leave and that are then they leave right after that.

Cory: 00:27:19

I mean, it just taking the who are these people?

Cory: 00:27:23

What are their behaviors?

Cory: 00:27:24

And what did that?

Cory: 00:27:25

Does that matter to me?

Cory: 00:27:27

if it's a throwaway audience.

Cory: 00:27:29

Then maybe spend less money on Instagram, but like, there is no right answer for this.

Cory: 00:27:34

It does come back to what outcomes are you trying to drive and what experiments are you running help you assess are these channels or these interaction points serving more as a brand type of awareness, like you just talked about, or is it creating legitimate demand?

Cory: 00:27:51

I mean, I think In some ways, media needs to have a better grip of like how B2B marketing works, right?

Cory: 00:27:56

There is going to be a mix between brand and demand.

Cory: 00:28:00

That's the age old challenge.

Cory: 00:28:02

But if you are not able to slice and dice on the audience side and do some amount of kind of measurement attribution that like lets you do that allocation, You're, you're never going to be able to get a good answer for you, but I would expect that to look very, very different for a broadcaster, for example, in terms of, you know, the audience and what the value is, depending on their sources and how they interact than I would from a niche audience.

Cory: 00:28:29

Subscription only publisher, right?

Cory: 00:28:31

The advertising proposition and the revenue from advertising on a broadcaster is fundamentally more important than it is for maybe the niche high, high end subscription business.

Cory: 00:28:42

Those are going to look different in terms of where the Instagram or the other sources

Cory: 00:28:45

play a role.

Brian: 00:28:46

it's different for every publisher, but it seems like the, the shift overall, the pendulum is shifting more towards, depth versus breadth, I mean, you'd rather have a deeper relationship with a smaller audience than a thinner relationship with a larger audience.

Brian: 00:29:02

Is that fair?

Cory: 00:29:03

I think I'd say it's.

Cory: 00:29:04

Both.

Cory: 00:29:05

Which, it just, this goes back, like, which audience are we talking about?

Cory: 00:29:08

If they're never gonna pay, then having a lot of people who are exposed to a quality amount of advertising that gets a pretty good CPM on behalf of your, your ad partners, there's nothing wrong with that.

Cory: 00:29:22

It's just recognizing that just because I read a lot but don't subscribe, maybe you don't need to push me so hard into a subscription funnel.

Brian: 00:29:31

Yeah.

Cory: 00:29:31

That's a way game where they come back to this.

Cory: 00:29:33

Like it needs to be all or nothing.

Cory: 00:29:35

It doesn't, it does not at all.

Cory: 00:29:37

It just means you need to allocate resources accordingly.

Cory: 00:29:40

And I, I think that is such a challenge for most publishers to operationalize.

Cory: 00:29:48

It's like, well, if we're going to not do this, then what are we going to do with our whole sales team?

Cory: 00:29:51

Ad sales team.

Cory: 00:29:52

And the, there's just this need to try to get to one set of answers.

Cory: 00:29:55

I don't think there is a right, you, I, I tend to agree with you, but I think if we say just dogmatically that quality and depth will, will always be better than shallow breadth, I think that's actually what we ran into with traffic.

Cory: 00:30:13

there has to be something, a

Cory: 00:30:14

mix.

Brian: 00:30:15

Yeah.

Brian: 00:30:16

So I'm, I'm legally obligated to, to ask you the AI question.

Cory: 00:30:20

I think as a human being, it's not even legal, it's just

Cory: 00:30:22

humans, we have to ask this question now.

Brian: 00:30:24

we have, we have to, I was just like, can't have any conversation without AI coming up these days.

Brian: 00:30:29

but I mean, how is this going to change the understanding of AI?

Brian: 00:30:34

First of all, an audience because I, I don't, I don't want to get too like down there, but like we did a dinner the other night and, we're talking about like B2B versus B2C.

Brian: 00:30:44

It was, it was ad buyers and, and then this, this one person brought up like, Oh, we're going to have B2A, which is the business to agents.

Brian: 00:30:52

Like we're going to need to be thinking about how we advertise to agents because agents, AI agents are going to be making an increasing number of decisions on behalf of people.

Brian: 00:31:02

And therefore we need to influence the agents.

Brian: 00:31:04

And this came right after a meeting I had, where basically the company, they were obviously interested in this, but was saying that, that, you know, there's so many agents that are, are going to be out there, websites.

Brian: 00:31:21

It's beyond just the core, the core models that, a few things.

Brian: 00:31:25

One that like advertisers are going to say.

Brian: 00:31:28

Did people see this or is this just are you are you advertising the droids?

Brian: 00:31:32

and then and then two is how you how you end up monetizing that when, you don't have as much data as, as, as other people have that are real people basically.

Brian: 00:31:44

but how, how does AI end up factoring in, into this?

Brian: 00:31:48

Leave aside the distribution challenges and stuff like this.

Brian: 00:31:50

How does it factor into how publishers can get this better understanding of their different audience segments?

Cory: 00:31:56

Yeah.

Cory: 00:31:57

I think I'd be gunning for bigger jobs than the one I have.

Cory: 00:32:00

If I had a great answer for this, I admit that I'm still in many ways kind of wrapping my head, around it.

Cory: 00:32:09

I do think that much the way we've had to grapple with this idea that the internet is free, for the last 30 years, I talk about the biggest fallacy.

Cory: 00:32:22

Maybe of the 21st century that the internet is free.

Cory: 00:32:25

The internet is not free and it's never been free.

Cory: 00:32:28

and a lot of mistakes were made, especially media and publishing, going back to what we were talking about, sort of the existential, nobody was more affected by that free shipping was about as close as retail got to that.

Cory: 00:32:37

Right.

Cory: 00:32:37

And, and, you know, Amazon kind of screwing them there.

Cory: 00:32:40

I think this is a similar catalyst moment of setting the expectations and the terms before it's too late.

Cory: 00:32:48

And I would like to think we've learned.

Cory: 00:32:51

Something from the Internet is free.

Cory: 00:32:54

and that a I just being able to intermediate or disintermediate in a lot of these places, is going to need greater regulation and scrutiny in terms.

Cory: 00:33:06

And I say that because I'm not sure you put this cap back in the bag by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't need to be a one way that the publishers are just kind of at the mercy of what AI decides here.

Cory: 00:33:19

talk about collaboration, nothing antitrust or collusion about saying, We need a better mechanism that if you're going to take our data and our, our journalism, our content, then we need to get the consumer data back, or we need to get something back in return that we can monetize ourselves.

Cory: 00:33:36

I don't have a great sense yet of what that business model could look like.

Cory: 00:33:39

but I think it is a, it is a clear example of history about to repeat slash rhyme itself very aggressively.

Cory: 00:33:48

If it's just taken for granted that.

Cory: 00:33:50

AI can just kind of run roughshod here and then everyone else is left to figure out what to do with the crumbs.

Cory: 00:33:56

this would be the opportunity to say that that's not going to work and protecting those assets, coming up with new formats and spaces for that to happen also, to your point about maybe it's not the home page, but it's the next generation of a home page.

Cory: 00:34:10

These are all things that we should be and smarter people than I absolutely are exploring and figuring out

Cory: 00:34:16

how viable they are.

Brian: 00:34:35

and convenience, right?

Brian: 00:34:36

just like you brought up Amazon, right?

Brian: 00:34:38

I think the biggest impact it had by far was free shipping.

Brian: 00:34:44

Like the idea that you would then go to quote unquote luxury retailer and they would be and they would say that it would take five to seven days to get are you talking about?

Brian: 00:34:54

Like I'm paying a lot of money and you're telling me it's going to take five to seven days.

Brian: 00:34:57

And my toilet paper showed up the

Brian: 00:34:58

next day.

Cory: 00:34:59

But even that, remember, it was only free because of Amazon Prime.

Cory: 00:35:03

this was always the long game, and that's what Amazon did really well.

Cory: 00:35:07

And most other companies, A, have never been afforded the luxury of doing what Amazon did.

Cory: 00:35:12

So let's be honest about that.

Cory: 00:35:14

But that's what we need to name is that they use that as a hook.

Cory: 00:35:18

Then it became Amazon Prime.

Cory: 00:35:19

And now people are paying 100 a year for this thing that used to be free.

Cory: 00:35:23

And by the way, the service has gone down.

Cory: 00:35:24

We don't even do that anymore.

Cory: 00:35:26

Like that long game of what is it that we're actually doing here?

Cory: 00:35:31

Instead of the short term, single moves like Amazon was playing chess when everyone else is playing checkers, we need to have starting to play chess with AI piece of like seeing around the corners.

Cory: 00:35:43

What is going to happen is how do we onboard people does how do we try to shift that behavior?

Cory: 00:35:48

It's not just going to be a 11 change and done.

Cory: 00:35:51

It's going to take many, many years to evolve that.

Cory: 00:35:56

And hopefully we've

Cory: 00:35:58

learned that lesson.

Cory: 00:35:58

I don't, I don't know.

Brian: 00:36:00

yeah, I think definitely the, the, the free shipping of this.

Brian: 00:36:04

I think a good bet is around personalization.

Brian: 00:36:06

Everything is going to be so personalized to people like beyond like how we think of personalization now.

Brian: 00:36:12

I mean, when people have a, their own AI assistant that is with them all the time, that is clearly where this is going.

Brian: 00:36:20

At best, People will be the supervisor to the agent, I hope.

Brian: 00:36:23

I mean, not the other way around.

Brian: 00:36:26

but that is going to bleed over into the, the experiences that, that they expect from publishers.

Brian: 00:36:32

And so publishers, the only way you can personalize is by knowing a lot more audience.

Brian: 00:36:38

And then if you don't know a lot about your audience, forget it, like you can't personalize them, I think.

Cory: 00:36:43

That's it.

Cory: 00:36:44

No, and, and you will get to, I mean, there's already an issue of creating content that's so generic, you know, because it's written by an AI trying to universally like where publishing can have a really magical impact actually could be in preventing it all just degrading and sounding exactly the same.

Cory: 00:37:04

And.

Cory: 00:37:04

Being presented in the same ways and the idea that, you know, I'm not much of a video content person.

Cory: 00:37:09

I really like long form, give me the long form version of the story and use AI to have a video version and an audio version and a and a bullet point version.

Cory: 00:37:19

Right?

Cory: 00:37:19

All of those are things that.

Cory: 00:37:21

I would be happy to share right this also going back to what could having expectations for consumers around like this is what you're going to need to give us in order to get these other things and that kind of new version of this value exchange is still so early days, but I think would be palatable, but we have to start.

Cory: 00:37:39

We have to start setting that expectation.

Cory: 00:37:41

It's not going to happen

Cory: 00:37:41

overnight.

Brian: 00:37:55

was told that it was the year of mobile.

Brian: 00:37:56

I think it might be like the year of the reg wall for 10 years straight.

Brian: 00:37:59

because So many publishers are going to need, to build up their, their data that, they're going to insist on registration.

Cory: 00:38:07

I think there's nothing wrong with insisting on registration.

Cory: 00:38:09

I think it's what are you getting back?

Cory: 00:38:12

that's the entitlement element where, you're not just entitled to me giving you that information.

Cory: 00:38:18

Because, to be fair, you could have been entitled to it.

Cory: 00:38:21

That had always been the expectation.

Cory: 00:38:24

Facebook.

Cory: 00:38:26

Like the average consumer, like I pay for a lot of news.

Cory: 00:38:29

I think I have something like 20 subscriptions.

Cory: 00:38:31

I pay for them all.

Cory: 00:38:32

I am, I am, I'm, I'm, but I'm not the average.

Cory: 00:38:35

We know that.

Cory: 00:38:36

Right.

Cory: 00:38:36

And so how do you start again, you have to wean people off of that expectation and do it in a way that is personalized, that understands what am I going to get out of this?

Cory: 00:38:50

And give me an offer that is actually relevant

Cory: 00:38:54

for me.

Brian: 00:38:55

Yeah, I think that was always the problem of the third party cookie and just really how at the ad targeting, architecture, was developed was so much stuff happened behind the scenes and it sort of needed to happen behind the scenes for a reason is because there wasn't a real value exchange.

Brian: 00:39:15

There was an entitlement,

Cory: 00:39:16

well, exactly.

Cory: 00:39:17

It was an entitlement.

Cory: 00:39:18

Masking is a value exchange is like, look, if you give us this information, we're giving you the news, but nobody ever said that, right?

Cory: 00:39:24

That was that was the sophisticates who knew what was happening.

Cory: 00:39:27

And now you have literally 2 generations of of consumers.

Cory: 00:39:33

Would never have have never even experienced the news in a way that was actually more of a transaction And have only experienced it in the ways, and I would imagine news content writ large

Cory: 00:39:44

in this way

Brian: 00:39:45

Yeah, and I think you can, I would make the argument that GDPR has been something of a disaster, at least as, as, as implemented.

Brian: 00:39:53

But I think it proved that a lot of people, one, didn't understand this value exchange and two, didn't think it was a really good bargain for them.

Brian: 00:40:03

and, and that's tough because when, You know, signing into Google and all that, you know what you're getting.

Brian: 00:40:09

it's like, Oh yeah, of course.

Brian: 00:40:11

I want to, I want to be signed into like, that makes total sense.

Brian: 00:40:14

It personalizes.

Brian: 00:40:15

And why would I not want that?

Brian: 00:40:17

Yeah.

Brian: 00:40:17

I understand that they're going to be tracking me, but you know, most people are, are better with that.

Brian: 00:40:23

And, and so, you know, making that explicit, but that also goes back to having like a strong tie with the audience that you can just be up front with them.

Cory: 00:40:31

Absolutely.

Cory: 00:40:32

I mean, we've we literally have customers who have done these experiments around, even if it's just the cookie consent, how they use the language, explain what is happening.

Cory: 00:40:42

Just approach that from a much more transparent kind of consumer friendly way.

Cory: 00:40:49

And the fear, of course, is that you do that.

Cory: 00:40:51

And much like Apple, right?

Cory: 00:40:52

When everyone was given the option to opt out of tracking on the apps, everybody said no.

Cory: 00:40:57

And it's like, well, of course not, because.

Cory: 00:40:58

Tracking is scary.

Cory: 00:41:00

You have no idea what that means.

Cory: 00:41:01

And as far as you're concerned, the consumer experience doesn't change.

Cory: 00:41:04

So there's no, there was no value to you tracking me across apps.

Cory: 00:41:08

That was purely only advertisers benefited from that.

Cory: 00:41:12

However, need to know if you are clear about, Hey, you know, here's the cost.

Cory: 00:41:17

If we don't do it this way.

Cory: 00:41:19

All of the kind of math that goes into this has been completely opaque to really all the stakeholders in this ecosystem.

Cory: 00:41:26

I think if we made the math a little bit clearer now, the counterpoint to that is you risk turning privacy and all of this into a luxury good, right?

Cory: 00:41:37

If law, if I can pay not to have ads, you know, collect my data and have ads shown to me, then you create a really skewed access to the internet or to content.

Cory: 00:41:49

That I think is problematic, but it's, it's no one is having that level of the conversation is like, how do we think about these as different tiers or other ways of conceptualizing the data for content exchange?

Cory: 00:42:02

It's just been a vacuum or cut off entirely.

Cory: 00:42:07

Nothing in

Cory: 00:42:07

between.

Brian: 00:42:08

Yeah, I mean, it kind of reminds me how like dynamic pricing, one person's dynamic pricing is another person's quote unquote price discrimination,

Cory: 00:42:16

Totally.

Cory: 00:42:17

I completely

Brian: 00:42:18

you know,

Cory: 00:42:19

And I don't think I don't have a good answer for

Cory: 00:42:20

that.

Brian: 00:42:21

I think about it.

Brian: 00:42:22

I'm like, okay, if I'm on an airplane, the person next to me paid a different paid what like this, but I've, I've heard from a lot of publishers that they have a lot of debates about this.

Brian: 00:42:33

I mean, this is a form of quote unquote, personalization, right?

Brian: 00:42:37

you're basically deciding based on, you know, a bunch of different factors.

Brian: 00:42:41

what you're going to put in front of a particular person that they'll find attractive.

Brian: 00:42:47

and if this happens, it's funny because I feel like publishers sometimes overthink a lot of things.

Brian: 00:42:53

I mean, this has been happening forever.

Brian: 00:42:54

I remember reading, you know, about if you go from iOS versus Android, like Android people are, get a cheaper price.

Cory: 00:43:02

Totally.

Cory: 00:43:03

I mean, it's, it's something, there's a, the data that it's like when Apple, you might have 200 trackers running in the background and on Android, it's like a thousand, right?

Cory: 00:43:10

Or some just ungodly amount of, and even that, okay, that sounds scary.

Cory: 00:43:16

But even I am like, well, what are those trackers?

Cory: 00:43:18

You know, where, where, where are they providing me utility?

Cory: 00:43:21

Right.

Cory: 00:43:21

This is a very old Forrester framework around utility and, and, and, and But, but we've made this so opaque and hard to understand and wishy washy, in some cases, best.

Cory: 00:43:33

And I think a lot of these is quite frankly downright exploitative, if you look at some of the stuff we're seeing out of this Google antitrust.

Cory: 00:43:40

So it's a problem, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't mean that everything is a problem, right?

Cory: 00:43:44

It's not all bad, it's just potentially the bad implementation of it, or the bad actors.

Cory: 00:43:51

And We're not able to, to engage with this at a level of what can we keep, what is useful to us in the technology world, to the consumer, to media, how do we actually engage this across a bunch of different stakeholders?

Cory: 00:44:07

And I think fundamentally, the problem is, That the vast majority of this oxygen is taken up by the big tech players who have no incentive to come to the table and, and try to fix some of these problems in a constructive way.

Cory: 00:44:18

and that is probably the biggest barrier, I would say, to progress on a lot of this is, is Google and Facebook and Apple, even under the guise of being privacy friendly.

Cory: 00:44:28

No, it's not right.

Cory: 00:44:29

It's just, it's just makes you less creeped out.

Cory: 00:44:32

That's not the same thing.

Brian: 00:44:33

Yeah, I mean, they like started their ad business right after that.

Brian: 00:44:37

but

Cory: 00:44:37

started there

Cory: 00:44:38

because of that.

Brian: 00:44:40

big billboards of privacy as a human right.

Brian: 00:44:42

not that people would ever do such a thing.

Brian: 00:44:45

anyway, This has been amazing.

Brian: 00:44:47

one, one sort of final thing about, question, give me the case for why there's a future for ads on web pages.

Brian: 00:44:54

This is something I've asked everyone I meet with lately.

Cory: 00:44:58

I think it goes back to what I said at the beginning is that The internet is not free and advertising was the original way of making information accessible to people.

Cory: 00:45:09

And whether that's an old magazine, a newspaper, radio, like advertising has always played a role in facilitating the movement of, of, of information.

Cory: 00:45:21

and so I think it has a place in this ecosystem.

Cory: 00:45:26

It doesn't necessarily.

Cory: 00:45:29

Look like it looks today or has been at its healthiest, but I, I do believe that it has a place in the ecosystem.

Brian: 00:45:36

Yeah.

Brian: 00:45:37

I mean, I'm just like, it is going to be fascinated.

Brian: 00:45:39

Just the number of, of ads.

Brian: 00:45:43

changes that take place to, to publish your business models in the next five years.

Brian: 00:45:47

Like I can't wait.

Brian: 00:45:48

I think it's actually kind of exciting.

Brian: 00:45:49

I know it's going to be very painful and any of these transitions are extremely painful.

Brian: 00:45:54

I started this business at the.

Brian: 00:45:57

com collapse and man, there was a lot of carnage around there.

Brian: 00:46:02

And that's just the way, that's the way, Markets and industries work.

Cory: 00:46:07

Yeah, I think the optimistic note of that is.

Cory: 00:46:10

I don't think we have to accept the carnage as the end of the story,

Cory: 00:46:13

and, you know, more of the phoenix

Cory: 00:46:15

from the

Cory: 00:46:15

ashes, but I, I think we

Cory: 00:46:17

need to have that hope.

Brian: 00:46:18

and you know, like nothing ever, nothing ends.

Brian: 00:46:22

Like

Cory: 00:46:22

no,

Brian: 00:46:22

just, it just, goes on in different

Brian: 00:46:24

forms.

Cory: 00:46:25

that there is, there are a lot of lessons to be learned out of what arose from the carnage over the last 20 or so years to make sure that the thing that emerges next is a healthier, a healthier version of what we got in this iteration.

Cory: 00:46:39

but I'm confident that this.

Cory: 00:46:41

Kind of the generation of leaders that, you know, the folks that you have working with you now and who I'm talking to, have such brilliant ideas around how this can be tackled and so much energy for doing it.

Cory: 00:46:52

that gives me a lot of

Cory: 00:46:53

optimism.

Brian: 00:46:54

Awesome.

Brian: 00:46:54

Corey, thank you so much for doing this.

Brian: 00:46:56

Really appreciate it.

Cory: 00:46:56

Thanks for having me.

Cory: 00:46:57

I appreciate it.