Bloomberg Media went all-in on an audience-first publishing strategy at the end of 2022, dropping programmatic advertising and committing to actively listening to its audiences. A little over two years in, Global Head of Product Marissa Zanetti-Crume for the news business explains that every project starts with two questions: how will this serve our audience and how will this serve our business?
Maybe I’m showing my age, but to me the product function in a publishing organisation is a relatively new innovation. Back in the day, we didn’t think of the magazines we made as products. We wrote words, we made sure they made sense and set them on the page next to some nice pictures. Then we put the word-and-picture pages between the advertising-pages and shipped everything off to the printer, job done.
Today, product thinking lies at the heart of many successful publishing strategies and the increasing importance of the product management role is down to one simple fact: publishing is not as straightforward as it used to be.
So, when I got the chance to speak with Marissa Zanetti-Crume there was only one question on my mind… What does the Global Head of Product at Bloomberg Media do?
“My team supports the media business,” she told me on this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast. “The products that we look after are the news products that your everyday consumer uses: if you go to bloomberg.com or if you use our mobile app, or engage with a newsletter. We’re really focused on thinking about building an amazing news product for our consumers.”
It would be impossible for an old-school publishing team to handle all of Bloomberg Media’s content mix, developing user interfaces and user journeys, building and managing the software needed to surface and distribute news and advertising effectively across multiple platforms and capturing and analysing every user interaction.
Marissa’s team doesn’t do all that either, but they are crucial in integrating content, technology, and commercial considerations. Marissa says that at Bloomberg Media, the product teams ensure collaboration across the business, from advertising and data analytics to subscriptions and the newsroom.
“I see our role as, in many ways, being sort of a connective tissue,” she explains. As a product management team, we are collaborators at core.”
A varied team
Marissa describes Bloomberg Media’s product team as ‘pretty varied’, including product managers, product designers and product operations people. “Some product managers are subject matter experts, really going deep. And then we have product managers on the team who are really great at connecting the dots,” she said.
A strong focus for the product team is supporting and building Bloomberg Media’s subscriptions business. “We work incredibly closely with our audience team, our newsroom, thinking about how we’re tying together the goals of the overall organisation with a deep understanding of our news, who our consumers are and what they value from Bloomberg and the role that we play in their lives,” Marissa outlines.
Regardless of their area of focus or expertise, Marissa believes that, first and foremost, a product manager’s role is to ‘deeply understand’ the business and the customer to make sure the organisation is building products and features that meet the needs of both.
Audience-first mentality
Towards the end of 2022, less than a year after taking up the role of CEO at Bloomberg Media, M. Scott Havens posted a statement that committed the business to adopting an ‘audience-first mentality’.
The meat of his memo was the announcement that Bloomberg would be ditching programmatic advertising for the sake of its audience and its advertisers. Beyond getting out of intrusive, low-value ads, Havens’ ambition was to build a more engaged user base and he committed the business to, ‘taking real action to get to know that audience better’.
Scott has since headed off to his dream job running business operations for the New York Mets baseball team, but the audience-first mentality is alive and well under current CEO Karen Saltser. “Having Scott, and now Karen, have audience-first as our North star is really powerful for a product manager,” Marissa says. “That is at heart, what we do.”
Marissa says her team always looks to start any project with two questions:
- How does this serve our audience?
- How does this serve our business?
To answer those questions, especially the audience part, Bloomberg Media uses a mix of interviews, focus groups, surveys and prototype testing. “As a product team, we’re really centering around our audience,” Marissa explains, “It’s been a lot of fun to think about how we are actually stewards of our audience, understanding who they are and what they need and how we bring that to the broader organisation.”
And the fun doesn’t stop there. Marissa says: “Looking at the data after we’ve launched a project, hearing from our subscribers, that’s the really fulfilling and fun part of our job. Understanding how something you put into the world, how your readers and consumers are engaging with that. I think that’s been really powerful for the organization.”
Truly cross-platform
For Marissa, one of the best things about working in product at Bloomberg Media is that it is a truly cross-platform media company.
“There’s radio, we have podcasts, we have video, we have print, there’s newsletters. We know that our audience is consuming content across those platforms, and so the challenge for us is how content might change based on the platform, how we think about building different features that celebrate the content in a way that feels really native and organic.”
She says the secret with publisher products is to meet consumers where they are, “It’s something we’ve been saying for a really long time in the product space, but I think we’re starting to see that.”
Coming back to my search for a definition of the product role at a publishing organisation, Marissa says, “We experiment, we validate, we understand and get creative. Some of the things that resonate with consumers are the things that, maybe, they didn’t know they wanted. I think it’s important to have, just, constant iteration.
“As devices change and as consumption habits change, we’re always thinking about how we meet the users where they are. We’re on our toes all the time.”
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