On this week’s episode of Media Voices we hear from The Economist‘s Executive Vice President of Marketing Nada Arnot. Marketing isn’t something we talk about a lot on the podcast, but as Arnot makes clear it’s an integral part of media companies’ ability to address, convert and retain audiences.
The Economist has just launched its largest brand campaign since the early 2000s, so Arnot tells us about how the news-focused magazine is seeking to attract younger readers, why she believes long-term brand building is vital in today’s news ecosystem, and the future plans for marketing The Economist.
In the news roundup the Media Voices team discuss the news that a group of 32 European media organizations, including notable names like publishing giant Axel Springer and media heavyweight Schibsted, have jointly filed a Є2.1bn ($2.3 billion) antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet-owned Google. We ask why no adults ever get round the table to discuss a realistic approach to solving these issues before they arise – and whether it will all matter in a few years given the rapid rise of Amazon’s ad capabilities.
Some highlights from the interview, lightly edited for clarity:
Giving a flavour of The Economist’s journalism
A big part of our strategy is, on Meta for example, we’re using articles to get out in front of different audiences. The articles have a headline that is catchy… someone clicks through, they get to that article, they get to read it, and then they sign up. So really we don’t even have to say to you, ‘By the way, the content is so amazing, and our journalism is worth paying for,’ because they see it live and they interact with it.
Once you get into a world – and I was very passionate about this when I started – once you get into a world where you start explaining, ‘Oh we have x number of new articles a day or week, and you get these three benefits, and you get it all for this price,’ you suddenly commoditise what you’re selling, and it’s really hard to show the true value. Because all a consumer will do is eventually comparing you to another publisher, when really what is different and worth buying is what’s intrinsically different about the style of journalism.
You can’t communicate that in a unique selling proposition bullet. It’s a race to the bottom and becomes a numbers game. Someone once told me, it’s like the pizza wars of the 90’s. Who can give you the bigger pizza for less cost? At some point, you’re just giving away massive pizzas for free, and it doesn’t do anyone any good.
The Economist’s new campaign
This is the first time that we have embarked on a big brand campaign since probably the early 2000s. We’re taking a little bit of what we did previously, which is that iconic white font on red background. But we’ve changed the tone of what we’re messaging slightly to be broader reaching, a little bit more inclusive, appealing to a younger demographic, more gender-based, balanced demographics.
The premise of it actually came out of a research project that we did last year around, what is it about The Economist that actually resonates with this broader demographic? What do they see as a differentiator? What does it mean to them? What bubbled up was this notion of independent journalism that really stood out as something that was really important to this audience. So we used that as our foundation, and landed on a campaign tagline: ‘Independent journalism for independent thinking.’
The reason why we landed on that… is because we’re in this world now of all-time high, low trust in the news, a proliferation of fake news and disinformation. So this cacophony of noise is the moment for us to come in and reinforce what we’ve been doing for 180 years, which is providing clarity in this world of somewhat chaotic swirl.
Getting buy-in to do a brand campaign
There was already an appetite to get more of the brand out there, but the inclination was it should be driving direct performance. So there was a little bit of an education that had to go on in terms of the value of brand marketing for performance marketing.
So if you think about the funnel, if you don’t have your brand awareness at the very top, there’s no way you’re widening the funnel. Your funnel suddenly becomes a cylinder, and your top is so narrow that the fewer people you have at the top, it means the bottom just gets narrower and narrower.
A lot of brands, particularly during Covid, turned off brand awareness marketing because people weren’t out, so it didn’t make sense. And a lot of brands said, ‘Oh, that actually worked. We didn’t see any impact on our conversions…’ Fast forward a few years, and brands in general realise, ‘Oh wow, we have fewer people at the bottom to convert, because we don’t tell them about us at the very top.’
When I tell that story, it’s easier for The Economist to realise, actually, we do need to keep investing in the top of the funnel, and this is the way to do it. And building the comfort that we do have metrics we can look at throughout to make sure that we are moving in the right direction. It’s just you won’t see a massive game-changing shift in brand awareness for a while.
The news round-up
32 European media organisations have jointly filed a Є2.1bn ($2.3 billion) antitrust lawsuit against Google over its adtech practices.
- The group includes Germany’s Axel Springer, Norway’s Schibsted, Austria’s Krone, Belgium’s DPG Media and Mediahuis, Denmark’s TV2 Danmark A/S, Finland’s Sanoma, Poland’s Agora, Spain’s Prensa Iberica and Switzerland’s Ringier.
- The lawsuit alleges that the media companies have suffered significant financial losses as a result of anticompetitive practices from Google.
- “Without Google’s abuse of its dominant position, the media companies would have received significantly higher revenues from advertising and paid lower fees for ad tech services,” said Geradin Partners and Stek, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, in a statement. “Crucially, these funds could have been reinvested into strengthening the European media landscape.”
- “News media were negatively affected at a time when their economic model is already weakened by the decline in sales of print subscriptions and the decline in associated advertising revenue,” the group said in a statement.
- Google plans to fight the case, calling it “speculative and opportunistic”. Their legal director Oliver Bethell noted that Google works collaboratively with publishers and supports their businesses by adapting and evolving its advertising tools in partnership with them.
We think it’s possible to believe Google has too dominant a position and should be regulated far more strongly, without indulging in alternate history fan fiction about how amazingly well media companies would be doing without them.
Meta also announced late last week that it won’t renew commercial deals with Australian news media.
- Three years ago, Meta signed deals worth millions of dollars with Australian news outlets following the introduction of the News Media Bargaining Code.
- In a statement, Facebook said its users were not coming to its platform for news and political content and that it would invest its money elsewhere.
- At the moment, Meta won’t block access to Australian news content as it has done in Canada. But the ball is very much in the federal government’s court as to how they’ll respond.
It may be a redundant conversation in the future anyway as the Duopoly of Meta and Google has peaked, with ad spend increasingly going to a ‘third wave’ of retail media like Amazon.
- According to data from WARC and Insider Intelligence / eMarketer, the share of online ad revenue going to Google and Meta is in decline. Gains are going to retail media like Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok, where marketers can place ads directly where people are already shopping.
- WARC’s data shows content media ad spend (including all publishers plus TV, cinema and radio) will fall to a 27.2% global share in 2024, down from 71% a decade earlier.
- An interesting Press Gazette note also feeds into the first story: “The pandemic taught marketers lessons that were brutal for online news publishers. People were willing to shop for just about anything online, even fresh groceries, and the best place to reach them was on the sites where they were already shopping – not news sites.”
