Big news: The Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson will speak with me at TRB Audience Summit on Sept 17 in NYC. We have a great lineup of speakers, including USA Today Co CEO Mike Reed, Morning Brew CEO Robert Dippell, People Inc chief innovation officer Jon Roberts, BBC Studios president of news Tara Maitra, The Associated Press CRO Kristin Heitman and more. Reserve your spot at TRB Audience Summit.
Turning audience data into action
Active Interest Media used behavioral targeting to lift open rates 58% and nearly quadruple click-through rates, while cutting mass email volume by 30%. The lesson: audience data matters once it becomes a product advertisers can buy. Omeda’s new report shows how publishers are turning engagement signals into repeatable programs that perform. Learn more.
A time for sales
“Sales solves everything,” I was counseled early in my career. I rolled my eyes at the throwaway line, but over time I came to recognize that, while hyperbolic, this rang true. Problems do not go away with sales, but they become more manageable. Besides, .
On this week’s PvA, we discussed why this is a time for sales rather than marketing. Of the many jobs supposedly going to be wiped away by AI, few have predicted the end of sellers. They understand the Catalan fishermen saying: “If you want the fish, you gotta get your ass wet.” Honor the seller.
SOURCE: TRB data from a survey of 40 media executives
Direct relationships with the audience is important not just for news business models, but for establishing the base level of trust on which those models are built.
The triumph of walled gardens
The open web is crumbling. Google is choking off traffic from publishers to the point where many are openly talking about blocking Google altogether since the entire bargain underpinning the commercial internet has ended.
USA Today Co CEO Mike Reed broached the possibility with me during our discussion in June. Reddit, despite an AI data deal with Google, is clearly unhappy. People Inc isn’t there yet but it continues to see Google referrals decline. New Business Insider CEO Christian Baesler told Puck’s Dylan Byers in so many words that there’s no future in the traffic business.
For the open web, this will mean a continued decline in quality, like a shopping center that loses its luster and turns seedy. If you think the open web user experience is bad now, wait until what happens when most sites are run by PE shops in full harvesting mode. Expect Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome as a model.
We’ve moved beyond Google Zero. Time to consider Dead Internet Theory.
I’m not an AI doomer. The open web might be lost, but the desire for reliable information will remain. The flooding of the internet with synthetic information of dubious provenance will cause attention bankruptcy. The traffic era was built around this concept of the attention economy. I don’t think attention matters as much in a world of AI-juiced algorithmic feeds that will always do a better job of producing raw attention. That attention itself will fragment and mostly benefit the walled garden platforms that surface it.
Instead, the information economy will follow the lead of the overall economy and the rise of private networks for the well off. I have no doubt, as Jay Rosen once counseled me, that the rich and powerful will be well served with high quality information. Like it or not, the information economy will be a series of gated communities.
The experience of PvA Field Notes has been instructive. Bit by bit, we’re developing a good community of participants who are joining together to connect the dots to figure out the future of the information economy.
The open web was born out of a utopian ideal. In retrospect, it didn’t stand a chance when it became entwined with capitalism. Enclosure is a key facet of capitalistic development. The democratization of distribution was exciting, but removing the friction in the creation of content has led to a tragedy of the commons only solved by asserting property rights via enclosures.
The power of convening
Publishers have gravitated to events for a key reason: They have scarcity. Wall Street Journal CRO Josh Stinchcomb explained why in the post-scale era, getting the right 200 people in the room is essential for a high-end brand like the Journal.
“[Events] are largely the main dish in many ways. There’s scarcity, and so I can use that to lock in commitments in a world where advertising can be very volatile. Also, the event itself becomes a content creation moment, not just a moment on stage. Rather than say we’ll run a media campaign and we’ll cap it off with an event, the event is the kickoff for a lot of our biggest programs.”
Thanks to EX.CO for underwriting TRB Conversations
Thanks for reading. For partnerships, get in touch with Richard Jamieson: [email protected]. Send me a note by hitting reply or emailing me: [email protected].