We wrapped up our collaboration with Affinity Global this morning with a morning salon that brought together commerce leaders at top brands, with insights from commerce leaders at People Inc and BuzzFeed, as well as specialty commerce publisher Discoup. One big takeaway I’ll have more about on Thursday: the need for “manufactured intent” now that Google is sending less intent traffic. Thanks to Affinity for its partnership.
Some notes:
TRB Audience Summit is on Sept 17 in NYC. Dennis Berman, president and publisher of The Free Press, has joined the programming to discuss how The Free Press is building community, both through a virtual forum and a series of in-person gatherings across the country. Reserve your spot to join Media People from People Inc, USA Today Co, The Wall Street Journal and more. If you have any questions about the event, send me an email at [email protected] or by hitting reply.
On PvA OT, Troy and I discussed the plight of the Gen X media lifer who are navigating an industry-wide compression at exactly the wrong time in their careers.
On The Rebooting Show, I spoke with Workweek CEO Adam Ryan about the power of practitioner media.
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As a kid, we’d hit the garage door and then race to get out before it closed on us. I feel that way sometimes about my career. I got lucky. Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard and didn’t make the mistake of switching lanes or, worse, becoming a generalist. But lots of people work hard and make choices that are best for themselves with the available information.
The compression of the media industry is a depressing topic. Sometimes it gets obscured as numbers. BuzzFeed is cutting 185 jobs. We’re numb to these kinds of moves at this point, and the churn of capitalism is a feature, not a bug. People are more adaptable than they give themselves credit for being.
This compression sucks at any time, but it’s particularly bad for Gen X media professionals. By design or not, careers go through phases and culminate in a peak-earnings window of about a decade starting at 45. After 55, it begins to taper off. As I told Troy, I looked around early and realized this profession is designed to commoditize me and replace me with someone younger and cheaper. When reporters in their late 20s would complain to me, I would tell them they have it as good as it will get. Old enough to know what they’re doing but still far cheaper than a middle-aged person with a mortgage.
Beyond the financial stress, there’s an emotional toll to displacement. Getting cast aside in middle age lands differently. In many way, you’re in too deep. It’s not like you can get your commercial real estate license.
Both Troy and I have been there. He developed an investing and advisory portfolio, although I still think of him as a podcaster. I was lucky enough to have a profile and skillset I believed would allow me to find my own way. There was little choice: I didn’t have other options or see many that would pay enough.
I don’t have any great advice for anyone in the situation of being in your 50s and not working after decades of working. It’s easy to say be adaptable. My belief is media is at the front end of structural changes to the economy. AI looks unlikely to replace all jobs, despite the dire warnings of this powerful technology from its makers while raising hundreds of billions, but I do think more work will be done like Hollywood. Groups will come together for projects, but more careers will move in the direction of operating a small business. That requires more hustle and uncertainty, even if it’s against people’s nature.
Join PvA Field Notes, our private community where we connect the dots between media, tech and culture with smart people. This week’s discussions: the pivot to open-source AI, the art of the “hit piece” clapback, Netflix chasing YouTube, and Calvin’s go-to lo mein recipe.
The rise of practitioner media
Adam Ryan has an interesting thesis at Workweek. It’s that the future of B2B media lies on people with experience in the field. Think Lenny Ratchitsky for product managers, Rachel Karten for social media pros, Ari Paparo in ad tech, and my favorite example and a TRB Audience Summit speaker, CJ Gustafson for CFOs. I’d add myself to this mix, since a core thesis of The Rebooting was that my experience both covering the industry as a journalist but also building businesses in it would be a differentiator.
“We encourage people to stay in your job,” Adam told me. “It is easier to write content when you actually are doing that thing.”
Workweek is building a media company with practitioners as the faces. This is in some ways a B2B version of Puck, which is rebundling the type of insidery journalists who might be found doing their own newsletters and podcasts. The challenge for Workweek is the same for most media businesses: how do you become a talent business?
Adam wants his creators to continue working in their fields rather than become full-time creators. That kind of one-foot-in, one-foot-out approach is ideal for keeping sharp. Rachel Karten echoed this in our conversation, explaining that her consulting work is integral to Link in Bio rather than a moonlighting hustle.
“The audience sees that not only in the work, but also in just how they think about me,” she said.
This is part of an overall shift in the creator economy as it matures. Knowledge creators are a rising force. Influencers sit on the personality end of the spectrum while knowledge creators exist on the expertise side. There are elements of personality, of course, but it’s less of a driving factor.
We also discuss in depth another belief of mine about B2B and a lot more of media: It’s a who you know business. That’s because, as I’m reminded by Omeda CEO James Capo, B2B is a lead-generation business. There are pathways for subscriptions businesses, but most categories push B2B media businesses to matching up a buy and a sell side. For instance, when Marketecture began with a subscriptions model, I was sure that would change because it would discover the money in ad tech in particular is in events.
That puts a premium on audience data. Consumer models often coast on very high-level data, while B2B rewards granular data focused on job title and function. I segment The Rebooting’s audience into various high-value categories like CEO, revenue, product, audience development, commerce and events. Big numbers aren’t that relevant in B2B. if you’re a software provider who sells to media companies, you don’t care about random Gmail addresses. The next task: Get those high-value audiences to take actions, which is why I track audience activation rate.
Adam has structured Workweek around something similar. Workweek operates across “communities” tied to industries like human resources, e-commerce, healthcare and marketing. Workweek has people from more than 150,000 companies across its five communities. In one CRM match with a Fortune 500 advertiser, Workweek found that 44% of the advertiser’s ICP was already present in its audience, according to Adam. So rather than report raw clicks, Workweek focuses on which companies in the advertiser’s target list engaged. “We focus on accounts and we focus on match rates,” he said.
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