Notes from Podcast #1 — [A Media Operator] Julia Beizer on Building Product at Bloomberg Media
I discovered a podcast channel called “A Media Operator” by Jacob Cohen Donnelly. The show is perfect for anyone interested in the media industry. It discusses business models, products, audience development, subscriptions, advertising, and commerce. I found the content of this channel very informative in that it helps me understand the business & technical landscape of the media industry, and thus, cultivates my product thinking as I navigate my career as a product/program manager in the media industry. I am forming a habit of listening to podcasts weekly while I take notes of the important points mentioned in each podcast to learn and digest.
🎧 Listen to the informative podcast here: A Media Operator — Julia Beizer on Building Product at Bloomberg Media
🎤 Guest: Julia Beizer, chief product officer + global head of digital at Bloomberg Media
🌟 The subscription business is not just a paywall
A paywall is a tollbooth. The subscription business is a complete business strategy. It means asking questions such as “Can you actively continue to attract and acquire new members every month?” “Can you retain your current users?” “Do you have the right email/push notification program set up to give subscribers the unique value of the subscription?”
Bloomberg Media has spent a lot of effort in building out a 360° marketing strategy to support this initiative. How does the company use data and AI/ML technology to target and market to all the subscribers, with the right offer, the right language, and the right price?
As Bloomberg Media goes into 2021, it is going to focus on attracting lightly engaged users to the subscription products. It is not just about talking to customers and understanding how to make a great product, but also doing the work across marketing, product, and editorial — The goal is revenue. The way they measure whether they are doing well and on track to their revenue number is by measuring active subscribers. That means the company needs to acquire a bunch of subscribers and retain current or future subscribers. So to get there, the company has come up with some innovative and fun, and collaborative ways to figure out how, across marketing, product, and editorial, they can attract and retain subscribers.
🌟 Active Subscribers
Active subscribers are people who are subscribed to the product on any given day. That means new users that you just acquired on day 1 and users who have not yet churned. It is a great metric. It’s inclusive of both acquisition and retention. A product can attract a bunch of new users but if they are all churned out after a one-month free trial, the company is not actually growing its long-term revenue and is not actually building a sustainable business.
What makes the subscription business great is that it is about human beings every day deciding whether they want to stay subscribed to the product so the company has to earn it every day. The active subscribers metric really help the teams make sure the company is really building relationships with subscribers who are staying for the long haul.
🌟 What is Bloomberg Media doing to up its subscription game
Bloomberg Media has two product teams that work on the subscription business. One is working on acquisition and the other on retention. These teams are focusing on two things:
- A/B testing — 1/4
The product team comes up with a set of A/B tests together with the marketing team to see if they can do anything to attract new subscribers or find the right optimization of the language they are using to drive people to subscribe. The team runs 10–20 tests a month. As for the granular details, about a quarter of each team’s time is spent on running, operating, and managing the results of these quick-turn optimizing tests, which are done in conjunction with marketing.
2. Longer-term investments — 3/4
The other 3/4 of their time is spent on longer-term investments — the things that need to be done to make sure the company is building a sustainable business. (e.g. Building out a more robust onboarding program has been one of the priorities of the retention team in making sure subscribers get more familiar with what the product is and all benefits as they subscribe.)
🌟 How Bloomberg Media is looking to tackle the advertising business
- Use data to provide insightful stories to its clients
- Use A/B testing to drive results
- Find a better way to monitor two revenue streams in real-time — Subscription & Advertising
- Use the knowledge got from the subscription business to drive the advertising business (e.g. customer subscription data, behavioral insights)
🌟 Maximize first-party acquisition and deprioritize third-party cookies
The death of third-party cookies is a good reset moment for Bloomberg to think about how to monetize the products in a more user-friendly way. Besides being a media company, Bloomberg is housed within a larger financial data company. The company benefits from its customer’s willingness to share information about themselves when the product provides the right value exchange and its ability to draw insight from data that help drive business for its clients. (demographic data & psychographic profile) This provides the company with a couple of key benefits (answers to the following questions):
- What do users care about? How can the company provide better editorial products and services for them?
- For advertisers who are looking to reach this audience, the company has insights into what makes them tick and what platforms to reach them on
🌟 Subscription Business vs. Advertising Business — Give more content to gain more subscribers vs. Open more content to get more advertising dollars
There is a revenue optimization system for every media company. How do they leverage and prioritize those two departments is at the core of the system. Bloomberg currently does it “manually” in a regular meeting called “project needle.” These two things don’t have to be in conflict if you are looking at the right data and the right numbers. Right now, the company is doing the precursor of the revenue optimization engine “manually”. The goal in 2021 is to have a system and tool that maximize revenue optimization in real-time. But sometimes these types of systems fail to look at the lifetime value of a user. As the company moves into the direction of subscription business and audient targeting, that’s a more valuable metric to look at. So the company is trying to figure out how to get a shared understanding and a shared common language of what metrics matter and then teams can optimize two businesses easily. (Subscription & Advertising)
🌟Listen to users but not “listen” to users
Listening to what users have to say about the product is helpful for understanding user needs. But what they say they want is not necessarily what they really want. When a user says they want a search function, the real user need behind this feedback can be that the user is having a hard time finding the information they need. Listen carefully to user feedback but dig deeper into the real user needs.
