PERSUADING AUDIENCES AND CUSTOMERS TO PAY AND STAY

By Michael Miller, Executive Chairman, News Corp Australasia

Keynote address to Mumbrella360 conference

Good morning everyone.

I’m Michael Miller. While you know me as leading News Corp in this region… I am and will always be a proud marketer.

Like many of you in the room, I am passionate about media.

My love affair with this industry began more than thirty years ago.

My first job was in sales - selling ads in Countdown magazine - for those of you under 30, Countdown was The Voice of its time - the most watched music program on TV.

It was exciting and dynamic. The pace was fast, and the learning curve steep.

In that job, I began to understand the power of a good brand, and the absolute importance of knowing your audience, your brand, and your clients.

I fell in love with media then and I’ve never fallen out of love with it.

From magazine ad sales, I moved to newspapers and since then I have had the privilege of working across the spectrum of radio, outdoor, subscription television and digital.

I love the way media combines to create effective marketing campaigns; as well as its impact and ability to connect people and communities - and make a difference.

All of us here whether publishers, marketers, creatives, buyers or planners want the same four things:

• Audience
• Engagement
• Connection and …
• Results.

We want to understand how our audiences and customers think.

We want to know them as well as we know ourselves.

We want them to need us, and to want us.

We don’t want just a brief flirtation.

We want them to stay with us for the long haul.

In short, we want them to pay and stay.

At News, across all our brands, our hunt for audiences who will pay and stay has brought  many lessons and much change.

In the last two years alone, we have been constantly changing ...

• our portfolio,
• our marketing services and market offerings;
• our structures and technology.

We are not alone.

There is no media company, nor any major business, that has not initiated change in response to recent market challenges.

Change can renew, refresh and refocus.

To be a dynamic company today,  you have to constantly change.

So, yes, our change has seen costs out of our business.

We’ve reset our newsrooms to be data-led, and outsourced  photographic and production to be leaner and more efficient. 

We’ve upgraded our sales network to add scale and specialisation.

We’ve rationalised our portfolio.

We’ve recently sold three magazine brands to Bauer and are currently responding to buyer interest  in more than 100 of our regional and community titles.

We are a business that will not stand still.

We have a clear focus on driving profitable growth.

Within this stable of brands we have created market leading audience eco systems in food, travel, sport, business, real estate and prestige.

All of these are embedded with our sizeable digital networks to better engage our audiences with our advertisers.

In 2019 we are focused on collaboration and connectivity across our business - the REA group, SKY News, Foxtel, FOX SPORTS and HarperCollins, and our newspaper and magazine brands - to continue to evolve News Corp for our audience and our customers.

Central to these changes is our focus on maximising our audiences and their engagement.

Our greatest opportunity for growth at News Corp is to connect with a consumer’s willingness to pay for content.

Using the science of data, we know that consumers will pay for content that is unique, local, and timely.

Across our network, we see the value of quality local content reinforced every day.

Our data shows us what people want - information about  their city, their streets, their teams.

Quality information that is reliable, is knowledgeable and about subjects dear to them.

In Sydney, for example, local crime, celebrity and court stories lead the way in driving digital subs.

In Adelaide, the popularity of the Crows and Port Adelaide is closely followed by stories of local council planning and development.

In Brisbane, stories about private schools and their performance rate more highly than general education content.

In Hobart, a recent series about the state’s most powerful public servants resulted in a surge in subs. Who knew public servants could be so interesting?

What this reminds us of that people will pay, and stay, with content that is about where they live, work and play.

This is why we invest in local voices  and local content and how we connect with our communities.

Audiences are also drawn to, and will pay for, strong opinion.

Opinion is about attitude and conviction; insight and analysis, wit and satire. 

It can both polarise and unite. It never sits on the fence.

Some of our opinion makers - like Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt and Phil Rothfield - drive conversations and start debate.

Their insights and commentary about politics, sport, issues and events are in high demand.

Content decisions were once all about gut instinct.

Today, instinct has some help. 

We measure relentlessly …. Everything from what news and information is being consumed by who and when, and where, and importantly … what people are prepared to pay for. 

We use real-time tools like Chartbeat and our bespoke version, Chartbeast to understand what people are reading - and HOW they are reading it.

We have information right down to which individual journalist is driving a subscription.

The data informs decisions.

We gather information tirelessly, curate it, verify it and make hundreds of decisions and judgements every day on what to publish – and what not to publish.

That’s why it’s called editing - and in our fast-paced, time poor world, all marketers could do more editing.

The more we understand our audience and what they want, the better the results for our commercial partners.

Results are what our clients tell us they want.

But results come in all different shapes and sizes.

Awareness and intrigue may be the result required from a brand launch.

It could be growth in the bottom line driven by sales from a retail event.

The objective might be to create desire and increased trial of their new or well-known product.

Sometimes clients tell us they want to convey detailed information on why their car, cruise, phone, or home loan is better than others in the market.

The client might want to grow customer loyalty.

They may need increased access to data to inform insights and developments, or enhance a direct one-on-one relationship.

They may want to position their brand in a contextual environment, being used in situ. 

Nowadays this is called, Content Marketing. 

When I started these were called advertorials or product placement.

Often the marketing result wanted, rather ambitiously, is all of the above.

But most of all, clients want profitable results.

Increasingly the leading clients we work with are realizing the cheapest offer doesn’t produce the best result.

Nor does the easiest or most automated solution.

Clients also realize that no single style of media will achieve the optimal result.

They want premium inventory, not just programmatic inventory.

They recognize that main media is needed to drive the top of the funnel, and above the line media needs to work with targeted media to acquire.

With so much clutter, particularly digitally, campaigns need cut through, consistency and frequency.

Marketers know they cannot be overweight in either retention or acquisition. 

They need customers who both pay and stay.

It is my ambition that when you think of what News Corp can do for you, we are seen as having the best and most complete set of integrated assets to deliver effective marketing campaigns, across multiple categories and audience groups.

This is why we constantly change - bringing together our large suite of marketing services, skills and audiences in a customised manner to ensure growth and results.

We invested in Unruly because we saw the value of maximising the shareability of your video content across platforms.

With Storyful we recognised the value in surfacing, verifying and licensing the best user generated content for brands.

To complement these, we added the capability of our new content agency Sudden.ly, a dedicated digital newsroom to rapidly create shareable commercial content.

Similarly, we created News AMP, our integrated content solutions team which draws on the most appropriate talent from across our businesses to take on the challenges brands are facing and to solve them quickly and efficiently.

We’ve also used data to build our audience categories.

Through the creation of Food Corp we’ve developed a rich and deep daily understanding of how Australians cook, eat and shop.

For example, we know that last weekend the recipe of choice for taste.com.au readers was pumpkin soup; and or the delicious audience, Matt Preston’s self-saucing chocolate pudding

The insights enables us to create made-for-mobile time-targeted ad formats such as Aisle Watch to connect brands with grocery buyers.

We understand the audience of our Prestige Network - now 90 per cent of all ABs - and what motivates their demand for luxury goods and experiences.

Our With Her In Mind network - also known as whimn.com.au - brings together our brands and content with Australia’s largest digital female audience.

We know how Australian women live, where they work, how they shop and their health and well-being priorities.

Since launch 18 months ago, it is now three times the size of mamamia and almost twice the audience of ninehoney every month.

In the last year, we launched an internal content agency News360.

Our goal was to drive collaboration between our businesses.

For the launch of the Jimmy Barnes biography Working Class Man for HarperCollins, we published book extracts and news stories across our Sunday, daily and regional brands.

We ran a national, co-ordinated social media campaign.

The David Speers interview with Barnes ran on Sky News and across all our online sites.

Working Class Man debuted at number one on release day, with sales also up 20 per cent on his previous book, Working Class Boy.

For the launch of Foxtel’s Love It or List It program, more than 30 articles across our national network of newspapers, the Sunday TV Guide and Stellar magazine.

The show’s debut ratings exceeded expectations by 91 per cent. And host Andrew Winter is now a Gold Logie nominee.

For the REA group’s launch of its new home loan business in partnership with NAB, we created a supporting editorial campaign that covered news, finance and lifestyle destinations. 

The result was a 240% increase in conditional loan approval applications. 

These are just a few examples of what our collaboration has achieved.

We understand our audiences because we connect with them.

We connect with them because our content is local, relevant - and trusted.

Our content is trusted because every story, every comment piece, every headline, photograph, video and cartoon we publish is subject to scrutiny.

Our editing decisions are made by real people, not algorithms.

It is how we connect with our communities.

For our business, connection is about bringing people together.

What we do best is bring audiences and customers together.

In conclusion, I’d like to consider the insights of two people who know a lot about connecting with audiences.

One was said by a young entrepreneur setting out to change the world with his company.

The other is Mark Zuckerberg, whose ambitions were equally bold. 

As you can see, the way they see the value of connecting people, and the importance of human interaction, is very similar.

Facebook connects through technology, the best engineers, smart algorithms and a constantly evolving platform.

But at News Corp, we create connections with our communities with real people and real stories.

This is what persuades audiences and customers to pay and stay.