Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Ensconced within the larger Bloomberg empire, Bloomberg’s editorial operations are in an enviably comfortable position.
“If you look at our approach at how we play on platforms that we don’t own, compared to other media companies, you’ll see we do it a little differently, because we’re part of a bigger exceedingly well-capitalized, healthy — for lack of a better term — technology company,” Michael Shane, Bloomberg Media’s newly appointed global head of digital innovation, told me. “So we aren’t subject to the stormy winds of the rest of the media industry.”
Shane was previously managing editor for Bloomberg digital and before that director of operations at The Verge, which he joined shortly after its launch — and before that, a professional clarinetist. He was especially confident in the new readership he felt Bloomberg was poised to attract globally, and the monetization opportunities that come from building a (loyal, wealthier) audience (if a little intentionally vague about what those new formats and partners might be). He was careful not to overpromise on the “innovation” part of his job, emphasizing the behind-the-scenes work building up internal processes and teams and the sometimes incremental nature of building digital products.
And approaching new projects leanly and deliberately has paid off, particularly in podcasting, which has become for the company a “seven-figure business,” up from zero less than a year ago. But as Shane told Nick Quah over at Hot Pod and reiterated to me, “we expect, as does pretty much everybody else, that the CPMs around standard-format audio ads will be pushed down to the commodity level.”
Below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Experimenting with and prototyping new products: That includes, do we have the right posture and culture to do rapid prototyping within product and editorial, and how do we approach it.
The next bucket is our internal tools and technologies. As a team both in editorial and in product, across every team until we have the right tools and technologies to help us be competitive.
The third bucket: What are the interesting partners that we might want to work with that are maybe a little surprising, that you wouldn’t necessarily think of right away if you were putting together your yearly business plan as a media company.
The next bucket is innovation around ads, working in close partnership with our ad products team, with our sales team. What kind of advertising can we sell as a collaboration with advertisers that is better for our users, better for the clients, and lead to more better experiences? What kind of new ad products can we make together that will make the Internet a better place?
The last bucket I’m focused on sketching out is looking for new revenue streams, new business lines, things outside the realm of advertising that are a good fit for Bloomberg, a good fit for our storytelling, our product team and our culture. What are some unexpected sources of revenue growth for the company as we head towards an anecdotally difficult media environment? It behooves everybody to be looking at, what are some more creative ways to run a profitable business?
A typical month for me might include: We could have a hackathon with the product team, I’m participating in a lot of user testing, user research, interviews with potential users with our product design UX group. I’m working on new ad products with sales and the ad team. I’m met with a few potential outside partners for Bloomberg. I want to see us develop the capability and culture to do rapid prototyping, so that we can experiment with things on small scale, learn as much as we can, and then if warranted, go bigger, if necessary, build a business case, get the buy-in and support that we need.
Our team has a roadmap. My mandate is to pull out of the weeds and look down-range six months or more for new opportunities to grow audiences, to grow our relationships with the audience, and to grow revenue.
The media business isn’t going to get any easier, but if you respect your users and you put out a world-class product, results will speak for themselves.
We’re doing a lot of research and experimentation. Podcasts for instance — there’s been a huge opportunity there. We’ve gone from a zero to a seven-figure business in less than a year. But we expect, as does pretty much everybody else, that the CPMs around standard-format audio ads will be pushed down to the commodity level.
Introducing Decrypted, Bloomberg's new @technology podcast https://t.co/F7ANRJJf3x pic.twitter.com/puAXSW2t0c
— Bloomberg (@business) October 5, 2016
So other ways to collaborate: That may mean new audio ad formats that don’t exist yet. Something you can only build in collaboration with an advertiser. Obviously a lot of people are looking at branded podcasts. But we need to figure out how to do that in the right way, how to get buy-in from your audience. Otherwise you find yourself shouting into an empty theater.
At Bloomberg, we’re global, and we have a global live events editorial operational business, and there’s a lot of opportunity there for us to connect with people in person. Primarily I think going forward you’ll see Bloomberg and a lot of other media companies focus on building products for the parts of the audience that show us they care about us. The people who are the most engaged, the people whose loyalty we earned over time.
When we go to advertisers, when we go to commercial partners, what we want to be able to say is, this is Bloomberg’s global audience — business leaders, executives, up-and-comers — but also look at this core that’s loyal to us and uses multiple of our products throughout the week, all day. We know who they are, we know what their proclivities are, what their preferences are, and because of that we can help advertisers form stronger relationships with them. Which means you don’t have to use squares and rectangles and prerolls. We’re going to be working on a lot of ad products and formats and looking for partners who are interested in taking some risks.
Before I took this role I spent my career in the newsroom. I’ve had plenty of edifying experiences with advertising in various formats. Fewer of them have been within the borders of a traditional web browser. But I know that canvas is still capable of good things.
First and foremost I’m excited about what we’re going to be able to offer our audience. But also to advertisers, when we for instance relaunch our OTT app starting with Apple TV. We’re trying some interesting new things there. And that means advertisers can try new things as well.
We’re trying to build things with our audience first. The opportunities that creates for advertisers is by definition going to be more powerful.
We’ll build a suite products that can talk to each other, and connect with an audience that cares enough to tell us who they are, and uses more than one of our products. Then we can serve a menu of advertising that is more relevant and integrated.
We have multiple different products being worked on right now. But how do they talk to each other? How do we create one single continuous experience for our audience, if we’ve earned enough of their trust and loyalty to allow us to do that.
Technology is making the world go round. And essentially every business story is a technology story if you dig deep enough. Bloomberg’s journalism is becoming more relevant for more people as our economy evolves, as the world becomes more globalized.
Welcome to the brand new Bloomberg @technology website https://t.co/2qtZU4wp6e pic.twitter.com/OUrQiI149G
— Bloomberg Technology (@technology) October 5, 2016
Bloomberg’s audience is incredibly high quality. If you look at our approach at how we play on platforms that we don’t own, compared to other media companies, you’ll see we do it a little differently, because we’re part of a bigger exceedingly well-capitalized, healthy technology — for lack of a better term — company. So we aren’t subject to the stormy winds of the rest of the media industry.
We’re very strategic about where we play, because we don’t have to live quarter-to-quarter. So we’re really looking at how can we build longterm relationships with audiences and platforms.
The shorthand is that it’s a section of our site for people under 40. They have a podcast that just launched also called Game Plan. The podcast focuses specifically on culture at work, life at work. One of my favorite episodes, the hosts went around the newsroom and asked colleagues, ‘Can I ask you your salary?’ So Game Plan is a specific thrust we make towards a younger audience.
I asked my coworkers what they make and they told me! Then, I put it on a podcast. https://t.co/1wUWJTB51R
— Rebecca Greenfield (@rzgreenfield) July 27, 2016
If you look at for example, our audience on iTunes, based on what we know about iTunes users and the Bloomberg audience: We’re doing storytelling and news reporting through audio there, and we’re also doing it through Bloomberg Radio. The demographics are quite different between the two, and that’s a unique opportunity for us.
We’re trying to think about how to bring out journalism to platforms in a way that makes sense, that isn’t copy and paste. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, for instance, what should a podcast sound like? We have a global radio network, and some of that radio does make its way to iTunes. Take a show like Surveillance. We transform it for the podcast audience, which is looking for something different.
We look for, where are the audiences we want to reach? And in the case of the up-and-coming under 40 crowd, that’s obviously on distributed platforms a lot of the time. We think about, what are their expectations on this platform, why do they go to this platform, what frame of mind are they in when they are on this platform?
For instance, I think of podcasts as a very intimate medium. A lot of people do it with earbuds in their ears. The journalism is literally inside their ears. So we spend a lot of time in the newsroom, on the product side, thinking about how do we get the right story, in the right format, on the right platform, at the right time, in order to meet the right audience?
You have to make a lot of adjustments along the way. You have to be thoughtful and sensitive when you’re doing that for an audience that’s grown up in some cases solely on distributed platforms.
One of the things I was involved in shortly after I arrived was, we created a special projects team, which is something that hadn’t existed before. When you go online and see the crazy things we do — from from What is Code to our big Businessweek electorate issue that came out — that comes from a team we built here, led by Thomas Houston. On his team he has a designer, a front-end developer, a features editor — we assembled this little special forces team that can branch out anywhere else in the newsroom and develop experiences unique to Bloomberg.
There’s not a national strategy someone is secretly working on that is going to turn everything around. The difference is, some people pay lip service, and others do the work. If you look around at the media landscape, it’s clear who’s guessing and who isn’t.
Launching podcasts and creating digital video obviously are not new. But doing them profitably is new for a lot of people. Bloomberg is in a position to do a lot of interesting collaborations, like the streaming deal we just did with Twitter — we were the partner for streaming the debates.
And we’re in some ways at the beginning of this. A lot of my work over the last two years has been behind the scenes — building processes, collaboration, communication, we’ve been doing a lot of hiring. In some ways my first two years were an on-ramp for this new role. After two years we’ve built a lot of teams and processes, and now we’re looking at an evolution to go from behind the scenes to projects that are more external in nature.
I’m not trying to dodge your question, but a lot of this is ineffable. A lot of innovation in media is iterative. It’s how you think. It’s how you work.
Obviously we want to do big things. But I’m just as excited about the things that happen in chunks that are so small that while they’re happening you can’t see them necessarily.
