Question: Do you also provide native advertising formats to clients and are they also included in packages to customers? 

Answer: 
- Yes, we do and they are included in packages. Native ads are some of our best performing formats. We think that's twofold. One is that they blend in more so with the other tutorial content, they jar less than shoutier ads. But we also find that, and if you think of it, the Facebook ad hasn't evolved hugely beyond its native format. We find that the native format focuses on the actual advertising message in a simpler way. Sometimes we can be guilty, mostly the business owners in particular, the ones investing their money, want to either get lots of things in the ad all at the same time, or they want it as loud and as shouty as possible. The native format is actually a far simpler, very focused message, particularly around what you want that user to do. That is very effective. And those native formats, I think, force you to be more precise in the messaging that you're putting out there. 

 

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Question: What comes through is that you have quite an experience. You have tried different sales models. It would be interesting to hear, what models did not work? 

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Answer: 
- Every year, our sales teams scream at us that they want to offer the full spectrum of solutions. And we are continuously thinking about how we can make that work. We find it challenging, because the sales people that come from a background of selling print and digital Newsquest solutions are on one side and want to sell lots of Google or Facebook ads on the other side. It's very difficult to balance both.

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- We also see, where we have our sales teams that are selling DMS solutions only, they struggle to sell digital advertising alongside. The fact that those solutions run across different parts of the purchase funnel, I think, is why it's quite difficult. We might find single individuals of great talent with the ability to do it. However it's very difficult, we found, to do it at scale and have enough people who can consistently propose those solutions all of the time.

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- There are at least two reasons; 

1. It requires a lot of knowledge to understand how to get each of those solutions to deliver as well as they can. They have different pricing mechanisms, some are auctions, some are cost per thousand (CPM) and some of them are cost per performance.

2. A lot more support is needed to understand how the mechanisms are going to drive the results. Some of it is about awareness time, some of it is a click to a destination. In the DMS world, all of our optimization work is charged by “cost per conversion”. So all of a sudden you're very busy building a very complicated process. We've seen from other businesses, particularly telcos and broadband companies, it's quite rare that you ever speak to one individual to talk about what subscription TV channel you're going to get, or what mobile phone you're going to get, or what broadband service you're going to get.  Historically and culturally, it’s been very different for news publishers. You tend to have one person dealing with one customer. And we feel that in every pilot and test we've done, we haven't seen enough results to say, deviate from the course that we're on.

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Question: It's tricky for the salespeople to sell everything. That's what I took away from that. So if you flip that around and look at the clients, it must also be hard to sell, like where you have to find a good entry point in the customer journey. I'm assuming these entry points are different for different sizes of clients?
 

Answer: 

- Absolutely. Yes. So again, when we look at, if we look at how the entry point is typically from, let's call it, our digital advertising teams, they'll tend to go in knowing those types of industries that historically we've traded with very well.

 

- And we will benchmark and use a lot of our case studies to say, we're working with customers like yours. We are dealing with 6,000 to 7,000 businesses a month that we've got reams of campaign data to prove to you why we're expertise in this. In the same sense that the DMS team or the digital marketing team, that platform that we have has immense data to say, businesses like yours, we can deliver consistently these results.

 

- And so whilst they sound similar, their narratives, when you drill down you're talking in detail about different metrics. And that's the skill set of those different businesses, different people. The businesses are also in different maturity stages.

 

- It's there aren't many that are, you know, spending huge amounts on both. And we see that in their spend patterns. But we are very aware, the more solutions you can have the customer commit to, the stickier they are, the churn level reduces significantly.

 

- So we are very focused on getting customers to three or four solutions, and more. Those that are on single solutions, particularly if it's print only, it's very difficult to justify when the pressure's on that cost. Everything seems to be going up in cost these days, proving the value of what they're spending is becoming our number one focus.

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Question: Just to clarify: The bespoke tech that you talked about, especially in the beginning, is just on the DMS side? Or does that go across the whole product range?
 

Answer: 

- It's on the DMS side. It's a platform that Gannett purchased through a business that they acquired. It's unique in the sense that it started life by optimizing paid for search spend across multiple publishers. So you could take one budget across Google, Bing, Yahoo, and optimize across all of them. You didn't have to run individual campaigns to see how they were doing. And then they've evolved it to include Facebook and other channels. Snap and. I believe, TikTok is probably on the roadmap where, again, the power of having one budget optimizes that spend rather than trying to run individual campaigns and see how you can move the budget around.

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Question: You were talking about Facebook advertising and that it's better to put ads through the news brands own Facebook account than through the advertisers accounts. Can you talk a bit more about that? 

 

Answer: 

- So when we say better, first of all, it's more efficient. You own the Facebook account, your ad ops team can access that as if it was your own network. We believe it's a way of endorsing where you have certain business owners who in that maturity cycle are quite low, maybe a bit skeptical of all this digital stuff, certainly not sure whether or not they should be on Facebook.

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- Your news brand is endorsing their brand in an environment they're not familiar with. So it leverages the fact that it's the trust of who we are, what we've done for 200 years, the content that we write that's ours and we endorse and the environment we've built is trusted. And it's bridging and holding their hands into someone else's environment that isn't managed or held accountable or invested in quality journalism.

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- But it's done by a trusted partner. And so it helps bridge that gap going across. And because the targeting is very similar to display, the transition of your skill sets with your ad ops team is easier. And it makes an easier narrative to understand when you start to blend these packages. And it's been a huge part of our transformation, really. Super interesting.

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Question: Is what you just described found also within the 1XL entity with national offerings to advertisers?

 

Answer: 

- We do have an audience monetization team that works in conjunction with 1XL. And they do that on behalf of 26 other publishers in the UK of which we are proud to be a big part of. So it's a more cost effective way of driving your national revenues. Instead, we pull that resource under one brand. And that third party does that for us.

(Our comment: we believe that the national sales organisation focuses on uniquely selling local brands in packages. And, the other way around, NewsQuest doesn't have an extensive audience or programmatic technology team).

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Question: I guess the blue people are digital, young, dynamic. You want to keep them in the organization. You probably have to fight to keep them. On the other side, I see people like myself. A bit older, not so attractive to employ etc. Is that the right description? 

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Answer: 

- No, not fully. But I would imagine, yes, perhaps on some of the demographics. What we have found is we have found that developing your own digital marketing services experts is worth the investment. It's not easy. In the ones that we've hired from other businesses, we haven't had as well as positive a track record as developing our own. And that's not easy either. Culturally, we want to progress people's careers and give them an opportunity to try new skills and develop their earnings.

 

- But I think it's harder to break the culture when we introduce the referral mechanism. Some sales people have been thinking, once they've signed on a customer, it's their customer. We are still working on those barriers to open up.

 

- And actually, it's through demonstrating how challenging it has been in the last few years to retain and grow customers. The idea that one sales person's customers are theirs is a fool's errand. And actually, the cultural muscle that we're very focused on right now, and I think will take us a big part of the next two years, is to develop a culture of moving customers around to best suit the skill sets of strengths you have in your sales teams.

 

-So that's not just as we transition them to a digital marketing services sale. It's actually within the areas within those two different teams. The DMS team is far better at leveraging expertise within a very small team.

 

- So where an individual understands the fostering or mechanic of businesses, your own sales approach, patter, propositioning, influence of the data, the industry, becomes a far stronger proposition. And so that's the mechanism we're trying to transition our traditional team in, is finding ways where they can develop expertise. A key area for us this last year has been to focus on education, helping private schools to position ourselves as the best experts to help advertise and market your opportunity.