Bloomberg’s Bullish Plan To Make Digital Media Work

AdExchanger: In the past, Bloomberg has held the position that it won’t put content on platforms where there’s not a fair value exchange. Is TicToc’s success the reward for being a social media holdout?

KEITH GROSSMAN: I’ve always been wary of why one should be the first onto certain platforms. In the case of Twitter, they have been incredible partners throughout the TicToc integration.

In the case of early publishers that jumped in with some of the social platforms, the rationale wasn’t aligned with the long-term vision of where the organization needs to go.

We are fortunate. We are a media company that sits within a larger data technology company. We are private so don’t have to go in front of shareholders every quarter and say, “Look at this crazy innovative thing we are doing – this means we are innovative!” Instead, we can step back and look at the landscape [first].

What’s next for TicToc? Does it stay an ad-supported model?

TicToc year one has been pure sales. We are beginning to work on distribution deals to extend where the TicToc reach will be. The TicToc brand launched with Twitter, and it will anchor there but push out into other areas as well.

There is no reason why TicToc should not be on airport TV screens. It makes sense to be there, and there may be a distribution deal that helps build the brand. That’s how I’m thinking about it.

How does advertising co-exist with Bloomberg’s new subscription model?

When we put the paywall in place, we looked at power users, the people who were consuming the most Bloomberg content. It’s at 10 articles a day, so it’s a relatively loose subscription model. Ops, sales and ad ops all worked together to make sure we weren’t cannibalizing inventory.

In most instances, when you do a subscription model you manage supply and demand. In our case, because we are not a traditional media organization and we have one of the largest newsrooms on the planet, we actually take a very small percentage of our content and make it public.

We produce 5,000 articles a day and only put a tiny percentage into the public space. The rest is designed for the Bloomberg Terminal. In any instance we would find ourselves challenged from an inventory perspective, we can [ask], “Do we need to release more supply?”

Would you also change the paywall to adjust supply?

We’re going to play around with it to understand what is the right balance.

Is three articles the right number? Five? Seven?

What’s the data opportunity for Bloomberg?

The data topic is my favorite topic. We hired Michelle Lynn two years ago from Dentsu Aegis, and she built Bloomberg AIQ, an AI analytics tool. Every person in our organization has access to this, whether you’re in the United States, India, you’re a seller or in ops. Everyone uses it slightly differently.

What AIQ allowed us to do is look at over 30,000 journals and periodicals around the world and suss out editorial themes. We can identify whitespace opportunities for our partners around how they are being perceived in the news. We can look at the content that aligns most closely to our partners’ desired outcomes. When we put together plans, we can think about how we should be targeting. The AI aspect of AIQ ties into the artificial intelligence, and the IQ is the human element – and we have been hiring a lot of strategists in the past year.

Tell me about that strategy and consulting business.

The consulting work allows us to think about our audience through the lens of insights. Sometimes insights can be bought without media, and sometimes they are applied to media. The hardest part of the consulting practice was the realization that sometimes, when we are given a challenge, the outcome won’t always be Bloomberg Media.

We are repositioning our entire offering around the idea that we see value in the audience we speak to more than anything else. Media is one way of accessing that audience, but insights are another way of accessing that audience. Sometimes they work together, and sometimes they work independently of each other.

What’s different about Bloomberg’s approach to agency-like services?

Where we differentiate ourselves from the consulting practices, from an agency and from a media player is that we can actually do end to end. We can start the conversation, and mine the insights from the 100 billion data points a day we sit on, and we can bring that to life in terms of insights and strategy work, which can be applied to media or events and other activations. We have the end-to-end capabilities.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

This post was syndicated from Ad Exchanger.