James Wilson, the legendary founder of The Economist, probably had very little idea how many of his readers favored or opposed the Corn Laws. Nor did he likely have a clue how many people picking up the magazine were casual readers and not subscribers. He didn’t need to.
The Economist, which began publishing in 1843, has thrived for over a century and a half on the strength of its excellent journalism. It is one of the sterling brands of publishing, a must-read for serious people who are globally curious.
But the old publishing formulas that worked for The Economist and other legacy publications pack a lesser punch in the Internet Age. In an era when everyone is a publisher and a world of articles is at everyone’s fingertips, it is harder than ever to get reader attention. Subscriptions suffer in the face of free, easily accessible content. And revenues are under attack as ad buys now include digital channels such as search, social and video.
Even a vaunted publication like The Economist was forced to play catch-up. While its paid audience grew, overall readership plateaued. And surveys indicated that people felt the publication lagged behind its rivals when it came to relevance. The Economist needed to find smarter ways to connect with its audience and transform its business model to embrace digital.
“We needed to expand our audience and get more aggressive about getting more eyeballs, which meant that we needed key performance indicators to see how we were doing,” recalls Stephane Pere, chief data officer at The Economist Group.
Not long after becoming CDO in 2013, Pere put in place a technology transformation that would fundamentally change the way The Economist marketed its brand. “We wanted to expose our content to new prospects because we believed that our content was the best way to attract them,” says Pere.
Pere knew that The Economist needed to gather better data to invigorate the perception of the brand and turn more people into readers and subscribers. The first step was to convince management to change The Economist’s privacy policy to allow retargeting, something all its rivals allowed. “That was my first bet,” Pere says. “If you want to play the data game, you need data points.”
He next sold his bosses on implementing a Data Management Platform (DMP) from Oracle Marketing Cloud as a way to organize and parse the vast amounts of information the publisher had about its readers. The Economist uses the Oracle DMP to analyze its core audience and better understand their interests and attributes. Not only can it better segment its targets, but it can track the types of articles being read on its website. It is then able to use look-alike targeting to identify and reach people who match its reader profile but are not yet subscribers.
“It meant that we now were able to leverage our data and have much more effective reach and engagement,” says Pere.
Data was only half of the equation. The Economist also needed compelling creative messaging that would grab the attention of its ad targets and demonstrate the publication’s unique, highly relevant voice. Pere helped architect a system that allowed The Economist’s marketers to link ad copy to breaking news in real time. These messages, which showed up on sites that attracted Economist-type readers such as The Guardian, The Independent and CNN, had the kind of relevant messages that almost demanded clicks.
For example, when the CIA director responded to the Senate’s torture report, readers interested in the topic were served an Economist ad with the words “CIA” and “Torture” visible, but the rest of the text redacted. When LGBT rights and some countries’ discriminatory policies were in the news, an ad came up featuring a jail cell with the line “There are plenty of gay bars in Africa.” Clickthroughs linked to a landing page featuring The Economist’s coverage of the topic along with a subscription offer.
The results of the 12-week marketing campaign speak volumes for the campaign’s impact: The Economist more than quintupled its goal of getting 650,000 new prospects. It finished the campaign with 9,500 new subscribers. An additional 1 million unique visitors viewed Economist.com, generating an additional £500K in ad revenue. Awareness of The Economist in the U.S. soared 64 percent. Plus, the Oracle DMP helped reduce The Economist’s cost of acquisition by half.
“In the past we would have run a campaign and waited until it finished to count the number of subscriptions. Maybe we would have had a bit of brand lift. But now we are able to map customers at every stage of their journeys,” Pere says. “We also can retarget people who might be interested in our message but don’t subscribe right away. We can keep working on prospects and try to push them to engage more with our content and hopefully subscribe. It’s very different from the way we operated in the past.”
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Keep it simple, smartly
One of the fallacies of data-centric marketing is that it has to be complex. You can see where this comes from. Within many organizations, customer data has been siloed across disparate systems for so long that the whole process just seems messy. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
At Oracle Marketing Cloud, we see ourselves as agents of simplicity. We know that the less time a marketer spends on managing a complex technology ecosystem, the more time there is to personalize the customer experience. Data-driven marketing really has to be about using the insights you generate to activate and engage customers with relevant, real-time communications.
The Economist knows a thing or two about being simple and straightforward. For more than a century and a half, the publication has had a reputation for taking complicated topics and presenting them in clear, conversational style. So when it came to developing an advertising campaign based on what it knew about its loyal readers, it kept that “less is more” approach. It understood the balance between the art and science of marketing, using technology as a catalyst to activate highly creative communications. The data? Primed to deliver insights.
The targeting? Personalized and relevant. The message? Clever and concise. The results? Staggering.
