“The goal is to build a digitally-centric, next-gen publishing platform that’s going to last for decades to come,” Borsa said during the Digiday Publishing Summit on March 28.

Borsa highlighted the stark difference between the two media companies integrating compared to the Time Inc. merger with Meredith in 2018 before Time was ultimately sold later that year.

Unlike Meredith’s merger with Time Inc. in 2018, where the companies had to “find synergies and cost savings to drive the business forward,” the focus of the deal with Dotdash was to find the growing areas of the business and “invest further to propel it forward,” Borsa said.

There are five main areas in which Dotdash Meredith is integrating the company: its portfolio of brands, sales teams, ad tech stack, content platform and culture.

Brands

The combined Dotdash Meredith now has “more and diverse brands,” Borsa said, ranging from “legacy” brands like People and Better Homes & Gardens to “upstart” brands like Byrdie and The Spruce.

The two companies, unlike with Time Inc., have “complementary capabilities,” such as commerce. While Meredith focuses on “news and deals,” Dotdash has built a business from its “evergreen round-ups and content,” she said.

Advertising

Because of the variety in the two companies’ brands and content, there “wasn’t a lot of overlap” in Dotdash and Meredith’s top advertisers — both in the brands and categories, according to Borsa. Dotdash Meredith is combining its ad stacks and integrating its back-end, proprietary platforms.

However, Dotdash’s sales teams are organized around content verticals, while Meredith had a more centralized structure, Borsa said. Moving forward, Meredith will be adopting Dotdash’s organizational structure. Health and finance have been successful categories for Dotdash, versus Meredith’s relationships with retail, CPG and entertainment.

Meredith has large, multi-year, multi-million dollar partnerships with advertisers, whereas Dotdash has built relationships with “different and smaller organizations, in ways that we were not able to through our organization,” Borsa said.

Meredith had a broader suite of ad products, as well as native and sponsored capabilities. “We have a whole team of people so it was just at a different level in a different scale,” she said.

Data & engagement

Meredith has built out first-party data capabilities, while Dotdash has been focused on “highly performant contextual targeting,” according to Borsa.

Dotdash was driving organic traffic and “really making sure they’re answering consumers’ intent when they are searching for it in their moment of need” with its service-focused articles, while Meredith has a “powerful” email newsletter capability, as well as social and …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron