Despite sharing a brand name and founder — Robert Allbritton — Politico U.S. and EU have operated as separate businesses until earlier this year. Now, Politico EU’s chief revenue officer Nicolas Sennegon said the Washington, D.C.-based and Brussels-based teams have developed global ambitions that include working together to sell ads across both regions, bundle subscriptions and find ways to editorially cover unfolding political news for readers around the world.

Most of the cross-brand collaboration has originated at the advertising level, which represents about one-third of Politico EU’s revenue currently (the other two-thirds come from its subscriptions business, which runs about €17,000 per year), according to Sennegon. But as the brand pursues its global expansion, he added that there are opportunities to further link those two sides of the business, by turning subscribers into advertisers, where Politico EU already sees about a 50% overlap.

On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Sennegon said that over the next year, Politico will be further branching the two brands together, though he would not disclose exactly what a global Politico will look like or when we can expect its launch.

Below are highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Realizing a global brand

Rebranding or working on a brand is not something that you do overnight. It’s a bit of everything, but we need some time to make it happen. But the first thing is [looking at] the existing assets that we have across the pond and from existing resources [and figuring out] how do we provide the most [from] these two things. From the newsroom perspective, you can have stories coming from Europe and stories coming from North America. From a subscription model, we can have some clients that want to subscribe to both Europe and North America. So we need to facilitate that.

What is the new brand? What is the new operational structure? It’s still in conversation. But our priority is to use existing resources and processes and optimize them as far as possible, in a more combined and aligned way. It’s an evolution more than a revolution.

Taking an agnostic approach to selling advertising and subscriptions

My role is to optimize revenue and optimize client relationships across the pond. The interesting thing [about] my role in Europe is overseeing both B2B subscription and media solution revenue. I can facilitate revenue growth by being agnostic, client centric and agnostic of business. I can take one client and have a conversation across the pond and not separate between B2B subscription or media solutions. My motivation is growth, but not specifically one versus the …read more

Source:: Digiday