WSJ, Insider, BDG among publishers revisiting pandemic lessons in business ops as potential recession looms

By Kayleigh Barber

This article is part of a limited editorial series, called The 2023 Notebook, and is designed to be a guide to marketing and media buying in the new year. Explore the series here.

After learning fast on their feet in 2020, publishers had to make some changes to the way they conducted business. Nearly three years later, several of those changes are still in place — guardrails media execs now hope will help them weather this pending economic storm.

Sales teams are still operating on tight timelines and are building in flexibility as their most important selling point. Remote working means publishers can continue saving on real estate and can hire strategically based on skill versus location. And if the economy takes a bigger hit than publishers can handle, they’re not afraid to make the necessary expense cuts to right the ship.

“Go back in the time machine to March 2020, one thing that we learned really quickly on the job was the importance of scenario planning,” said Jason Wagenheim, CRO and president of BDG. “We had levers that we could pull to keep our business moving forward, whatever the universe threw at us. So now we’re doing the same thing.”

Flexibility sells

In the pandemic’s first year, publishers’ sales teams had to scrap all of their rules around sale cycles and the timelines for campaign executions to be as flexible as necessary with clients who suddenly lost their advertising budgets. Yes, losing that money in Q2 and Q3 of 2020 hurt, but potentially ruining relationships with top clients by being strict about ad deals would have hurt worse.

The pandemic’s recession was short lived and by the end of that year, many publishers were able to recoup losses as well as sign on advertisers for hefty 2021 deals. But by mid-2022, advertisers were once again asking for the same flexibility as they determined their budgets for this year.

Media execs are heading into this year preparing to be flexible or risk losing advertisers to competitors that can offer them better terms.

“It’s never been more crucial to be in consistent communication with your clients,” said Josh Stinchcomb, global CRO at The Wall Street Journal. “The ever-evolving economic circumstances can change the needs of your partners and their businesses, and if you’re not closely aligned and can’t quickly adapt to shifting priorities, you can find yourself behind the eight ball.”

Take Insider, for example. The publisher’s customer success team was born out of the pandemic and was created to provide flexibility from point-of-sale to execution in a way that salespeople and the campaign creatives aren’t equipped to do on their own.

“When you have clients just getting thrown everything at them from their leadership teams [from] changing deadlines, changing budgets and changing priorities, that means we have to shift gears really quickly. [Even] after the deal is done, [we will have to] reposition ads, change creative, change the lines of …read more

Source:: Digiday