INMA Consumer Engagement Summit
By Bob Terzotis, Executive Vice President
It was HOT in Miami this week! Both the outside temperature and the presentations/discussions from many, many brilliant media leaders in the digital space! And as usual, Earl Wilkinson and his fabulous team put on a great event!
The Thursday morning sessions had a Scandinavian flavor with presentations from Espen Egil Hansen of Aftenposten telling us how his newsroom is taking the lead in subscriber relationship building. Followed by Martin Jonsson of Dagens Nyheter sharing how they battle digital churn with quality digital content and lots of data! Rounding out the morning was the Mittmedia team of Thomas Sundgren and Magnus Enstrom sharing how they drive their subscription business with user knowledge, A.I. and machine learning. Our dual moderators—Robert Whitehead and Nicki Purcell—had their hands full fielding questions and keeping the agenda on time. With all the great attendee engagement—we ran long to which no one seemed concerned!
The afternoon of Day 1 was equally exciting with a turn toward global media with presentations from Elisabeth Goodridge, NYT, sharing their fantastic newsletter strategy—highly recommend you reach out to her for those insights. Next up was Gadi Lahav from Financial Times with a host of great information on how they measure success—Breadth, Depth, Frequency. Finally, Emile Harkin from The Atlantic gave us their vision of the personalized customer experience.
Day 2 started with Carla Zanoni and Karl Wells telling us how the Wall Street Journal approaches improving digital retention and reducing churn through subscriber first metrics to build new habits. The always engaging Josh Awtry from the USA Today Network took us through the evolution of their newsrooms to convert casual readers to engaged members. The Star Tribune’s Louis Deering shared their experiments in digital subscriber retention and Kelli Dakake from The AJC took us though the best titled presentation of the summit—“Love the One You’re With”. Chris Duncan, from the Times Newspapers Ltd, took us through a very interesting and thought-provoking presentation defining content driven vs customer driven in the digital space. Rounding out a very informative summit were presentations from Zen Habito, from The Globe and Mail, Matt Skibinski from the Linfest Institute and a bonus session from Greg Piechota.
For me, the biggest take-away from our time in Miami was to make sure we are focused on identifying and testing strategies for reducing digital churn—be it implementing the best front-end acquisition and pricing tactics, making sure content supports your long-term goals, or A-B testing churn reducing activities!
Got questions? Contact Bob T. at Bob@mathereconomics.com.
Kudo’s to INMA’s conference coordinators, Earl Wilkinson and Katy Schaff!
