At last year’s PPA Festival, it was standing room only for the presentation by Tom Armstrong, VP, global advertising at the New York Times.
So, they invited him back for this year’s festival, and the room was again jam-packed.
Despite being labelled “the failed New York Times” by a certain well-known politician, it is anything but. The brand is flying high with a whopping 12.8m paying subscribers, two million of which are outside the US.
It’s a very exciting time to work at the NYT, says Tom, but it is not without its challenges. Along with other media brands, it faces strong headwinds, in the shape of overmighty tech platforms transforming the information eco-system and a breakdown in trust in mainstream media, fueled in large part by attacks from unscrupulous politicians with a vested interest in discrediting journalists.
Underpinning the NYT’s successful publishing strategy is the three Ds:
- Destination: the publisher’s overarching aim is to make itself a destination, where the quality of the product (both of the core news offering and the lifestyle brands that are bundled in with it, like sport, gaming and cookery) is of such a high standard that readers seek them out. Across their offering, they are investing in the quality of their product, increasing the usage of audio, video, photography and infographics and fine-tuning all aspects of the user experience.
- Daily: the focus is on deepening engagement so as to make usage of NYT content habitual. To that end, the NYT is using AI to personalise the offering, increasing the opportunities for user interaction with its journalists and content creators, and generally making the whole NYT experience more interactive and participatory.
- Direct: the NYT is working to establish direct relationships with users. In addition to the 12.8m subscribers, the publisher also claims to have 150m registered users.
The beauty of the three Ds is that they create a lovely virtuous circle. The better the content, the more repeat visits, the more repeat visits, the greater the chance of securing a subscription, registration or newsletter sign-up, the more first-party data they collect as a result, the better able they are to further improve the product, the better the product, the more repeat visits… and so on and so forth.
(Finally, we’re finalising the mailing list for the May/June issue of InPublishing magazine. If you’re not yet on the free mailing list, you can register here.)
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