“Industry Partner of the Year”: Atlas Consultancy’s Abi Spooner on why putting the customer first reaps the right results
At Revenue Europe in Berlin on October 1st, one of the key speakers will be Abi Spooner who will appear alongside Schibsted Media’s Bård Skaar Viken and Denník N’s Tomas Bella in a panel discussion focusing on DTC revenue models.
The panel, steered by customer strategy consultant, Amanda Wiggington, will look at the importance of thinking from an audience first perspective. As Abi remarked at the recent FIPP Congress in Cascais, “You must think from the customer’s shoes and put them first, so long as the lifetime value of your customer is profitable.”
The success of Abi’s approach is not in question. She has held positions as Customer Strategy Officer at both Dennis Publishing and Future Publishing, and is now a Strategy Partner at Atlas Consultancy which last month won ‘Industry Partner of the Year’ at the recent PPA Awards in London. The recognition came merely weeks after Atlas won the same category at the Newspaper and Magazine Awards also held in London.
In advance of Revenue Europe, we caught up with Abi to let her introduce herself and Atlas in her own words.
Imagine our audience will meet you for the first time. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your company?
I’m Strategy Partner at Atlas, a recurring revenues growth consultancy founded by subscriptions experts and about to celebrate our second birthday!
Before Atlas I was Customer Strategy Officer at Dennis and then Future. I’m obsessed with Lifetime Value and pricing strategies and I am passionate about making data tell stories to inform brilliant decision making.
It’s also a key motivation for me to help our industry, and as a result I’ve been running training courses to develop subscriptions understanding and growth strategies for publishers.
You won industry partner of the year at this year’s PPA Awards as well as the Newspaper and Magazine awards. What’s your secret?!
Atlas is the consultancy I and my partners would have loved to have had supporting us at Dennis when we grew the Week and launched The Week Junior globally.
It’s essential to us to understand how our clients’ businesses work from a customer first point of view, using insight and data along with stakeholder interviews to really get under the bonnet. That means when we do make recommendations, they’re realistic, practical and align with our clients’ goals.
Putting the audience first when building up a subscriptions strategy is something the industry has lost sight of in the pursuit of marketing efficiency, and Atlas can provide brand and customer informed strategies to unlock growth – it’s all based around Lifetime Value and the insights it gives for return on investment throughout the funnel.
I feel our recent awards are partly in response to our strong case studies – it’s wonderful to work collaboratively with clients and see our approach deliver real world results.
When it comes to monetisation, the only way for media to survive commercially in the modern media landscape is through building diversified revenue models. Could you briefly explain to what extent you agree/disagree with that statement and why?
Putting the customer at the centre of your business is a key way to unlock growth. Publishers were very focused on selling ‘products’, but if what’s being sold to customers doesn’t solve customer needs, it will struggle to deliver on business goals.
Offering different solutions for different customer groups, whether that’s print and digital bundling, various levels of access, ads or no ads will allow publishers to reach more of their audience.
Plus, if you’re focused on your customer, you’ll find more opportunities – be that events, one shots, apps, data products, which will allow further diversification. A diversified model is a more resilient one – but that needs to be driven through customer segmentation and targeting based on customer demand and needs, not just more stuff sold to everyone.
Historically, publisher revenues have been siloed and are often seen to be in competition with each other; I think now there’s sufficient evidence to prove that the revenue from driving subscriptions through paywalls or registration walls doesn’t cannibalise ad revenue, or that offering subs doesn’t undermine shop sales.
If all revenue streams are focused around customer needs and informed by customer data, diversification becomes more straightforward and revenue itself can be maximised in an intuitive way.
You have built a successful consultancy, and have been at the sharp end of some world class international publishers. You are well placed to comment on what media organisations you feel today are impressing you with regards to revenue strategies.
The FT – their journey since moving to a paid content model has been stellar; they’ve united behind a Northstar goal and allowed it to inform strategies right across the business. The change in the proportion of their revenues coming from customers over this period is remarkable, a true business transformation.
FT Edit, which launched last year, is a fascinating output of this approach; it reaches an audience segment who couldn’t pay their premium content price, meaning they can still make their content accessible. Their approach and purpose is well structured, and having worked with the FT Specialist team it’s clear that is all part of their admirable culture as well.
Harvard Business Review – I saw their Co-President Sarah McConville interviewed at FIPP Congress, and I think their approach to monetising content in all forms, and for all audiences at multiple levels, is inspiring. Most obviously, that’s coming out in their use of technology and audience understanding, alongside recognising the role their content plays in fulfilling customer needs – supporting subscribers in all stages of their careers. Their approach to AI and how that’s going to help them drive value is clearly a winning one, especially around using technology to drive learning.
Netflix might be a contentious one, especially with recent price increases and a clampdown on password sharing, but they’ve effectively created the streaming market – it doesn’t seem that long ago we were getting DVDs delivered by mail, does it? I think creating the ads tier is an interesting approach and it’ll be interesting to see those results. Ultimately the whole sector is being judged by churn, and with these extreme audience volumes it’s going to be very interesting to see who gets there.
Ultimately though, it’s an understanding of audiences that needs to inform product changes, and I think Netflix are starting to get to grips with this. Bring on season 4 of Bridgerton though, as I might end up cancelling if it takes as long as the last one to come around!
Looking at the future, how do you see Revenue Technologies shaping revenue growth and profitability in the media sector?
We’re already starting to see AI/ML being used to identify propensity to subscribe or renew by bigger players in the market. Being able to provide the right offer to the right person at the right time is the ultimate marketing goal – and technology needs to help us to be relevant and useful to our customers. Paywall and registration wall tech doesn’t now need to be managed with rules informed by editorial intuition; it can be driven by actual performance, and adjusted in real time to reflect user sources and response.
From a retention point of view, increasing customer yield is an ongoing challenge (especially as inflation continues to impact cost of sale), and insights into customer pricing elasticity are gold dust – especially any tech that can help to make this challenge simpler for publishers or iron out passive churn. Personalisation of comms and offers is now expected by our customers who have high expectations for customer experience and ease of use for our products.
Having a direct relationship with customers is being facilitated by these technology developments; making it easy for customers to do business with us is as important as making sure our systems are optimised for profitability. Finding the route to harnessing this alongside Lifetime Value forecasting will be a very powerful tool indeed, and some publishers are starting to engage with this very effectively.
Anything else we might have missed?!
I’ve mentioned it before, but the value of research is being underestimated across the board. Publishers think they know their audiences – and in many cases they are close – but ultimately understanding the ‘Why’ behind customer engagement with products will help everyone, from editorial content to product decisions through to marketing messaging and price optimisation. Customer value perceptions can be really powerful in informing pricing strategies, and that can really unlock growth.
Meet Abi and your peers tasked with monetising media at our Revenue Europe summit in Berlin on 1st October. Find more information and sign up here. We hope to see you there!
