Robin Re: “Industry Dive is a lesson in executing a simple operating model well”
One of the sharpest execs in U.S. media is Industry Dive’s Robin Re who will be participating at Revenue North America in Austin, TX, on October 9th. Robin will be speaking on ‘scaling engagement and monetization – insights from Industry Dive’. In advance of the event we asked her to introduce herself and give a glimpse of what she will be speaking about at the summit in Texas.
Industry Dive is one of B2B media’s stellar success stories, going from a standing start in 2012 to its eventual acquisition by Informa in 2022 for $530M.
The media group continues to evolve and grow, with its razor sharp focus on B2B verticals tightly interwoven with targeted newsletters covering industry-specific “dives” such as Retail Dive, Healthcare Dive, and Supply Chain Dive.
At the time of writing, Industry Dive has over 100 full time reporters, operates across 34 industries, and has a total audience of 16M readers, many of whom wield considerable influence in their respective business sectors.
A central figure to Industry Dive’s success is Robin Re who was Industry Dive’s first audience developer in 2014 and now, when she’s not raising a family or playing as an ice hockey goalie, is the publisher’s SVP of Marketing.
Leadership and the importance of empathy
Having to juggle so many commitments as well as shaping the growth strategy of perhaps the leader in business journalism is no easy task and it’s perhaps no surprise that Robin places great importance on leadership values.
In an interview earlier this summer she stated that empathetic listening is essential, “(You must) be able to tap into what makes people tick and how they can bring their best selves to work. You’ve got to be able to pick up on that, and you’re only going to learn that by listening.”
She added, “Being a good leader is about being comfortable making decisions. Often, there are a lot of good ideas in a room and someone just needs to make a choice to keep things progressing.
“Equally, you need to be okay with making the wrong decision. And you need to be ready to take responsibility if that choice doesn’t pan out. Being humble and accountable are the traits of a great leader. Each mistake is going to help build a better response or decision the next time around.”
That’s not to say that Robin has made many wrong decisions. Not when you’ve spent a decade overseeing Industry Dive’s audience growth from 150,000 subs to 16M.
She says, “I started the audience development team at Industry Dive a decade ago, focused on growing 6 Dive publications at that time. Over the years we 5x’ed our offerings across many more markets and I expanded the team to 25 members supporting audience growth and re-engagement, audience insights and data analysis, revenue marketing, and lead gen fulfilment of client programs.
“I partner daily with senior leadership to align our strategy across audience, content, and monetization as we continue to build out our high-growth, sustainable media organization.”
Execution above diversification
When I put it to Robin that diversification was essential for any growing media business she stopped me in my tracks, “I disagree. Industry Dive is a lesson in executing a simple operating model well. We’ve grown intentionally, aware of the risk of jumping too quickly to a new offering.”
She adds, “For example, it would be tempting for us to go all-in on events. But we’re really good at growing high-value audiences digitally. And simple doesn’t mean boring – we were named in Fast Company’s most innovative companies list in 2024. As our CEO, Sean Griffey, often says “media is an execution game”.”
Robin also holds the view that to remain competitive in the future, media companies will need to, “adopt technologies that will show advertisers the line of ROI from concept through to execution. Impressions, pageviews, clicks and leads are increasingly questioned and being able to offer clients identifiable engagements (in a cookie-light and privacy-heavy world) will be key.”
She concludes, “All that said, having an engaged audience is the cornerstone to making those metrics impressive. So we can’t lose sight of that muscle while we build the other.”
As for other B2B media organizations that are impressing her, Robin singles out FreightWaves (who earlier this year divested its media arm to focus more on high-frequency data services through its platform, SONAR), “I find it really interesting the journey that FreightWaves has been on, as well as the divestment it has made of its intelligence and media arms.”
“It further makes the point I made earlier that complex business models are not necessarily the ones that will stand the test of time.”
Asked what are some of the conversations she’d be keen to have with fellow attendees at Revenue North America in Austin, Robin replies, “I’m always interested to hear what kind of innovations other media organizations are exploring and what’s keeping them up at night. I also love to riff on what we can all do with first party data and the monetization of known audiences and insights.”
You can hear Robin speak at Revenue North America where she will be speaking alongside some of the continent’s foremost media innovators, including FreightWaves CEO, Craig Fuller.
See you in Austin!
