New Digital Age (NDA), in association with LiveRamp, is spotlighting the men and women championing a data-led revolution in the marketing industry. ‘Meet the Revolutionaries’ focuses on the efforts of the industry executives helping to push digital marketing into a new era of data collaboration.
Here, Jo Holdaway, Chief Data & Marketing Officer, The Independent recalls how the decision to become a ‘digital only’ publisher was vital to the survival of the business and how their data strategy is key to its future…
Tell me about your current role and how your career to date has led you here.
I’ve been Chief Data & Marketing Officer at The Independent for the past 10 years. It’s a broad role, touching all parts of the business. We cover newsroom analytics and data governance on one side, then data monetisation, consumer analytics, subscriptions and registration strategies on the other. That includes areas like cookieless trading, audience segmentation, CRM, compliance and data engineering.
We are at the heart of the business, so we don’t have ‘data silos’. Our analysts can sit together and feed off each other. Innovation flows from that, in my view.
During my time in the role, I’ve helped build our data strategy and capabilities from the ground up. Ten years ago, we only had one analyst. Today, we have a team of 35 people that I’m very proud of. They do incredible work for our business. My own background was in media sales before moving into digital. Coming from a commercial background has benefitted me enormously and helps me understand where data can help to solve our problems and achieve our business goals.
Can you give an example of a time when you personally have helped to drive innovation?
I was part of the management team back in 2016 when we first became a ‘digital only’ publication. We had been expecting the decision but, when it finally came, we had just six weeks to make it happen. We had to up the ante on our CRM and ensure that our data capabilities became best-in-class. It was an exciting time. Thankfully, as soon as we launched, we became profitable overnight. It was a great example of innovation to survive.
A specific marketing and data example is how in 2021 we decided to get a really robust first-party data strategy in place. We had around 1 million registered users at the time. With an eye on future trading, we launched a strategy with the goal to acquire 2 million registered users over the next 12 months. We recently passed the 6 million registered user mark.
We did it simply by politely asking readers to register user details on the first article view and explaining the value exchange of their data in return for quality content. In addition, we ran a really successful lead generation paid campaign, which is something we hadn’t done before.
The key to success was that the entire senior executive team bought into the need to make our registered user base grow, and grow quickly. If you get a multidisciplinary team all working together towards the same goal, it’s incredible what you can achieve in a short space of time.
What are the most common challenges or barriers to innovation?
In our case, we had to innovate. We had no choice. So there wasn’t any cultural challenge. We had buy-in from the start. In our case the key challenge has been the time pressures we’re working under.
Generally speaking, though, it can be difficult to innovate when times are good and legacy processes are working well and generating material revenues. In the news business particularly the focus is also on the present. Trying to lift your head up and focus on the mid-term future is really difficult.
So it’s a challenge sometimes to cut through with new ideas and new ways of doing things that bring longer-term benefits when the organisation is rightly obsessed with the present. You need buy-in and that, in turn, requires very clear communication about what you’re trying to achieve.
What tips can you offer others hoping to drive innovation?
You need clear objectives. Also, not any not every innovation project is going to succeed. Some might fail multiple times, but the solution might come from those failures. That might be the seed of success. So, if you believe in something, persistence and self-belief are really important. You don’t learn from being right all the time.
How do you think digital marketing might evolve over the next few years?
I’m hopeful that, in digital publishing, we’ll move away from targeting individuals based on what we think we know about them and towards a more data-informed audience based approach. The digital media industry is really complex. There’s been a lot of innovation in the ad tech space but some of those innovations are solutions to problems that don’t really exist!
I believe that the supply chain will be simplified and become more transparent. Data collaboration between publishers and marketers will become more common and more powerful. Digital publishers will become a stronger voice within the digital marketing industry.
Likewise, the use of AI is moving from the theoretical to the practical, which makes it easier for people from non-technical backgrounds to get involved in the conversation around how this tech can be harnessed for good.
Will data collaboration become more important to marketers?
The lack of interoperability between some cloud providers has created challenges in the past but the technical issues are disappearing quickly. That will revolutionise data collaboration in my view. Various compliance and performance issues have also been ironed out, boosting trust in clean rooms and collaboration. We’ve already run some really successful data collaboration campaigns with partners, focused on attribution and conversions, rather than simply clicks.
