"Two months ago, we asked, 'Where do we go from here?'" said Caysey Welton, content director, Folio:, Access Intelligence. "The pandemic will have long-lasting impact. It will be important to have conversations with your audience. Those who have diverse portfolios, have managed cash well, have good digital DNA and are nimble and creative with product offerings will do well. You can't rely on too few products. Legacy products will go on but we should probably lessen our dependence on them. Look at your data."   One common theme during SIPA 2020 this week was the increased need for products. "Continue realigning your product portfolio with the client input that you get," suggested Krystle Kopacz, CEO of Revmade. Because many publishers relied on events, the need for products and the revenue they can bring is crucial now. As Welton said, data could be the new buzzword.   Elizabeth Petersen of Simplify Compliance stressed the need for a diverse revenu ...

"People don't want to be marketed to; they want to be communicated with." As I look over my notes for today's again-excellent SIPA 2020 Day 2 sessions, that quote from Jeson Jackson, audience development manager, Education Week, stood out. Because even though so much of what we are doing now is in response to the pandemic, there will be a carry over of successful ideas and methods.   And that will be one of them. If a theater I like simply asks me to buy a 2021 subscription, I might hesitate. But if they communicate with me and engage me in a conversation between four or five of their diverse actors and directors for next year, I'm probably in.   Day 2 keynote speaker, Krystle Kopacz, CEO of Revmade, talked about "echoes for the long term" that she is hearing now. "Overall what I'm seeing is we're heading to some type of reordering. How can we be more important to buyers so we're not cut off? In my mi ...

Look at your data. "[Data] value is in the eye of the beholder," said Michael Marrale, CEO, M Science, in an informative Alternative Data 101 session with Meg Hargreaves, COO, Industry Dive. "You'll find value in surprising places. Typically, we've partnered with companies that don't fully realize the value of their data. They can be surprised" when told their data has value and content licensing potential. "Don't think that size of the company is the main factor. It's really about the data. You can have relatively small revenue but big data capabilities." 

There is something really good to these virtual conferences. I just watched the director of strategic initiatives for The Washington Post and he was great. (I will report on it here next week.) He even told a funny Jeff Bezos story.)   It doesn't work for everything. Theaters have tried to put some productions online and it's tough. (Although, Bryan Cranston and Sally Field doing A.R. Gurney's Love Letters tonight at 8 could be different. See it here free.)   Sitting at home, we can focus on speakers online—even with the occasional pets, kids and laundry disruption. SIPA 2020 June 1 motivational keynote Don Harkey told me that he likes the idea that he can mention an article and people can bring it up, or they can comment as he goes along, and he can play off that energy   "The more that we can mimic the one-to-one ...

Earlier this year, Money-Media launched Health Payer Specialist, targeting health insurance carriers—many of whom are paying the bills for COVID-19 medical treatment. "On March 3, we announced that our free beta test was ending at the end of the month," said Dan Fink, managing director of Money-Media. "The next week, everything seemed to change overnight and the pandemic was suddenly a real thing. We thought this was going to scupper our product launch, but we actually saw amazing results. We brought on 20+ corporate licenses during the month of March."   Fink will be shedding brighter light on this on Tuesday, June 2, in a SIPA 2020 Virtual Conference session appropriately titled Growing Your Audience in the Time of Pandemic. Joining him will be Stephanie Williford, CEO of EB Medicine. When EB Medicine put COVID-19 content in front of the paywall, website traffic exploded (153% increase) and a modest increase in subscriptions (9%) followed. "We al ...

Even before Don Harkey, CEO of People Centric Consulting Group, and I started a Zoom conversation on Monday—you are in for a treat when he keynotes the first-ever SIPA 2020 Virtual Conference on June 1!—we both laughed. I think it was because each of us used "pivot" in the first sentence that we spoke.   "That's the word of the month for me," he said.   It's probably the word of the year for all of us. Funny, when I looked it up in Webster's just now, the noun appears first—"a person, thing or factor having a central or major role, function or effect." The second definition reminded me that it's what we call the center in basketball, almost an antiquated term now that the game has changed so much and centers matter less.   But I digress. It's the verb pivot that we have all been living the last two months—turning, changing to something new. And accepting.   "My favorite story is that my 75 year-old mother-in-law is teac ...

I was watching Jeopardy the other night—okay, it has become the highlight of my exciting evenings—and in Final Jeopardy they asked something about an Ernest Hemingway novel and Spain. Oh my gosh, I shouted, happy to be out of a Zoom box for the first time all day, it's The Sun Also Rises!   On Monday, June 1, the sun will rise on SIPA 2020, our first-ever, two-day virtual annual conference, and the lineup is shaping up to be exceptional. (Early-bird prices expire on Saturday.) So figuring that you can get all the details on the website and with my current love of quizzes, I devised my own, based on six of the sessions. Good luck.   1. Fill in the blank: A Euromoney article today led with this paragraph: "At the start of April, Exabel, an artificial intelligence and machine-learning platform for active asset managers, partnered with 1010data, __________________ data provider to the retail, consumer packaged ...