Owning the Audience Relationship and Feedback Loop: Morning Brew's Approach to Proprietary Research

all right we're at the top of the hour so we'll go ahead and get started thank you to everybody who um or welcome back to those of you who joined earlier today um and have been participating in the other sessions and welcome to those of you who are just now joining to the accelerant research virtual insights conference before I um introduce our speaker um just a couple of uh a couple of things we are at the mercy technology especially today with the weather as it is so um if something goes Ary this come back to this place we're going to work on getting things restored as soon as possible but thank you for your patience ahead of time let's be respectful um our speaker will um be presenting and we will have the opportunity to ask questions at the End by submitting them in the Q&A chat room um and now is the time to interact Network and engage so um we want to hear from from you who are out there listening today um hear your stories and certainly ask your questions and with that I'm going to introduce Mike Nan senior director of insights and analytics at morning brew and he is going to talk with us about owning um the audience relationship and feedback loop so Mike you want to go ahead and get started started awesome thanks Leah we'll share my screen now can everybody see this okay or Leah can you just give me a verbal uh yes awesome and let me make this full screen all right so hey everybody uh super excited to be here thank you Bill thank you Leah thank you exceler research team for inviting me uh this is the last presentation of the day uh so we're going to have some fun thanks for sticking around uh my name is Mike nen like Leah said I've been working in the consumer research analytics field for over the last decade always on the media or publisher side uh so I've worked at companies like AOL K Nas that Brands like wired and GQ and Golf Digest and Pitchfork uh high snobiety and now I have currently I have the privilege of leading the insights and analytics team at morning Brew where I've been just over three years so I have my threeyear anniversary uh just a few days ago so that's pretty new and can't believe it's been three years already but as Leah mentioned today I am going to be speaking about why investing in owning your audience relationship and feedback loop is critical for business and so throughout this presentation I will cover a few things firstly what I'm going to uh be chatting about is what morning Brew even is as i' bet many people tuning in today are not familiar with us hint we are not a coffee company uh more to come on that uh from there I will talk about the role of my team insights and analytics at morning Brew uh and how we work with the entire organization today uh leading into the main topic which I'll dive deep into which is the power of community and research and again why owning that feedback loop is really good for business and finally I will go through some case studies uh showcasing the power of that audience relationship and feedback loop and how it has a positive measurable impact on our business today and like Le I mentioned there'll be plenty of time for QA in the end this presentation should run me around 30 minutes or so so so we should have plenty of time so here we go if you're not a coffee company what are you uh so morning Brew started back in 2015 as a daily email newsletter uh by our two co-founders Alex liberman and Austin Reef it was launched essentially as a response to a younger generation of people want to consume business news a little bit differently than they had before or those who came before them and the options available at the time simply not cutting it uh you know things like the Wall Street Journal the New York Times at the time do uh to this next generation of people might have felt dry or dense or maybe boring or lacking the formats that this audience craved and so the email newsletter was launched back in 2015 and since Inception millions of people have discovered and fell in love with morning Brew uh we now have have over 4.2 million subscribers to that daily newsletter which again was our our our first product and if you fast forward to today we are much more than just a singular newsletter uh but now we are a full-fledged Media Company operating 18 different brands which you see on the screen here across all different mediums podcasts websites uh socially LED Creator Brands events both virtual like this one or in real life events and basically today there's two sides of the business one of which we refer to as the consumer side of the business so that's the brands that you see at the bottom of the screen here which uh houses our Flagship brand that morning Brew brand that I mentioned up top uh and other brands like money with Katie which is a personal finance brand good work with danant Tumi which is kind of business satire uh YouTube content and Max anomic which covers the data behind you know some of the biggest industries in the world today which I think uh the folks on this call would really be interested in I think and the other side of the business is what we call Brute professional media uh that's those top brands retail Brew marketing brew and essentially their mission is to help that audience of decision makers in those Industries or job functions be better informed in their careers or their roles at at their companies and today we are currently the fastest growing Business Media brand with a footprint of over 200 million across all of our properties and platforms and the fun part is we're kind of just getting started uh again launched in 2015 our 10-y year anniversary is actually coming up next year which is really exciting and so in a nutshell across all those 18 Brands we like to say that we cover the world of business and The Business of the world in our uniquely entertaining and witty way essentially we are known for making business and finance news a little bit more approachable accessible digestible and fun to read all of our content is free there is no pay wall um and we're also known for delivering the exact insights that professionals need to succeed in their careers in that brw professional media division of the business today and what that's done as a result I think is you know allow us to become one of the most trusted brands in Business Media with almost 90% of our readers stating that they rely on us to make sense of the world around them whether that's their world and in their career or their world in regards to their finances or just business news in general and 84% saying that our brands are part of their daily ritual um so that Flagship newsletter goes out every single day uh and not many media companies I've worked at a lot of media at a lot of for media companies large and small not many media companies can tout this kind of loyalty with an audience that comes back every single day and so naturally when you have an audience that is this loyal and cares so much you get a ton of feedback uh so we get plenty of feedback from our audience mostly good and of course sometimes critical that said when we do get feedback it's really nice to see that it is pretty much align with how how we believe our value proposition or what we believe our value proposition to be in the market with which is being informative being entertaining and exactly what this audience craves so one audience member if you see on the bottom left towards the bottom left of of of this slide went as far as to get a tattoo of our logo on their leg and if that's not dedication I don't know what is uh so and many of these you know quotes that you see on the screen right now come from our social media you know we get comments and things from a feedback standpoint but that's not the only place of course where we're getting feedback we ALS Al have hundreds if not thousands of people write back to that daily newsletter every single day uh and give us feedback which is always uh really interesting to read through and so that's a quick 101 of kind of what what morning Brew is who we are today um an elevator pitch if you will but speaking of feedback I'm now going to kind of transition into talking through the role of my team today the insights and analytics team at morning Brew given the fact that I'm often referenced internally as the feedback guy uh being sort of This research insights Ro uh that's prettyy Central to the business uh so today my team consists of four individuals uh including myself we work with essentially every single part of the morning Brew organization originally when I began at morning Brew my role was simply to work with our Revenue team but that's quickly evolved over time and and expanded quite a bit over my three years at the company so some of the teams we work with we work with the editorial teams and multimedia teams so these are the folks folks that are writing the content producing the content the video producers the journalists the editors we work at them on sharing insights on how our organic content performs who our audiences are to inform future content decisions uh we work a ton with brand Partnerships on ensuring that our pitches to advertisers are data driven and rooted in something empirical uh we're also responsible for measuring those campaigns so we do all of our ad efficacy research uh and measurement on ad campaigns um we work with our events team on things like event concepting and feedback I'll talk about this in the case study section uh with a really cool example from from our work with that team and lastly we work with the growth marketing team of course to understand things like churn or audience acquisition Health audience development and also helping to facilitate the use of our first-party data in marketing or or for personalization and one of the ways that we're able to help all these different teams is by owning and operating our audience panel for research but before I talk about that which again is is is kind of the meat of this presentation I wanted to take you on a trip down memory lane and kind of tell you a story uh so when I first started at morning Brew about three years ago again one of the first things that I did was kind of dive deep into our slack archive so slack for those who don't know uh it's kind of a a a messaging platform for professionals within a within a business and some companies have their archives up and you can kind of go through them and so I'd spend some nights kind of scrolling through our our old slack channels and understanding a reading the exchanges between teams or even our internal morning Brew team and our audience so there was even a slack channel for brand ambassadors way back then or even before I joined where you'd have audience members and people from the business you know speaking with one another and asking questions and getting feedback and after spending a bunch of Time In The Weeds on these slack channels and just being you know so interested in and what each side of that table had to say I was just fascinated really by the early team's ability to solicit and act on feedback really quickly and at the time I'd been hired to help the business gain a better understanding of who our audiences were how to communicate those audiences and so it was just so awesome to see that this is a practice or a thing that this business was doing since the beginning and fast forward to today you know we take our audience feedback super seriously we often act very quickly which I'll touch on in the case study section as well uh and I believe it's a really big part of why we're so successful and the fastest growing Business Media brand today so when I first started uh working at morning Brew one of the cool things I noticed was we were doing a ton of survey research uh we were doing so much survey research but what I found is that across the business these surveys were kind of sporadic or they lacked cohesion or strategy you know for for instance the editorial team would send a Sur survey out and want to understand which topics the audiences wanted more of or craved the sales team wanted to know wanted to know what are the key demographics of those audiences and hopes to position them as attractive audiences for advertisers the product team wanted to know kind of the X's and O's of the product how is it working what can we do better in the newsletter on the websites the list goes on and so one of the things that I did when I first uh got to morning Brew was kind of helped to normalize the way that we ask questions across those different brands and those different surveys or use cases taking all those seemingly disperate needs or questions into account also so that we can easily compare and contrast across all these Brands now of which there are 18 I think there was like four or five when I first started but it was important to understand the differences between them so that first survey that I threw out to the morning Brew audience uh years ago what ended up getting 53,1 100 responses and that's something that is just kind of in rined in my brain always and I talk about it a lot internally uh and it all happened pretty much that same day and that's more people that can fit inside Yankee Stadium so immediately my my jaw hit the floor and I was like wow there's there's there's something going on here this is really interesting and so again I'd worked a lot of media companies before I've never seen anything like this not even close and so I knew inherently that we were going to get a lot of responses to that survey simply due to the scale that we were dealing with at the time right I was sending that survey to 4 million subscribers but never in my wildest streams did I think we'd get over 50,000 people to answer a survey I think the funniest story here is I did you know as as one does as a research person so much prep uh leading up to that survey uh knowing again I'm sending an email to four million people and my survey is kind of front and center and so you know QA the survey 10 15 times the night before waking up super early to be on you know on call for QA because that news letter goes at around 5: to 6:00 in the morning uh I even went as far as connecting our survey tool at the time to Google Sheets and sort of writing some formulas and and and trying to automate some of the data Cuts or the analysis up front and ironically the sheet the Google sheet broke within an hour of the survey going live because go Google Sheets just couldn't handle the traffic and so not only did we get that many responses but many of them wanted to continue to engage with the morning group brand in this way 81% of people that answered that survey said that they wanted to participate in more research with morning brew and it was at this moment when I had one of those aha feelings where I realized kind of quickly that this is a super engaged audience they love to give us their feedback and can probably can and probably should be used way more across the business than it was that day and so that's what led us to formerly launching what we call the break room which is our proprietary insights community and we launched this back in February of 202 to uh so we're going on I think it's our fourth year third or fourth year uh operating this community and so like I said the break room is this proprietary insights panel that's made up of over a 100,000 audience members across all of those different 18 brands that I talked about at the top of this call uh this group is super unique to morning Brew with over half being genz or Millennials so those under 44 years old they're super affluent so they're way more likely to have a household income of 150k plus than average consumer uh they're pretty senior in their roles despite being a little bit younger so almost 60% or managers or above in their roles which helps us a ton on that professional media side of our business and the kicker is they're not really reading other Publications that are similar to us and again that kind of goes back to this origin story around us covering things by design a little bit differently than how uh these other media companies like the journal or Reuters or axios cover them and if the quality that audience isn't enough from a demographics perspective or a firmographics perspective this audience is super leaned in again loves to engage with morning Brew in this way by taking surveys or participating in research activities and so as a result we have higher participation rates response rates completion rates and lower stop rates compared to other comp other media companies measured excuse me uh year of a launch of 2022 we we also won What's called the Elita Delta award which is is an annual recognition of innovators kind of going above and beyond infusing insights into their organizations uh all throughout the business which is just really awesome and and we're really proud of that so similar to other touch points with this audience going back to that origin story of making things a little bit more digestible fun entertaining yes we want our surveys to be quick yes we want them to be efficient yes we want them to be targeted but what we also want to do is have a little bit of fun with our audience as well with questions like this which we see helps our participation rates and response rates on surveys and for the record I am part of the one-third of people who would order buffalo wings on the first date uh so we ask questions like this often just to have some fun with our audience and and sort of keep them engaged along the way another note on quality uh I think this is super relevant for this crowd uh I'm sure many of you tuning in today have dealt with third party sample that maybe you know wasn't the best quality or you can tell something was off one of the ways that I typically see this or notice this is in open-ended responses so you'll ask a question and and hopes to get some more qualitative Insight on on an answer and you'll get back na or TK or a bunch of keyboard Smash and For Better or For Worse this is an audience again that loves to give us their feedback and knows that we're listening to them and it shows in our actions which you'll see in the in the case study section of this again but I spend a ton of time reading these kinds of feedback from our audience we've started to use AI a little bit to summarize some of these things and make them themes to just better roll them up or understand them and we're also sharing these with the appropriate stakeholders throughout the business to you know in in hopes to drive positive change based on some of this qualitative feedback so up top for example you'll notice we asked a question uh to our audience in a recent product survey which was imagine if you were able to switch places with Neil Neil Fryman who is the editor of the morning Brew newsletter what would you change and you'll see you know we get some Usual Suspects like I don't love the ad experience I feel like all consumers say that about ads um but we also get some really in-depth thoughtful feedback which is always helpful and I think helps steer our product in in ways uh that we might have not known before and we'll also go pretty deep into critical feedback so if we have a detractor in our audience or someone who says the experience is kind of not up to scratch whether it's the newsletter the website or just just something that we've done as a brand we ask them why didn't they like it what can we do better um and again I think that's really important and and as you can see this is an audience who sometimes writes uh multiple paragraphs so I have a lot of fun reading these um across the business so speaking of the business I'm now going to walk through some of those case studies that I mentioned on how this insights Community is leveraged across the morning Brew business and all the different teams that that we support as an insights and analytics team which is growing essentially every single year which is exciting for us and so first I wanted to start with how we work with our editorial team again this is the editors the writers the journalists uh and how we leverage insights from this community to help Propel or sharpen that editorial strategy from a topics standpoint so we have a large amount of Marketing Group subscribers going back to what I was saying about marketing Brew marketing Brew is on that Brew professional side of our business where the point is to you know help make marketers better at their jobs or give them the insights they need to succeed in their roles so we have a lot of marketing grw subscribers that are part of the break room and so a few times a year what we'll do is we'll ask them what topics they are curious about or want to stay on top of or learn more about and just for the record I'm someone from a research standpoint that believes what people say and what people do is often different or contradictory and so we use this as one of our inputs uh so when we get the survey data back we combine it with other things that we have like behavioral data subscription data firmographics click data from a topical standpoint web consumption data from a tagging standpoint to understand what this audience is interested in to make more informed decisions about what topics our editorial team should focus on or lean into or even more importantly sometimes what they should steer away from and so as a result we now have a way more robust model or a point system based on you know this survey research being one of those inputs to determine our core categories editorially and and so far we've seen a great success with double digit increases in page views per story within marketing Brew which has been super exciting for us as that franchise continues to grow these next two are going to be about media sales or brand Partnerships uh which I would say is our biggest stakeholder uh throughout the business and this first one is regarding the topical research that we now do in the breakroom to really help our sales team get in the door with new categories and clients so as a growing Media company I think sometimes it's hard to start a conversation with a New Prospect and a new industry that's been maybe non-endemic to us so if you look at the right side of the screen you think you see things like cryptocurrency and investing and credit cards which you know from a morning Brew standpoint come a little bit more naturally than some of these other things because we do cover finance a bunch we don't really dive into alcohol or travel or Automotive unless it's from a business standpoint so what we do is we use this research on these topics with our break room audience to arm our sales team with empirical evidence and key insights that position our audience as an attractive one for these new advertising Partners or we're showcasing new trends or insights in these categ categories amongst a really attractive audience again a little bit younger more affluent not reading that traditional media and as a result one of our uh actually our most recent study which was that bottom Automotive uh uh research project that we did secured a bunch of net new client meetings and relationships with some of the major Automotive brands in the US we actually as of I think two days ago got a new $500,000 RFP uh in that category as well so breaking new business is something that we are now supporting uh quite a bit which again is a really exciting use case for I think research here the second one within brand Partnerships or or ad sales is when Partners trust us to do research on key audiences on their behalf so sometimes we'll do c like deep custom research projects for some of our biggest brand Partners uh and they come to us to feel new research in order to either a kind of inform or shape their broader marketing strategy like bolt which is the green logo on the right that you see there uh who wanted to hear from our retail decision-making audience what their pain points were with Logistics or inore experiences and so we have direct access to a senior highquality sample of leaned in audience exactly who they want to speak to to get those questions answered or B Fuel branded content or program ideas with the insights glean from the research so morning Brew produces a ton of content sometimes it's it's branded content so Fidelity is a great example here where we've run a number of different research projects with Fidelity but for our uh co-branded podcast that we do with Fidelity or have done in the past called Fresh invest we survey our audience and then showcase the results of those surveys actually within the podcast themselves because we we understand that this is an audience that likes to understand how others like them are thinking um and the cherry on top really is we're supporting now over $7 million in Revenue uh since the launch of the break room in client research uh which is only growing uh another great use case on the revenue side of our business this next one is about our multimedia team uh and I think it's a fun one because it mixes both kind of a an analytics input and a research input or qual and Quant in a way uh so on the left what you'll see is a chart representing the download times of our then new podcast the morning Brew Daily Show and a quick plug if you haven't heard of it I would definitely recommend checking it out out it's a 30 minute podcast essentially briefing you on that day's business news in our tone and voice uh educational and informative entertaining uh anyway early on we noticed that the download times for the podcast were happening super early in the morning around you know 4: 5 6: a.m. which was contradictory to when the show was being released so at the time the show was being released at 10:00 a.m. eastern so this gave us an inkling you know or something to think about which was maybe people are listening to yesterday's episode when they wake up uh we weren't entirely sure so separately we got some reader feedback from podcast review sites and breakroom surveys that this audience wish that the podcast came out a little bit earlier uh most of the the things that were being cited were around the commute right I wish I had today's news on my drive to work or I'm on the train and I really wish that it was about today's news which you know in ECT makes a ton of sense and so our content team acted on this feedback straight away and I think within two weeks time we switched our publish time from 10 amm Eastern to 7 am. Eastern uh which pretty much exponentially grew our audience from that point on you see that in the chart on the right nowadays Neil and Toby who are our hosts of the show wake up around 400 am every single day to get this thing out on time and it's it's it's growing exponentially ever since so it's all not for not uh morning GR Daily Show is now the number one business new show on Spotify and continues to be in the top 10 globally by reach and it's growing every single week uh go give it a listen again if you haven't heard of it lastly uh I wanted to share a little bit about how we work with our events team uh so over time we have found that the marketing Brew audience I'll use marketing Brew again uh here responds really well to datadriven insights on themselves uh so in other words it seems like marketers are always wanting to know what other marketers are thinking which again in retrospect makes a ton of sense it's a pretty competitive industry there's a lot of CopyCat things that go on in marketing generally so with our last marketing Brew Summit which is an an in-person event that we do each year uh recently we hosted about 300 marketers in New York City for a day of programming and panels and networking and things like that before that event we decided to survey the attendees that were parts of the break room uh and understand kind of how they're feeling about the things that we're covering what trends we should be looking into and then showcase those findings in the opening remarks of the event so not just telling this audience that we're listening to them and taking their opinion into account but showing them and so we've got great feedback on that event so far uh 91% said that they would attend another marketing Brew event and then we have some wrin feedback that just shows how much the audience love this intro to the day and selfishly I also love the stat that the editor of marketing Brew who's who's featured in that image on on the right side there was presenting which shows that 79% of marketers can uh consider audience insights and data to be very or extremely important uh do with that what you will uh and then lastly so that's it for case studies I thought I would it would be fun to kind of leave you all with some takeaways and tips for insights professionals from spending you know a bunch of time doing this um I think the first that I would call out is Keep Your Head on a swivel um so one of the early lessons that I learned was Insight can come from pretty much anywhere and if you open up your mind to it you'll find that you're more welcoming to things or you notice things that are relevant to your work or what you're studying all throughout everyday life you know these can be things that you do at work like qual methods Quant methods they could be conversations that you have with friends on a bar stool they could be something you read or listen to like the morning Daily Show podcast or they could be something that you come across on your social feed and for me it's important to notice those things and kind of collate them into a deeper understanding of what it is that you're looking at or studying the second is treat your audience as humans uh remember those that you're doing research on are people too uh I think at times research gets a bad WAP as beinging as as as feeling kind of robotic and stuffy um So within reason try to have some fun plus when we see when we do have some fun we tend to see higher participation rates and completion rates on Research activities which is always great to see and the last is expand your surface area uh this is something that prianka actually said in an earlier session today and something that I say to anybody joining my team whether it's at warning Brewer before this I believe one of the toughest things for insights professionals today is what I refer to as insights distribution and shelf life of insights so when you notice something interesting or you do a big project try to get in front of the most amount of people possible and all the while kind of tailoring your message to those folks when you go to Showcase that research to them and I think what is interesting to one team is often interesting to another but just from a slightly different vantage point or angle and that is all I had um I threw a QR code on here in case you wanted to subscribe to that daily newsletter that started at all um but I would be happy that to answer any questions that you might have thanks Mike we do have one question so far uh does morning brw compensate readers who participate in the breakroom yes so we we do a lot of thinking about incentives and my my Spiel on incentives is we want to try to make the value exchange as close to 50-50 as possible with our readers and this community of people who's opted in and so we compensate them in a few ways sometimes it's early access to things uh sometimes it's behind the scenes access to things sometimes it's tickets to events or early invites to events sometimes it's Raffles uh sometimes it's merch packages uh so uh to answer your question a little bit more directly not everybody is you know paid per se to join the panel but they are incentivized in other ways uh from the brand okay thank you um so I'm sold picking up what you're throwing down what recommendations do you have then for how to get started how to get started um I think uh when you say how to get started do you mean with kind of building with an Insight Community with an Insight Community I think I think it can at first feel like a pretty scary thing oh there's a bunch of tech involved or oh you know there's so much to do there's so many things to consider which of course there is but I think if if if you don't have the investment and you don't have the resources it's actually pretty simple uh which is you get a list of your customers or your audience members and you reach out to them even if it's just one-on-one and and have some conversations ask them if it's okay to add them to you know a list that you'll Cate or curate rather for research purposes and allow them to opt in and and even if you're building like a mini database and you know a protected Google sheet I think that's an interesting place to start because then you start to profile your community of readers or customers or whatever it is but you can keep going back to them and see how they've maybe answered questions differently and I'd say on on that note it's important to uh try to build in some level of what I would refer to as like Progressive profiling allow them to update their information allow you know anytime they maybe answer a new question that question gets pulled into their profile just so that you have a good like more holistic understanding of who they are but also what they're doing maybe or their opinions on things but I would say you can start with a Google sheet and and just talking to customers or or readers okay so you talked about you've got you have an Engaged audience which um you're very lucky to have um and you talked about a little bit about you know putting out phun questions and things like that in order to keep people engaged what else are you doing to to keep that response rate high and people engaged I think the activity targeting is a big part of it um so we like so there's two parts I think one is the progressive profiling piece and the other is the targeted research piece on the Progressive profiling piece as new responses to different activities come in we learn that piece of data about that specific Community member which allows us to be super tailored in our questionnaires or the logic that we use in surveys or how we target surveys so rarely I would say are we just sending a survey out to the entire Community we either a are super specific about the types of people that we want in that sample or B using logic to um or really skipping questions that we've already asked in the past so we're not repeating questions uh based on that Progressive profiling so let's say say we have uh you know we have a I think there are 25 what we refer to as profiling variables on this audience gender identification age seniority at work uh so we get to skip those profiling questions anytime we're at we're you know we're doing a new research activity which I think helps with the brevity of of those studies and and helps us kind of get to the point but we can still use that profiling data in analysis too which is also critical and really helpful great thank you um and I think that's all of the questions that we have um so as a reminder the video sessions today were recorded and will be available in the coming days so that you can um rewatch or share if you've um if you've got a a friend or colleague who might be interested and um wanted to thank you all for joining today yeah thanks for having me