SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1325 Secrets Old Media Brands are using to compete with Facebook
11 Mar 2019
Chapter 1: What strategies do old media brands use to compete with Facebook?
She's consulting with a lot of companies like Lakana via her agency, helping these old media brands figure out how to reshape those assets in the new content and publishing worlds, having some success. This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn.
Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest-growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everybody. My guest this morning is Elizabeth Osborne.
And she specializes in strategy, market, and product development for media companies and brands navigating a changing media landscape. As head of revenue at a company called Lacana, she oversees platform strategy, business development, and go-to-market for a leading content management platform powering 150 million unique users a month across 60% of local markets.
Her firm, the Azure Group, has worked with brands including AOL, Univision, Associated Press, Kempton, Ogilvy, Group M, and on many strategical strategy issues related to digital transformation. Elizabeth, are you ready to take us to the top?
I'm ready.
I'm branding that. Strategical. That's my word.
Strategical. I am very strategical. I'm very strategical. I don't mess around. I'm very well-read. Let's have a very strategical conversation.
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Chapter 2: How has Elizabeth Osborne contributed to media companies' digital transformation?
They have listeners?
No, it's television stations, local television stations. The point is you bring them together. You think about television networks, but they're all individual stations. How do you take all of local broadcasts, so every local market in America, and put one platform underneath them so you can share intelligence and data in order to improve the performance of those businesses?
What's the answer? What are you telling me? Build something custom or what?
Well, it's actually, the answer is let's do some smart deals with all the best products that are out there. And let's be vicious in terms of deciding who we should use and holding them accountable to being the best product.
Give me an example of two of those products.
I would say, you know, let's talk about recommendation engines. So a company like there's a lot of companies out there that do that. In the past, there was Taboola or Outbrain. So do we get a better deal for the network with Taboola or Outbrain? Other ones would be now in the area of.
I bet you're hell to negotiate with, by the way. You're a killer. I can tell you put a big smile on, but you're a killer.
I'm okay. I like to have a good time. And let's be fair. Business is business. Fun is fun. So let's get down to it. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors, and then there's a lot of noise in deal-making. For me, it's like, let's line it up.
So Elizabeth, going back to Outbrain and Taboola, when people think that, they think at the bottom of a blog article, recommended articles, it's a little ad network, essentially. I don't understand how the televisions, how is that, where do they exist on the web in one spot?
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Chapter 3: What challenges do media companies face in audience engagement?
If they want to start-
allowing their super fans to pay them literally tactically how does this guy in orange county do it is it a website what plugin does he use to collect the money how's he do it well you know a lot of this is old shoe leather stuff which is and you do this with brands that want to create thought leadership so if you take the same thing i'll give you two perspectives for him he walks around town and talks to everybody in the town he gets out a hat he says you know want to write me a check he's just in the community in a small community in a place working the street
Take my big SaaS company. What I want to do tomorrow with Alacana is I want to take the leaders of my customers and I want to sit them down at dinner with somebody who really knows what's going on, who can open their eyes and help them see the future a little bit. So if you take thought leadership, you know, it happens in different ways.
It happens by being present in somebody's mind share and producing a product or an experience that really engages them. I would say more and more like the product that experiences engages right now is you could do a blog post. You could write a wall poop or you can do, you know, a Facebook post.
We all have the drill of marketing tactics that we do, but there is nothing better than sitting down with somebody and teaching them something they didn't know or showing them a direction that they didn't see or enlightening them somehow, or actually saying, Hey, I don't know the answer either. Let's work on it together. That's the kind of stuff that engages people. This is a tough market.
You've got to say, Hey, Hey, where's my perfect answer. I don't have a perfect answer. I'll take you through a process where we'll figure out like, what's going on out there, how people are screwing up, how people are winning, and pick the right strategy and path for your company.
Yeah, see, I think if I was in your shoes and they kind of hired me and they said, Nathan, spend a month, do in-depth research, give me your best advice. I go, okay, I scraped away for a month. I spent, I had a team of 15. We did amazing research. Here's my recommendation. You should shut down immediately. Do it quickly, do it fast and waste no more money.
Because I mean, even engagement rates on these local apps, these, you know, every TV station thinks it's sexy to have an app. But how many times once it's downloaded, does it actually get engaged within a week? Like zero. People don't go back into these things.
I'm just curious how you're thinking about taking these old media assets and allowing them to break through the noise of fake news and big headlines in these social streams.
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Chapter 4: What role does consultation play in media companies' growth?
It was something that hadn't occurred to them. Then I set about introducing them to a number of investments in the small firms that were incubating new products that were actually going to need their content to test, sort of build a structure for that kind of investing.
They simply had been operating for 20 years just saying, hey, it's great, we did this deal, and never actually thought about getting in the game in any way.
It never made any money. It was all theatrics, essentially.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was all like, hey, great, we're making great products. So my deal is, at the end of the day, it's beyond what's cool and what's hot. It's what works and what doesn't, and what makes a buck and what doesn't.
Amen, sister.
If you're not operating a company every day in a way that says, hey, you know what? This path might smell cool, so I'm going to use it for marketing, but it's not going to give me a nickel, but I'm going to keep doing that. But I'm going to double down over here where I'm going to make a dime, a quarter, a buck.
Yep. Let me shift this conversation real quick. Success Magazine just shut down. Great brand. Great. You know, Success Magazine, right? Great. Shut down. The economics weren't working. They were losing too much cash. If you'd own that asset, what would you have done to it to turn it around?
Well, I don't know a lot about the business of that asset, but in general, the deal is this. With a magazine, first of all, you've got to get the leadership over the emotional side of it because they go on for way, way too long thinking because they're journalism or they're a great brand, they don't have to take certain actions.
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Chapter 5: How do local broadcast markets leverage technology for success?
Like what actions are they most resistant to?
Well, the first one has to be is you have to deeply cut costs and you have to double down on what your mission is. So if you used to have 40 reporters, sometimes you have to have 20 reporters. If you used to have 50 beats, then you have to figure out what's your core beat and want to get down to five beats. So you've got to greatly focus your business and where you have... differentiated value.
So many people have fluff on the outsides that they grow into. That's a commodity. So you want to turn right back to those same people. Second thing you want to do is you want to understand who's coming to your site. You want to go for your magazine. You've got to get your circulation department and the data that's coming in about who used to pay you and how that used to work.
You've got to take that and you've got to combine that some way with your digital revenue and your digital objectives.
And how do you do that? I mean, that sounds great. Let's talk
I don't want to sound airy-fairy because it's all very gritty, detailed work, and I'm just trying to not bore people to death.
Well, it's not boring. But the reason I'm asking, so full transparency, we have just launched a magazine. It's a beautiful magazine, and we've launched it. But the only people that get this, they pay me $10,000 a month for access to my database on SaaS companies. So this is only going out to people who pay me $10,000 a month.
But the thing is, that's a great business model.
It works beautifully.
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