Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration: The power and potential of growing relationships between media corporates and niche publishers
What, if anything, can niche publishers, content creators and community-led brands learn from the big beasts of publishing? Last week the VIDA team headed off to Portugal to find out at the first FIPP International Media Congress since 2019. Much of the talk focused on the next digital age - and the strong message was of the benefits from closer collaboration.
Collaboration on Content
Ralph Büchi, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Axel Springer spoke about the threat of a decentralised web3 with the potential for media owners to go the same way as travel agents - where convenience and cost enables content creators/IP owners and audiences to ‘cut out the middle man….’
But instead, bigger media brands and smaller innovators can collaborate, creating value with and for each other. Take Morning Brew’s collab with Money with Katie where a mutually beneficial strategy tripled Millenial financial guru Katie’s Gatti Tassin’s audience and gave Morning Brew a share in her (greater) success. (And compare this to the creator initiatives and funds promoted by Big Tech which tend to benefit the platform way, way more than the talent.)
Another example came from Alastair Mackie, Head of Digital Development at the FT who explained the decision to partner with audio studio Pushkin on a new FT Hot Money podcast to seek new audiences and grow revenues.
Or how about the leading italian food content brand Giallo Zaferrano where Brand Manager Daniela Cerrato, talked about content creators as “our best allies,” So they built a process and a structure to make it easier to work together, launched a creator awards programme, and used these partnerships to evolve their traditional top-down editorial culture to a flatter, more collaborative one - with a key role given to creators, and greater voice to their audience.
Collaboration on culture and capability
Professor Lucy Kueng, digital transformation expert, board adviser and author said that after 25 years we need to stop talking about transformation and focus squarely on digital growth. There are two challenges here for big publishers:
Cultural challenge - embracing this mindset means viewing content, product and data as equal - which has not historically been the case in some traditional publishing businesses.
Commercial challenge - Big publishing businesses that scaled using a top-down strategy focused on selling more stuff to their growing audiences need to radically rethink and act differently. Now and in future it’s more bottom-up; really (really) understanding your audience and what they want, what they need, and what they will buy from you, listening, adapting and meeting those needs.
There are many challenges faced by niche publishers and creator-led businesses - but not these two. Distribution and audience development are on an equal footing to content and creative, seeking feedback and adapting are instinctive (often because founders are already part of the communities they are building products for and with) and with no scale to leverage, the commercial revenue mix has got to be diverse from day 1.
Professor Kueng spoke about the need for publishers to develop new ‘organisational muscles’ - a bit of collaboration with niche publishers playing the role of PT would definitely help with that…
Commercial collaboration / Content Studios 3.0
One of the clear themes of the Congress was the money that publishers are pouring into audio to build and grow their audience. But the other, perhaps more surprising, was increasing investment in content studios, in-house agencies and brand partnerships.
The FT has worked with commercial partners including WorkDay and Accenture to fund new podcast launches. And Alpha Grid - an FT company comprising a global team of journalists and creatives that operates independently of its owner - develops and creates branded content and formats for clients to use in their own channels.
Katie Vanneck, co-founder of the self-styled “audio-first, slow-new, open-newsroom” Tortoise Media, said that around half of revenues come from Tortoise’s custom content agency. Their creative and editorial team work with clients including Bank of America as their ‘agency of record’ - but only publishing and distributing in the client’s channels, not in Tortoise’s world.
Pre-pandemic there was a strong trend to develop content studio propositions but the challenge publishers faced was how to scale them. The approaches described here effectively uncouple the “studio” from the main business using either standalone or shared resources but with a freedom to experiment, develop and grow in parallel.
Collaboration with community
Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting spoke about what he calls primary engagement media:
Primary engagement is people subscribing to your newsletter or podcast, it's people actively coming to a publication instead of arriving from a random link on a tech platform. Primary engagement media knows its audience, even to the degree that audience is a community.
Brian spoke about growing a niche business based on feedback from your (primary engaged) audience or community. He spoke about the end of the scale era for ad-funded businesses and challenged us to “embrace niche - not reduce ambition” building a more meaningful connection between creator and audience.
“Community” is overused, he concluded, but it’s powerful, especially when based on respectful relationships with your audience.
VIDA’s take on this = Collaborative advantage
Over the last 2 years we’ve been connecting with over 100 niche, innovative media and creator brands and we are now starting to compile our third annual report shining a light on the people and business models that are innovating and growing in this space.
It is obvious from our FIPP learnings that collaboration between corporate media businesses and niche operators can bring real opportunity and mutual benefits; corporates get access to diverse talent, new skills, new audiences and new brands and the smaller players get access to expertise, resource and commercial leverage.
VIDA is on a mission to solve the scale challenge for next gen media and community-led brands based on sustainable growth, preserving the focus and protecting the meaningful audience connections - or respectful relationships - they are built on.
Approached in the right way, strategic collaborations between scaled media businesses and niche operators can be part of the solution and after 2 years in development we are now enabling this. We will build on the learnings with a series of planned initiatives in the second half of the year and we are, of course, open to further collaborations to give greater oxygen to the sector.
