Inside The Telegraph’s Surprising Digital Transformation
Telegraph Media Group’s Digital Audience Development Program
Introduction
Founded in 1855, UK-based Telegraph Media Group is a trusted and widely read news publisher, with a long history of journalistic awards, important scoops and a deeply loyal Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph print readership. In recent years, structural changes in the newspaper industry led to a steady decline in print readership, leaving the company under increasing pressure to grow its online business.
Editor-in-Chief and Chief Content Officer Jason Seiken hired Gregg Stewart to bolster the company’s online presence. Stewart led a radical strategic, cultural and operational program that increased TMG’s online revenue annual run-rate by £18M and positioned The Telegraph as the UK’s number one online publisher. This case study describes the successful design and implementation of the program, which ran from February 2014 through January 2015.
Program Impact and Results
The audience development program delivered immediate results and TMG began a pattern of consistent month-over-month audience growth, setting a series of historical company audience records along the way. Less than six months into the program, ABC (the independent body for media measurement in the UK) reported year-over-year audience growth of 70% for The Telegraph, far ahead of key competitors Mail Online (up 27%) and The Guardian (up 6%). These trends continued and, within a year, The Telegraph overtook The Guardian to claim the top UK audience share ranking.
Program Design and Implementation
The audience development program included a number of initiatives designed to create an aligned and empowered cross-functional team supported by a comprehensive analytics platform to aid in decision making.
#1: Defined Strategic Goals and Key Performance Indicators
The objectives of the audience development program were to grow digital audience, boost online revenues and transform TMG’s newsroom into a world-class digital publishing operation. In order to align the objectives of the commercial and editorial departments, the highly monetized “UK page view” (with a yield of 12x a non-UK page view) was established as the primary key performance metric for audience development. For the first time, the commercial and editorial departments created common bottom-up budgets and forecasts.
#2: Reinforced Cultural Change
The transformation of a newsroom with a strong print legacy requires fundamental restructuring. Although the traditional “Chinese wall” between editorial and commercial had created a culture in which the two departments did not effectively cooperate, the success of new cross-functional workgroups reinforced the benefit of collaboration and quickly dissolved many old barriers.
The culture within editorial was strongly print-oriented, with influential leaders who regarded digital publishing as a secondary, and largely unimportant endeavor. An organizational restructuring placed “change agents” in key leadership roles and the incoming management team reinforced new values and behaviors through example and mentoring. Despite strong organizational inertia, the program achieved significant cultural transformation.
#3: Upgraded Staffing and Skill Levels
The restructuring of the newsroom required each editor and journalist to become proficient in digital publishing and the training of hundreds of staff, most with little or no digital background, was key to the program’s success. Custom training and quality programs were developed and rolled out for existing staff and several dozen experts were hired to create new digital journalism and breaking news teams, as well as to expand the digital design and audience development teams.
#4: Built Effective Cross-functional Teams
The implementation a digital-first publishing model required the creation of cross- functional teams with members from departments with little experience working together. A new “virtual” audience development team was created that integrated the efforts of the editorial, commercial, product, technology, customer relationship management (CRM) and insights departments. This team led the implementation of important initiatives related to integrated workflows, content strategy, product enhancement, analytics and commercial optimization.
#5: Created a Comprehensive Analytics and Reporting Framework
The implementation of a common analytics platform shared across the editorial, commercial, product, technology and finance departments provided the foundation for data-driven digital publishing workflows. The resulting “democratization” of data was a critical enabling factor in the success of the broader program.
#6: Quantified Performance of Digital Content
The new analytics platform enabled the movement of performance metrics right into the heart of the newsroom. Real-time audience and content performance statistics were projected onto large screens and motivated naturally curious and competitive journalists to optimize their content for online. The importance of data was reinforced with a new editorial conference structure that featured in-depth reviews of current audience metrics relative to month-to-date and daily digital performance targets.
#7: Optimized Product Design and Content Flows
The newly created digital design team implemented a tracking system that measured user engagement with content and captured where readers came from and where they went after reading an online article. The resulting insights allowed editors to better understand the needs of their readers and create content targeted for specific audience segments.
#8: Implemented Data-driven Editorial Planning and Commissioning
Cross-functional “SWAT” teams of digital data experts worked intensely with the editorial desks to replace planning and commissioning based on “editorial instinct” with a digital-first and data-driven model. Editors began to commission with a deep understanding of online reader behaviour and content performance, resulting in in more engaging content and better resource allocation.
Program Summary
The audience development program delivered a 55% increase in monthly UK page views, the primary KPI, from a base of 184M to 286M. In addition, UK monthly unique browsers increased by 38%, from 23.4M to 32.3M; global monthly pages by 59%, from 328M to 521M; and global monthly unique browsers by 59%, from 40.3M to 84.4M. The program also resulted in TMG achieving Newswhip rankings for the first time, with The Telegraph ranked as the #7 UK Facebook publisher and #6 global Twitter publisher by month twelve.
Most importantly, the program delivered on its objective to deliver the online audience growth required to support the commercial department’s revenue targets, increasing TMG’s annual online revenue run-rate by £18M in the course of one year.