Q&A: Jarrod Dicker, VP of Commercial Strategy, Technology, and Development @ The Washington Post
This week, The Idea caught up with Jarrod Dicker about innovation at The Washington Post. Subscribe here to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.
Can you tell me about your current role and team at The Washington Post?
I oversee the Commercial, Development, and Technology Group, which is a new group that was formed in February. At the Post, we’ve always had a build-first, then-buy mentality, and that was something we leaned in on five years ago when we started building the Arc Publishing suite of products and created the RED team (Research, Experimentation, and Development). When it came to our journalism and our content, we want to make sure that we own the content management system and delivery tools and, ultimately, make a business out of it as SaaS.
There really isn’t a lot of focus within media companies to build and invest in their business. That has always been an opportunity for me personally, so my team is really focused on owning the software and building products that make the most sense for our business as a unique way of controlling The Washington Post’s fate.
Where does the Commercial Development and Technology Group sit within the Post?
I’d like to describe it as an integrated R&D department throughout the business units of the organization. At The Washington Post, we have three major pillars for business and revenue: advertising, subscriptions, and SaaS (Arc Publishing). Our group is about 50 people, half of whom are engineers, and really focused on evolving those businesses and building better products and software.
Then on the other side, we’re interested in new opportunities and ventures for not only The Washington Post but for the industry at large. The team is essentially a small company within the organization that gets products built, delivered, brokered, and then sent live. So as we come up with new ideas and innovations, we’re able to incubate those things within our group and bring them to market without needing any outside groups or resources to do so.
We’re not an innovation team that focuses all of our attention on new opportunities. A lot of our attention is focused on both how to make things better and how to take advantage of new opportunities and be the first-to-market in those areas.
Can you tell me a little about the Zeus ad-tech suite and the process behind it?
Zeus Performance guarantees fast-and-friendly ad delivery, Zeus Insights guarantees advertisers the opportunity to target across a wide range of audiences at scale based on advanced contextual insights within a premium environment, and Zeus Prime offers advertisers looking to run an ad the next day a premium approach in targeting and format.
The first iteration of the Zeus product, which is Zeus Performance, started about three years ago. Ad-blocking was a huge trend back then, so we were trying to figure out how to build a better experience for readers that were engaging with content on The Washington Post site and build a better environment for advertisers.
We started off by setting a goal to load everything onto our site in under three seconds. We managed to load all our content in under a second, but integrating all the third-party ad-tech caused heavy loads. At the time, we asked our existing partners to help us figure out how to create a faster advertising experience. We realized that the ads were slowing down our page which hurt our revenue and user experience. No one was able to solve that problem, so we set out to solve it ourselves, and that’s how Zeus Performance was created.
It’s become extremely important in the media industry to diversify revenue. I think what’s happened over the years, especially with advertising, is that ad-tech and programmatic have become bad words. It’s dangerous to avoid fixing or evolving that space. In a world where there’s a huge piece of the pie that’s tied to digital advertising and more so going to Google and Facebook, it’s a shame to not have those dollars and that association be tied to original creators and journalism.
The reason why the Washington Post decided to tackle Zeus first and foremost is because we don’t see a lot of investment coming from media companies to better evolve the advertising ecosystem. Unless we have control over those products and that software, we’ll never be able to — for lack of a better phrase — control our fate. At the Post, we recognize that advertising is an important part of the ecosystem and that brands want to be associated with original content and journalism. So, we asked ourselves: what are ways that we can invest in making the products better? How can we actually build something that makes sense for media companies, drives value for advertisers, and doesn’t rely on all these third parties and outside resources to drive our business.
With Zeus, we’re looking to attract publishers by offering them products that will help drive more incremental revenue and advertisers by providing them with products that allow them to execute in real-time. Hopefully, by pairing those objectives together, we’re looking to take back our share of ad revenue and put it back to the original creators.
What’s the future of Zeus?
For Zeus Performance, we’re opening that up to anyone and everyone — brands and publishers of any size. There isn’t a threshold or criteria for who could use Zeus Performance. We believe in upgrading the web and we want to provide brands and publishers that don’t have resources the ability to access an updated and reliable framework.
The Zeus network, however, will be gated. Currently, we’re trying to determine which publishers we want to place within our network. Our goal is to bring to market a closed network of premium publishers for advertisers and agencies to buy into. If we can get a network that can guarantee high performance and good targeting because of Zeus technologies, then we open up an opportunity for advertisers to align with the right pieces of content and the right publishers in a high-quality environment.
What other products or initiatives is your team working on?
Recently, we’ve put a ton of focus on privacy. We’re trying to take a proactive approach to privacy. We recognize that these are real concerns and we agree that there should be a better way to deliver experiences that aren’t reliant on the cookie. For instance, we’re doing a lot of work to better understand reader and consumer behavior to build look-alike models. We’re wondering what can be built off of grouping together like-minded users. In other words, what does personalization look like in a privacy-first world?
We’re also interested in the future exchange for advertisers and readers. Right now, there are a lot of conversations around data as a currency because everyone’s data is essentially being used. There’ve been interesting thoughts and hypotheses on what data as a transaction looks like. If your data is valuable, what are certain tools and products that could be tied to that.
The catalyst for our approaches is often: what is everyone afraid to tackle? To be quite honest, this has worked for us at The Washington Post. When it came to ad-blocking, for example, everyone was trying to fight the ad-blockers. We acknowledged that ad-blocking was a thing because the ad experience was not ideal and we figured that if we could make a better ad experience, then maybe we can convince people that advertising is important to fund journalism. What’s interesting now is that the ad-blocking experience isn’t just about ads — it’s about tracking and privacy.
What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen in media from an organization other than your own?
I think it’s interesting how some organizations like Axios and Medium are driving a lot of brand value and reputation to a specific writer or author. Building these brands on an individual level, rather than a domain level, is a trend that’s smart.
We’ve kind of seen that on Twitter, where if someone has a 100,000 followers, they essentially have an audience. While many of these people may write for a publication, some of them are creating their own vertical around their personal brand.
I still think that brand is the most valuable thing as we’ve seen with the Times and the Post, but enabling individual creators to build an actual business and not just have a platform is an interesting trend. As someone who’s trying to build software and products that reward creators and originality, I’m happy to see companies being creative in their focus on that area.
