Selling to media companies

Media companies buy services when their revenue model shifts under them. And it's been shifting for twenty years, so there's always a reason to buy.

The trick is finding which shift is hurting this company right now.

Who buys

The buying seats in media look different from a bank or a manufacturer. Technology sits under a CTO or chief product officer, and at many publishers and broadcasters the product leader carries more weight than IT. Digital revenue often has its own executive, sometimes a chief digital officer, sometimes a head of subscriptions or audience.

Then there's the business side that controls the money. Advertising operations, ad sales, and the finance team that's trying to make the economics work. A data or analytics leader sits in the middle, feeding all of them.

For a services engagement, the economic buyer is usually the executive who owns the revenue line you'd affect. The champion is often a director running a team that's stretched thin. The technical lead is the platform or engineering head who'll have to live with your work.

The pressures they face

Advertising revenue keeps moving to the big platforms, and every media company feels it. That pushes them toward subscriptions, events, licensing and anything else that doesn't depend on ad rates.

Subscriptions bring their own problems. Churn, pricing tests, paywalls that frustrate readers, and data that lives in five different systems. Streaming brings huge content costs and technology bills. Older publishers carry content management and rights systems built decades ago.

And restructuring is constant. Mergers, divestitures, layoffs, newsroom consolidation. Every one of those creates a technology and operations problem that somebody has to solve fast.

Which signals matter most here

Business pressure is the loudest signal in media. Public media companies talk openly about revenue mix, cost programs and restructuring in their 10-Ks and earnings releases. Read how they describe the shift they're betting on. That's your hypothesis.

A new leader in the buying seat matters a lot. A new chief product officer or head of subscriptions is usually hired to fix a specific number, and they'll move fast in their first 90 days.

Hiring tells you where the money is going. A media company posting roles for subscription analytics, ad tech engineers or a new streaming platform team is telling you its priorities. Tech stack signals help too. A job post naming a specific video platform or customer data platform tells you what they're building on.

Funding and deals matter more here than in most industries. An acquisition of a smaller publisher or a content library means systems to merge and audiences to combine. There's more on that in an acquisition announcement is a services signal.

An example opener

Say a regional newspaper group announces in its earnings release that digital subscriptions will be its main growth driver, and it names a new head of consumer revenue the same month. Its careers page has openings for two data analysts on the subscriptions team.

You stepped into the consumer revenue seat as the company named digital subscriptions its main growth driver. That makes the subscriber number yours in your first year. My guess is the data you'd need to fix churn sits in separate systems for billing, the paywall and email, and the team is stitching it together by hand. Is that accurate, or is the bigger issue something else?

It names what happened. It ties it to her first year. It guesses at the plumbing problem underneath the strategy. And it's easy to correct.

What media buyers ignore

They ignore pitches about digital transformation. They've been transforming since the first website, and they're tired of it.

They ignore case studies from other industries. A media executive hears retail examples and assumes you don't understand editorial, rights or the way their audience behaves.

And they ignore anything that sounds like it'll add cost without a clear path to revenue. Margins in media are thin. Every pitch has to connect to money coming in or cost going out.

Reach more than one seat

Media organizations are political. Editorial, product and revenue often disagree about priorities. Reaching only one of them can put you on the wrong side of an internal fight.

Write to the revenue executive, the product or engineering lead, and the director who runs the work day to day. Give each one a version that speaks to their seat. And look for a warm path first. Media is a small world, and someone you know has probably worked with someone on that team.