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Business and financial news publisher Bloomberg Media is restructuring its sales and marketing divisions around industries like tech, finance, auto, luxury and consultancy, rather than geography, to streamline operations and strengthen its appeal to advertisers, according to chief revenue officer Christine Cook.
To lead the newly reorganized divisions, Cook created two new jobs and made four key hires: Mike Wong, Andrea Ching, Felippe Velloso and Julia Clyne. Anne Kawalerski, who formerly ran the integrated marketing team now run by Ching, will now lead a Client Innovation Team and stand up the new Bloomberg Client Council, both of which seek to draw core advertisers closer into the fold.
“A lot of these moves were intended to examine the organization and figure out how we can give people discrete [ownership] over processes,” Cook said. “This way, when someone calls, they are always calling the same person.”
The shifts come on the heels of a difficult year for the digital advertising industry, a challenge compounded for Bloomberg Media by its decision in January to remove open-exchange programmatic demand. The strategy aims to bolster its direct sales efforts and improve the user experience—which, in turn, could improve its subscription business—but has led to an expected decline in ad revenue.
In the second quarter, total revenue at Bloomberg Media rose 3% year over year, with live events and display revenue increasing 48% and 12%, respectively, according to the publisher. By region, revenue rose 41% in APAC and 60% in the Middle East and Africa, but declined 12% in Europe and 8% in the U.S. The publisher currently has 480,000 digital subscribers, according to Cook.
The reorganization by industry, which publishers like Hearst Magazines have also embraced, also reflects a growing emphasis on live events, a key source of revenue growth for the publisher, according to Sharon Mussalli, founder of media rep firm Xtracrisp. Publishers increasingly find themselves in need of unique ways to weave brand sponsors into their editorial, and events can provide that integration in a way social platforms are unable to replicate.
“What I have seen in the market is that advertisers want great ideas that are germane to their product and platform,” Mussalli said. “So it doesn’t surprise me to see Bloomberg making integrated marketing and events hires that allow them to go to market with something that feels bespoke to those advertisers.”
New structure, new hires, clearer ownership
According to Cook, the throughline of the reorganization is a desire to create a clearer chain of command that will enable the publisher to operate more efficiently on a global scale.
Bloomberg Media routinely conducts internal surveys and collects client feedback, and data from each revealed that both groups struggled, at times, to discern who oversaw key processes.
“We had too many diffuse shareholders in too many of our strategies,” Cook said. “Now we have a clear owner for everything.”
Following the changes, Bloomberg Media will now have a sales lead in each of its four regions: North America, London, Dubai and Singapore.
Realigning the sales team around industries and appointing a primary stakeholder to each division creates a culture in which staff are expected to be subject matter experts with clearly defined fiefdoms, according to Mussalli. Such a shift means sales and marketing teams better understand the needs of their clients and work with them more collaboratively.
The new structure prioritizes the needs of advertising clients, an effort bolstered by the creation of the client innovation team and the client council. These kinds of organizations provide advertisers more intimate access to internal conversations and early notice of upcoming changes and new products, according to Mussalli.
By drawing advertisers more deeply into the Bloomberg Media ecosystem, the strategy builds on its previous efforts—such as its elimination of open-exchange programmatic and emphasis on its first-party data solution—to make it easy for clients to work with the publisher but harder for them to go elsewhere.
“If Bloomberg has integrated marketing offerings and live events that are superior to others, but their audience is ubiquitous and financial news is everywhere, what you are really trying to do is create a switching cost,” Mussalli said. “How do you make it such that clients feel like they cannot leave?”
