How Publishers manage revenue in an automated world, With Rob Beeler

Foreign the CRO Spotlight Podcast Power by the Growth Farm Production hi and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. I'm Warren Zenna from the CRO Collective and I'm here with my co host, Lupe Feld. Hey, Lupe. Hey, Warren.

This is Lupe Feld and I'm glad to be here with you.

So this podcast is really for aspiring CROs and CEOs and current CROs whom are interested in learning from not only us, but the great guests that we're going to have. We're here to tell you that there.

Is other areas of the business that can drive revenue and we're going to look and inspect and come up with some great ideas for us to bring in as much revenue as we can and drive some meaningful change for the business.

So tune in, we have some exciting opportunities coming up for really amazing conversations and any B2B leaders. I think you're really going to enjoy it. So thanks for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you. Hello and welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight podcast. Great to be here running solo today. So a lot's going on. I mean, one thing I want to report on is just how many. And I know it's sort of like starting off with negative news, but a lot of my clients are talking about layoffs and there's a lot of them. And what I'm seeing right now is, you know, the majority of the layoffs are coming from sales organizations, which is interesting, right? Because that's the place that people typically, you think that they wouldn't cut because there's this notion, everyone knows that marketing is always the first to go. And I think that doesn't mean that marketing people aren't being let go, because I'm seeing that, but I'm seeing a lot more salespeople being let go than usual. And I think what's going on, I think everyone knows this, I'm not saying anything scientifically brilliant here is that people over hired, they just overhied on the sales thing. And here's, here's what I want to talk about that first is it's not so much just typical over hiring. I think it also is an indication of this kind of growth at all costs mindset that's been going on for a while that during an upturn, the first thing people think of is let's throw more salespeople at this problem. There's gotta be more customers out there, we can afford them. Let's just toss more bodies at this and see if we can build more Pipeline. And what we are seeing in my world is how inefficient sales organizations are that they need more salespeople to begin with. And we're seeing that when marketing and sales and the customer success organizations are working together better, you don't need as many salespeople because the efficiencies are there and you get more out of them and they're supported better by the other components of the revenue operation so that you get more, you extract more value per body. And I think that it seems to me it's easier for organizations to just hire more salespeople than do the work to fix their revenue engine. And that's just, it's amazing, you know. And you know, if, if that revenue engine were fixed, they wouldn't be in this situation. As a matter of fact, they'd probably be getting ahead of the people who are letting go of salespeople right now. And we talk this all the time, this is the key to our entire business is building the kind of CRO ready revenue engine for your company. It doesn't make you necessarily recession proof but it protects you against a lot of stuff that I'm seeing a lot of my clients go through right now. So anyway, I wanted to get into that. We could probably have a whole topic on that one. But I want to introduce a really great guest, someone who I'm very close with, whom I've been lucky to be collaborating with now for since the day I almost started this business. And I'm just really been a while since we've put this together. So I'm talking about Rob Beeler. Rob is the founder and CEO of Bealer Tech. Okay. And a little background on him. So he's got 20 years or so experience in digital media and ad tech and he really focuses primarily on the publishing industry which is interesting. We're going to talk a bit about that. So he provides the industry with training, consulting and events and research. He is the preeminent MC like no other. It's not just his jackets by the way. You know, he's emceed one of the best conferences in the industry which is, you know, the ad monsters, you know, conference. And he's really amazing at it. And in the ad tech space, you know, he's very well known. He kind of develops the next ad tech rock star. So he's partial coach, part of co pilot, consultant and conciliary and he's helping people in the ad tech space reach next level. And he really is an industry, industry changing research on the industry that he focuses on specifically, which is publishing. We're going to get into that. So with. I want to introduce Rob. Thank you for being here. It's great to have you.

Absolutely. And I'm. I'm feeling terrible that I didn't wear one of my jackets. You know, I don't wear what I wear on stage around in my normal. Normal.

Everyone's thankful for that, Rob, that you don't do that, you know, so it's good you're considerate of everybody around you. So I want to say something too. So Rob has his own podcast and I was his first guest.

That's right.

I mean, it was great that he called me up and he said he wanted me to be his first guest. I couldn't have been more flattered about that. It was a great episode, by the way. So you can listen to Rob Beeler's podcast.

It still gets.

For sure. So anyway, I want to talk to you a bit about. Just give us a little rundown of your history through the publishing industry and what you did and more importantly, sort of where you landed and why Bueller Tech was created and what you're trying to accomplish and the kind of people that you're influencing in the areas that you're trying to make a difference in.

Yeah, thanks. Well, like most people that I know and have yet to see someone come through with a degree in ad operations, I fell into an ad operations role and, you know, kind of a testament to anyone that's an ad operations person. I showed up for day two and day three and day four. I didn't give up. I kept plugging away at it. And I was working at Advanced Digital, right. So the advanced. The Newhouse family of newspapers and working through that in early days, and what I found is that once I actually started going to like Ad Monsters, I had found my tribe, I'd found my people, and realized that there were other people had the same issues I was trying to solve. And the best thing was, was to show, was to sit there and it's an underlying thing for my business. It was true then, and as it is now, that, like, complexity of how things work, the technology and so forth, is still being developed and figured out so that the complexity of the whole thing is more the competition than each other. You know, certain publishers will fight for one piece of business, but we're all fighting for business itself, right? Against the platforms and so forth. And so when I had the opportunity to actually work for Ad Monsters first as the content czar back in the day, when that was A cool thing to be a czar of something. Don't say that anymore. But there was definitely a part of just, you know, bringing that community together. And while I still work with ad monsters, Baylor Tech is kind of an offshoot. And some of the concepts I wanted to explore, which is one to get my hands dirty again. So I actually help run ad operations for Golf.com so I'm a practitioner. I consult with other publishers, but I also run this community of publishers. I have like 1200 people in my, you know, publisher only Slack. And we talk from where are the reports today from Google to how are you handling the legislation and regulation that's coming from Europe? So all the top topics, you know, and we are diving into that. And I help companies who are trying to reach those publishers understand what those publishers are talking about. And yeah, again, you were one of the first people I reached out to when I was putting together my podcast because I knew the work that you had done. And the way you see the. You see all of this from a slightly different perspective. I think you and I agree on so much. But it's so funny that when you and I talk, I talk from that operation side and you talk from that, the sales and the CRO side that I think we really wind up hitting some real nuanced discussions about how organizations should act and what the sales side is to the fulfillment side and all the things that kind of go on in between.

Yeah, agreed. And it's great to be able to have those conversations. And just for the sake of the audience that some of the people that listen to this podcast are not from the same ad tech world you and I are from. Right. So some of the stuff that we're talking about, they may not really get. It's an interesting topic. I want to ask you one question, which would be interesting for people who aren't familiar. How do you define a publisher in 2022? What's a publisher?

That's a great question. That's a great question. So I will say that in my world, I do think of there are platforms, and we are talking about the Googles, the Facebooks, the Twitters of the world. Right? And these are. These are companies or people who are. They are publishing content, but it is generally driven by the audience that comes to them. I look at a publisher as someone that is investing in creating content. Right. For an audience, and then obviously looking for some way to fund that exercise of creating that content. Now, there are levels of that. So there are levels of. When you think about traditional newspapers, or broadcasters where they have newsrooms and they're trying to provide the news and they're investing in journalism, investigative reporting and so forth. Right. So I think it's very important that we all keep that, you know, keep, you know, factual information flying around. I mean, that's what the Internet should be. But what person. One person's news is another person's entertainment. So I think that there's some line there. I think the key thing is that for me is that as you think about the Internet, there are publishers who are really made for advertising approaches, whether they're not really creating the content, they're just coming up with ways to grab impressions and make money. It's not a bad business, except for the fact that it's. It tends to be. It tends to undercut all the other things that we're trying. Trying to do. And I'll just throw to one thing, which is, of course, I am a little ad tech focused. But one of the things that I in my mind do is I do think about things in terms of sales and fulfillment. And I think that there's things that we're a growing industry, and I think there's a lot of things that, like, everyone thinks digital is the cool, hot new thing. We're doing a lot of manual things. And I look at more mature industries for ideas around how to grow and get us to the ideas that, you know, again, like, there's tried and true ways of measuring success. And digital's still trying to figure some of that out. Certainly on the publisher side.

That's interesting. So this is sort of like where I wanted to go with that question. I mean, an app is a publisher.

Yes, right.

So if I have an app on the App Store, you know, there's an audience that's using that app and that those are impressions, those are audience members that are engaging with content. The content is the app. And there's a business model around that now that's pretty difficult for people to understand who just look at publishing as like a newspaper that publishes stuff, you know. So I think I say that the parlances and if I may, and because you and I both come from that world, it's really like it's audience capture. Right. There's attention in the marketplace that people are giving them. We're all being kind of competing for our attention every single second of the day, more so now than I think ever in history. And we're giving our attention to more things than we ever have in history. And when we give our attention to things, then we're engaged in something, there's an opportunity for somebody to capture that attention and influence us in some way with some message that may have us take an action or make a consideration of something. And the publishing world is vast in terms of terms of how to capitalize on that. To that end, you're correct. I wanted to discuss, because it relates right, to the revenue quality of this conversation is you've got the. I'll call it, if I'm right. I'm going to call it like the content first businesses and the audience first businesses. Okay. So the content first business is someone who, you know, a little bit of high brow sort of thing where we're an expert on golf or an expert on, you know, science or an expert on, you know, investigative journalism. And we have a, we have a point of view that we want to put out to the world and we're going to make that really good so that we get eyeballs and we're going to capture audiences that are really interested and engage them with amazing, you know, very principally driven stuff. And then we're going to monetize it by, and we're going to fund it by selling ads, some cases subscriptions. And then there's like this whole slew of people, which in my opinion is probably more right now that said, boy, this is a great business model. I mean, if I put stuff out there in the marketplace and I can grab audiences and I can prove that to an advertiser, they're going to give me millions and millions of dollars. Well, I'm in. You know, so I'm just gonna go out there and I'm gonna push out something that's gonna just get people all excited and, you know, tickle their dopamine with enough level of attribution that I can go to an advertiser and say I can get people's attention more than New York Times can, so give me the money. Right. So to that end, I mean, how do, how does a revenue operation deal with that particular issue related to publishing in its traditional sense and more just audience creation and audience exploitation, if I may say.

Yeah, so, and there are different aspects to this, so. And feel free to, to guide me to where you want me to go with this one. Right. But there's, there's one aspect that you hit on that for because of programmatic advertising. Right. And so that's really the ability to let the systems do the buying and selling of impressions and advertising. That that company, when you said like that company was just like, hey, I'm going to go in this, see if I can do this and compete against the New York Times. There's a. Essentially a faucet that they can just turn on. There's a lever and they get advertising on their site. And there are people who are going to buy there because they're going to get that same New York Times audience for cheaper on these other sites. It doesn't take into account, it doesn't take into consideration the context. Right. It's just I'm able to serve to impression someone that's kind of floating around the Internet and so forth. And that's both a problem and it's, you know, programmatic. And that kind of automated buying is both a. It's a curse and a blessing.

Yeah.

Because there's. The fact of the matter is, is that no publisher really can sell all of their inventory to all advertisers. And if, if you. You are. You're probably underpricing. You probably have another issue that you have to kind of solve for. Right. So there's an aspect that you shouldn't sell everything. So what can you do with what you haven't sold? And here you go, you're able to get this kind of programmatic fill that's in there. But the underlying thing to where you're going is there is a part where I've really been pushing and talking to publishers about this idea of being, you know, who is your first client? Because publishing has two clients that are at odds with each other. At many times you've got a consumer that is coming either to be entertained or for utility or whatever that is. And you have an advertiser to your point, that audience that's looking for that audience capture and going. I want to persuade them to take an action. I want to distract them, if you will. And those two things don't align. Well, I talk, I'm almost all of my conversations wind up into this balance of monetizations to audience and whatever. And my. What I've been putting forward more is if publishers started working more with focusing on their audience and getting them to understand the value proposition, the advertisers will follow. Because trust is going to be. I think that's an underlying thing to what you were. You're talking about like this is. This is. The Internet is not trusted. People go in just knowing that there's bad actors out there and there's a part of it of going like the New York Times should be considered a trusted place to go. Right. You're going to see, you may not agree with all their politics.

Sure, I understand.

Right, but you understand what they are.

And you understand that the four walls within they exist and you have, they've instilled some degree of credibility to you and you won't want to be inside that story with them. And this kind of goes to. I'm glad you kind of walked down that path here because this is my point is it really is. You're right, you're dueling with two different sort of stakeholders here, right. You've got the buyer of the media that wants to sell their ads and you've got the customers who are reading the content and you sort of have to please them both to make the model work. There's an argument that says given the technological advancements that have taken place in the last 10 years around advertising deployment, it doesn't matter as long as I can bid lower on an audience and I can get more dollars for it. Well then that's. At the end of the day I win the bid, which means I get to deliver the impression, which means I get a revenue against and who cares. But the other side of it is users, meaning I hate the word users, consumers, you, me, people are getting sort of abused in the process because we're like being over distracted and it's, it's difficult to discern how the audience actually wins in this sort of, you know, economy. And I think that's sort of what I think is happening in most revenue businesses, which is B2B businesses, which is, you've got. Any CEO of a company is battling two things. They have the board that wants their customers and clients, you know, they don't really care. They just want more revenue because they want to get their, the investment that they made in the company back and they want their projections hit because there's certain other expectations that come with that and then there's the customers themselves who bought the product and invested in it. And they need to get their value fulfilled on what they pay for. And so I think the publishing world is unique in that it has that battle going on where you are kind of fighting two different battles at once. And I'm not really sure anymore I being cynical here that the focus on the customer is actually a good business strategy. I think that it, it what seems happening is I agree with the business strategy. I'm not saying it's a bad one. I think I'm looking at, maybe I don't like ethically or whatever. I would say my mantra, and I speak to this all the time is the customer should be at the center of any business model. You know, however, in the publishing world, who's the customer? That's the point. And at the end of the day, the customer usually is the person who pays for the service. In this case, it's the advertiser. Right. Now one would, would say, I think you would agree that if I made my customers really happy, meaning the readers of my content really happy, and they kept coming back, then that would then mean that my advertiser should be then happy because they're getting the value of that to that engagement. But you know, at the end of the day, it's hard to win that battle when I have to deploy as much impressions as possible to try and get my revenues up. So I'm just curious if you're looking at it from. I know you are, but what's your perspective on the way that someone who's running a revenue model or revenue operation at a publisher manages and deals with this sort of, I guess you could say these dynamics and fighting out between those two to, to almost like opposing polar pole polls. What's your thought on that?

Well, I mean, it goes to something that again, I've learned from you and something that you're focused on, which is there has to be an understanding within the industry, excuse me, within the, within the organization of the parts and how they come together. Right. And that, and if that's a, if you want to call that a CRO role, that's perfect. Right. You know, that's one way to, you know, to label that. But there's, there's got to be someone that is thinking short term and long term. And I use this, this kind of analogy all the time, that if a CEO came into, into the room, brought all the heads of the department and said, going forward we're going to be a data driven organization, everyone went to go huzzah. And they'd clap and they'd all leave the room going, I was finally heard. And they would then go and build whatever they're doing in their departments based on their own metrics of success and they would not be aligned. And I see this time and time again. Legacy publishing companies were built for a different time and they need to figure out ways to keep all of those roles and responsibilities, but they have to work out ways to bring more collaboration between those departments. Now some of that has to happen at the top and some of that has to happen a little bit more tactically. So one, one role that I'm hearing coming up a little bit more often is this almost a role of Like a translator, someone whose responsibility is, is to work across the departments to understand what those metrics are and start to realize and understand what the effect one has. Because what you want is you want an editorial department that's creating fantastic, engaging content and you want them to see that you want an audience growth that's saying that this is showing up in Google and you're getting that more traffic to see that engaged content. And along the lines, you want that revenue number to follow that. And we're seeing more and more companies coming out to try and help publishers understand engagement as a metric in a way that says the right number of ads to serve or the type of ads or whatever. We're all trying to serve as relevant an ad as we can. Right? That's the one thing that we're trying to add to the mix. It takes data to do that. And so we're all trying to do that all at a time when we're trying to find the right line of privacy. You know, I think that that's one of the things that I want to make sure, like for people that are not selling in the industry, your typical publisher, again, I'm going to go to that point of like the New York Times or whatever, totally extremely respectful. Again, they want user trust. It's the fact that ad tech is so easy in passing data that the industry has kind of been built on that as the oil in which we're all fueling things. And guess what? That's getting us into trouble. And all this regulation is really about the biggest platforms, the big tech companies. I almost feel like it's like Godzilla versus Mothra and we're like the citizens of Tokyo, like we're the collateral damage as regulations trying to control these monopolies and allow other companies to thrive. And it's a hard line to draw. It's a hard line to sit there.

It's crazy. Especially with the power that these platforms control. They're not just publishers anymore. They're service providers, their email platforms, their communication tools, their work tools, their warehousing data. They're holding people's files. You know, they've become big monsters that control so much money that, you know, I see the publishing industry is unique in that because I've had some consults with CROs who are at publishing companies. And the conundrum they find themselves in is the first question I ask them is, are you in an audience first publisher or are you in a advertiser first publisher? And I think they know the purpose of the question, right? They Know the business that they're really in, right. And the ones that say to me, yeah, you know, the company I'm working for, they kind of built this thing because they want to capture advertising dollars. That's the, that's what drove them into the business. Right? Wasn't like some editorial perspective that drove them into this. It was just they get, they wanted to get into this great marketing ad game because there's a lot of money there. Okay. So that says a lot about the culture of the company that you're working for. Right? That's their focus. Their focus is in monetization as a primary goal driver. Right. And you think any. Every business is like that, but you more, I'd say, let's say fundamental type of publishers have a lot of sanctity around their content. They just, they want that to be first. I worked for one for a while, I mentioned them, and they're in the real estate space. And they were incredibly principled around their editorial. It was like the incredible restrictions around what they would and wouldn't do. And it was really impressive to see. And as a result, they built a great business, but it took a lot longer. And they had to actually refuse a lot of business because their principles kind of steered them towards doing things a certain way. So that put constraints on the sales model, that put constraints on their growth. But because they were clear about their mission, they were able to do it because they understood kind of like the North Star for them. Whereas if you see a company that's more advertiser driven, they're like, well, I don't know, whatever, just find that audience for me, you know? Okay, what do you mean? Coke's coming in. Great find. Kids, just do it. I don't care. Just figure it out. And I think that this is sort of where I think a chief revenue officer, we can talk into that in a second too, about that role in the industry. Has to figure out how to build a revenue engine that appropriately meets those demands. And it's not the same thing. Right. So you're seeing in your world a lot of these similar, different types of publishers. So what are some of the things you're seeing when you look at like a, let's call it, like revenue alignment strategies that you see are happening in response to this sort of almost, how do you say, schizophrenic, if you will, type of business? What are the ways that you're seeing some of the companies succeed and make it work? What are, what are success formulas that someone who's running a Revenue operation at a publisher might get some ideas from or understanding about.

Yeah, so I'll, I'll. It's funny, you, you, you kind of caught me on using a frame, a word that I also do not like, which is users. I mean, for some reason our industry uses users, right? And drugs, the drug industry uses users as well. Like it's, you know, all these things just don't align. And it is about audience.

We're all addicted, Rob. We are all addicted, let's be honest. But. Okay, continue.

But there's a reason I use it almost because again, it's like shorthand in our industry to get there. But there is, what I'm seeing more and more discussion around is that if you can establish that value proposition with your audience, you're going to get put into a position where you are going to future proof how whatever regulation, whatever technology, I mean Apple has made some changes to the way that this industry works. It's just kneecapped a lot of things that this industry was kind of fueled on. It's amazing. And Apple can go to any industry and destroy it and just own it. Right. And so that's always hanging over one's head. But there is a part of this that says, you have chosen my site, you've come to me and this is how we make money. This is how we are able to do what we do for you. And if we could work out how to do that, well, we can get consent to use data, we can get consent to serve ads and we can do things in a way that will build. And again, it's a much more longer term type thinking. Right. Like someone that's sitting there trying to hit a quarterly number, really hard to sit there and say, hey, I'm going to put my weight on there. Because what most publishers realize is that some people aren't necessarily going and saying, oh, today I'm going to consume content from these three sites. They just start consuming and they start going and they're not even sure where they are. But there is a need for people to say stop. Understand, we add value to your life and we need to sit there and figure that out. And it could be a subscription, it could be, we have E Commerce, all of these things. And so what we're seeing more and more and what I can say that I, that the Golf.com management has seen is from the start is we're going to serve relevant advertising and then what we're going to do is we're going to build out an E commerce solution so that we know what people are looking to buy. And golf is one of those areas where you know that like buying the equipment is as a part of the process is actually playing the game or following the sport. Right. And now we're building out a membership program and all of that is to just find that core audience and serve them what they want. I, I, I work with people who blog and write about golf every single day. In my mind, I can't even imagine it. I'm not that much of a golfer. But they are able to sit there and do this. That's how much they love the sport. And that passion shows up. You find that other passion and that's the only way to kind of build it up. How big can we get? I don't know. I'm sure there's a cap, right. There's an aspect of building that business just at the right size. I think to, you know, you led with people over hiring in terms of sales and so forth. Yeah, slow and measured and you know, again, I think that's one of the things that you and I have talked about in the past is the alignment of sales to operations. What can we sell and what can we deliver? And the more and more you're able to align that and then you grow from that and have that framework to build upon. You have success. You can't sell yourself out of, out of the trouble in publishing. You just can't. You can't hire an army and it just, it isn't there.

Do you see, however, that that is being adhered to? Or do you think that publishing has the same syndrome as other industries? Are they over hiring too? Like, what are maybe some nuances or other ways that you see the publishing industry handling stuff like that.

I might be a tad my out because I do look at the operations side more than the sales side. I have not really seen people hiring sales and media to, to a great extent in part because I think the sale of media has really changed to where it's more consultative. Right. It takes, it takes some, you know, some sales skills that again, I, I'll go back to an old story once when, you know, when I was at advance where Yahoo came to us and said, you know, our newspaper, our newspaper salespeople are like our greatest asset as a newspaper. And we were like, well, then we're screwed, right? Because a standard person just goes out and says, hey, we have the Valentine section. Do you want to buy? It's 50 bucks. Is not the salesperson who sits there and goes, oh, you're using A data clean room.

Right?

All of these things, this level of complexity makes the sale hard. And I think what we're seeing, and I say I'm seeing this in publishers, is you're seeing people who understand the technology putting put forward further to collaborate with that sales team so that when the buyer brings up how they're thinking of the future, there's so many questions about the future of digital advertising right now that everyone's trying to get a sense of where you are, that you need someone that can help navigate and try to understand what the other side is. And that's kind of like what my role is. My role is waiting for a buyer to sit there and bring up something and everyone else will look to me in the room and go, okay, what was that language that he was just talking in? And then I'm able to kind of translate and then we start to build things that, that do that. Salesmanship is so needed. You know, every publisher needs a narrative. They need to know how to talk about it and go out there. But it's getting harder and harder to not to sit there and you have to bring how can you fulfill. And that part of it. Again, it's always been a sales issue.

So let's talk about fulfillment because you bring that up a lot. So you mentioned it is complicated, right? It's not a simple matter of like, I want to buy this section and I'll sponsor that section. I mean, there is that. There still is some of that stuff. I know there's takeovers and all that kind of other nonsense. What I'm referring to more is one would think that the advertising offering is simple, right? It's like, okay, I have a product, I have a certain demographic that I know wants this product. I want to reach them, I want to know that they're engaged and I want to be able to get in front of them with my message in a way that has them make the decision whether it be whatever I set up to do so. And can you do that for me better than other people can? Right. Are you able to somehow deliver on that promise better than your competitor? What are some of the things that you, you advise companies that they can do that improve my chances of getting that advertiser's dollars if I have the same audience? Right. The same demo? Right. Whatever. What are a, what are those tactics that are being used into? What are some of those questions that come up that you're talking about that sometimes people don't really know how to respond to?

Yeah, yeah. Well, it to the Same point around there being this schizophrenic feeling around who our clients are. There is a piece that one buyers looking for scale, they don't want to, they don't want to put the effort into, to not get, you know, get very little return. And at the same time, what they're looking for is something that is somewhat unique.

Yeah.

And I think that that's the part that, that we're talking with publishers about is we all have to start talking the same language. So think of it this way. Any, anyone that's an agency or a brand that's looking to sell their product, buying on Google, easy. Buying on Facebook, easy.

Yep.

It's all self serve. You go and you do it yourself. Now you come to talk to a publisher and suddenly then there's an RFP process and insertion orders and whatever and all that stuff that has to go away. But at the same time, why would someone buy golf.com versus just buying golfers on Facebook? Okay, right.

And, and, and why would they?

And why. And so as not being the sales guy. But that's okay.

No, it's a good way. The buyer thinks as I'm looking into here more.

Yeah, that's right. Well, they look at that and go. At that moment in time that someone is on golf.com they're in a golfed mindset.

Yep.

In other words, if they're on Facebook and they're just looking at people's pictures and whatever has happened, you know, someone's birthday or whatever, they could get distracted and that might work. But if they're, they've come to golf.com they are, they've identified themselves in their head. I am in a golf mindset. And so to see an ad that says there's a brand new driver that's coming out, that's perfect timing to sit there and be there and keep in mind. Then again, there's an aspect of thinking through. We know people when they're looking to buy, we know when people are looking for instruction and whatever. And so we can cater the message to that moment in time that someone's in that mindset. I think that that's part of what you can do with data and so forth. The, the key that comes down to it is from the buy side is they have so many options and so many ways to buy advertising. They have to figure out what works. And if you think about it, someone could come to golf.com, they could see an ad for, for a new driver and then go to Google and search on that Driver, find it, click on it and buy it. Who gets credit?

Yeah, well, that's the other part.

Right, right. Who gets credit for that? And I think that there's an aspect that what you learn is that sophisticated buyers know that that impression on golf help lead Google to that actual interaction. The simple ones don't and they just give Google all the credit. So I think that there's a piece of like, trying to resolve and understand what works is a key piece to, for both sides, kind of like how are we going to measure what success looks like is a key thing on that. And I think that there is a, a part of reaching audiences at the right time with the right message that is just inherent in our business where new technologies come up, sit there and try and figure out how to solve for that. And, and that's kind of some of it of like, which makes it exciting for me as someone who like is a, you know, I'm a puzzle solver. Right. I love this. And at the same time, you know, part of what we have to do is we have to make this easy. Can't show off by like how many, how fancy we are. We have to make this how sophisticated and easy we are.

I agree. And this stuff is great. It brings back a lot of cool memories of the time I was developing a lot of these products myself. And the data is fascinating in the way you can use it and do things with it. So let's switch gears a bit on this particular point related to more what you and I call the Chief Revenue officer. To what degree are there chief revenue officers in publishers? Is it like a prominent role at publishers? Is it like a role that's up and coming? Like, how would you say the maturity of that role is within the publishing industry? And second, what is a difference or a nuance between a chief revenue officer at a publishing company and one that might be working at, let's say like a SaaS based, you know, software company?

Yeah, yeah. I'll do my best. Right. So I will tell you that there are a couple people that come to mind in that particular role. And you and I've had this discussion. In fact, I, I, we've talked about this. A couple of them are actually more from the operations side and have been kind of elevated to that particular role versus saying a salesperson moving into that particular role. They've been quite successful in what I, what I've seen. And at the same time, one of the things again we, we talked about is whether that's someone that operations background can really Think through how to sell. Right. There's. There's a piece to that. I see it as a developing role. I would say that the majority of companies have. I look at it go like. And again, Warren, you know better than I do that actually using the phrase CRO is still a developing thing. People put people, someone in that role, they may not call it a CRO. So that's. I see a lot of different names in the publishing world. It. It's almost like made up by each company in terms of what that is. It is.

It's the most ambiguous C suite role for sure. I mean, you'd never kind of have any ambiguity about what a CMO or a CFO does. Everyone pretty clearly understands their role. That's kind of part of the core mission, what I'm trying to solve. But as that pertains to the publishing industry, one thing I'm hearing, and this is interesting, is that it's more of an operational focused role as opposed to like a sales focused role. Is that accurate?

Yeah, I don't. I'm thinking of a couple of examples where that is. Is the case. I do think that I just had dinner with someone that's more of the head of sales. And when you ask him what he's trying to solve for. He's trying to solve for that audience first issue, right? That's what's focused to him because he feels like again, he's got the other handle. There is no doubt in the publishing world that someone at the C level is coming together to try to figure out how these pieces work. Again, it isn't me telling the world now that traditional fiefdoms of different departments isn't going to work. Others are seeing this too, right? Like, this is. This is what every organization sitting there trying to struggle to. And so having someone that can understand what the sales organization part of it needs and then watch it kind of go through again. The frameworks that you've been talking about, I would say is definitely happening. How is it different than other industries? Again, I'm myopic. I look at publishing to some extent, but I do feel like I use this phrase sometimes that the Internet's kind of built on sand. Right. There's a. There's an aspect that wasn't really built with us in mind. It was built for trading research papers across, you know, departments. Right. And now we decided, hey, why don't we build an entire industry on top of it? And all this, and you just realize that this is hard to actually measure success other than that Top revenue number, everything that goes into it in terms of profitability and how do you get to profitability is complicated. And again, that's part of what my job is to the other publisher I work with as well as Golf is to sit there and say like, how can we make any efficiency level, you know, up that. Because that's to me the, the, the true metric is how can I be more efficient at the fulfillment. Because then I could take on whatever things with sales, we can grow the site and I can deliver. Sometimes it gets to a real problem where you oversell and I have very few levers to pull.

So now when you say oversell, you mean what? Like you don't have the impression count to deliver on what you promised to be the impression?

Yeah, well, someone wants a specific thing and it's like you want to say yes and you take that yes. And then you go back and go like, I don't have that right. You know, that's. So that's, that's a piece of it. But I also just sit there and look at it and go. When you think through that. So some of the work I've done. And you're aware of this because again I've looked at your framework for some of this is just even working through the workflow of an actual sale from a publisher side and what that looks like, mapping that out and starting to have more companies look at each other and go like how does that compare to what you're doing? And in that is so much nuanced and difference that you really start to come up with some great ideas of how to move things forward.

Got it. So how much does marketing play a role in all this? Like what, what does marketing, an organization market look like in a publishing industry as opposed to let's say like selling a software solution for a business?

Yeah, I, it, I think again it. There, it varies. But since, since there's a, an aspect that marketing is kind of beyond the. Well, if you can consider Google, you know, and search optimization and other kind of things that can be part of marketing. And that's super important. But the fact audiences come in from wherever they come in, right. And where I am seeing more marketing efforts is really on the B2B side of how to help sales support. Like by giving them the materials. Right. So I'm seeing more direct sales, selling account management, client services, handling that next step. But marketing is sitting there in that process, sitting there going and helping product get brought to sales, give them the tools they need to then go out and sell And I think that that's, you know, when I think of the CMOs that I work with, with the companies, the technology companies I talk to, you know, they're, they play a much more bigger role in terms of going, here are the events that we're going to go to and here's who we're trying to sell and all those types of metrics. Maybe I'm not talking to the right people on the publisher side, but you can't do that with an audience. You can't go, hey, Warren hasn't gone to today, so let's go out and try to figure out, right?

So it's an interesting part of it, right? It, the, the sort of marketing side of it to the, let's call it the audience or the reader if you want to is a completely different thing. But you're, you're the paying customer is ultimately the advertiser. So someone who's going to have make that consideration. I know you have a third party agencies that do a lot of the bidding on your behalf. But you know, golf has an advantage of having a very unique focus and niche and it's easier to go to market as a golf publication because you know exactly what you do and the walls are defined and you know, there's no ambiguity about what you're talking about. But if you're like a more of a general publisher, right, you're just publishing kind of content, you know, and you're trying to get audiences and it's very disparate and a lot of it's broken up into a bunch of different groups. What role does marketing play to get advertisers in that particular scenario? Like, why would an advertiser initially become aware of a particular publishing entity as opposed to just saying, here's give my money to an advertising agency. Yeah, say would you spend this money on my behalf, please, and just find the right places where I can get my people. I'll leave it up to you. You guys know better. I don't want to hear about this. You know, it's your job. You're my media agency. And just get back to me with the attribution report and tell me how my money was spent and how many people I got from it. You know, that it's such a bizarre like ecosystem in that respect. How does the publisher deal with the fact that now you've been lumped into this big group where now you're actually being fought over, right. At an agency between, you know, how they make a decision about utilize your own resources? Yeah, I Look at as a marketing part of it is what's the, what's the way that that is being managed right now from a publisher standpoint?

Well, it's interesting what comes to mind and I, I'm sure you've, you've been a part of this is like events like CES immediately come to mind that like a lot of agencies and buyers are there. So it's like a feeding frenzy, right? The brands go to a consumer electronics show to see the newest tech and see where they're, where they might be able to integrate their brands. So therefore the agencies, those are their clients, they want to make sure that they're not getting poached by someone else, which means the publishers then show up to sit there and talk to those agencies, to hopefully talk to maybe those brands. And then of course, the technology companies come into that. That particular piece now doesn't directly answer your question, but it's so top of mind for me as I'm sitting there going like, why am I going to go to ces? And it's.

And why do you go to ces?

I go to CES because I'm going to, in the course of, you know, two days, cell a lot of people.

Everybody'S in one place at one time. The ecosystem has somehow over the last 12 years or whatever, seems to have collected this group of people that are all in the same industry at one place for a long period of time. It's a very condensed opportunity to have a bunch of meetings with the right people at one place. But when you think about it, somehow that happened. I don't know, it's, it's an electronics, you know, event. It's got nothing to do with media whatsoever. There isn't even like a media center at ces and the media center lobbies and stuff.

Chandelier bar.

Yeah, pretty amazing. So, I mean, I get it. So much of the media industry in my world, it used to be all about that sort of thing. It was very event driven. It was very, you know, travel and expense budgets. I mean, when I was in, at my roles at the holding companies, you know, a lot of the money was spent just trying to buy me dinners and you know, matter of fact, one, one client took me to the masters.

That's. And I think that that is where we are. So think of it this way from a, from an agency perspective, even a brand, there are literally millions of websites you could work with in any way, shape or form you want to. And so what's going to convince me to sit there and move my media budget any particular place than to just again, throw it to someone and just have them buy automatically. A billboard isn't going to do that.

Yeah.

Even a piece of collateral isn't necessarily going to do that. It's going to be relationship driven. And I think that that's another reason why again, you won't see throwing lots of salespeople at things if you can't open up that door to that buyer and again, plant in their mind that there's a unique way to think of how to solve their problem. Right then. I mean, it really is such a relationship game. And, and one of the things I, you know, I'll say this is unfair. And again, you can correct me if I, if I am too glib in this comment. Right. Which is a lot of decisions made by agencies are by 22, 23 year olds who, whatever reason, want to get in the advertising business. And now they're spending all their lives in Excel spreadsheets trying to buy across 100 publishers. And they don't really want to do it and they just want to check the box and go like, did you hit my demographics? Yes.

Cool.

Let's move on. Meanwhile, you're trying to sell to them and say, I have a unique opportunity for you. You're actually just adding more work onto their plate. So that sales piece is really critical because you have to sit there and say again, if you're an NBC, a Paramount to New York Times to a small regional newspaper, you have to actually get them to understand that the extra effort on their part to just not buy Google, not by Facebook, is worth it. Now, what I will say is that most agencies, most brands realize they don't want to just spend on Google and Facebook because they know they're missing out. And those environments aren't necessarily the best for all of their messaging and so forth.

Yeah.

Wow, do we have a lot of work? And so again, that's why I'm operationally focused. I'm trying to make it easy.

Yeah.

So my salespeople can go out and say, this is easy.

Got it. It's so important, this part of it, because it really is. There's too many opportunities to get the same thing. It becomes so commoditized. And I think that kind of, we can kind of close it out with this thought. We can get back in a little bit more about your world is, you know, with the people not going into the office anymore and events, I think they're coming back, but, you know, it's not, it's not the Same as it was five years ago. These type of boondoggles and these sort of things are not as usable anymore. You know, you can't get a client from sending them off to some Bahamas trip or something like that because it's just not happening as much, I think. I think it will come back more, maybe. I thought so. I think maybe more. I think it more now than I would have maybe a year ago. But still, I think that it's forced companies to have to really be more clear about their value proposition as opposed to just saying, well, let's just take them to a big Yankee game and get him a section in the front seats and stuff. So in any case, though, I want to just find a little bit more about. Tell us a bit about your business. What are you doing right now? What are some things that are going on? How can people learn more about what you're up to and how can they participate in the things you're trying to accomplish and get in touch with you?

Well, I appreciate the opportunity to share that. So, you know, what we are focused on going into 2023 is, again, there are a lot of changes coming to our industry in digital advertising. And I want to make sure, again, that publishing is a thriving business. And so we're working to spend more time with more parts of the company, you know, of the organizations that are, you know, these publishers, to find out the ways to. To come together. So I'm, again, I really have built my business on being a community, and I serve my publishers first. I don't charge them. Okay. So if anyone's a publisher, you can be part of my community. And it is. It is free to do so. And out of that, you'll get what I call crowdsource consulting. I am literally just trying to say, someone can help you. Let's connect you and let's make that happen. And out of that, what I'm also trying to do is I'm trying to move to events that have outcomes. Right. So in other words, instead of just being a boondoggle, instead of just hearing the same session like, hey, wow, we should all get together and talk. And, you know, it'd be great if we educated brands, they'd understand better. Whatever. It's like, okay, enough.

How so?

It's almost like a level of advocacy that we're trying to kind of work into this. And so, you know, we have a newsletter. I think that it's relatively entertaining. I try to add my sense of humor into it. And then part of what I'm trying to do is elevate these conversations where they need to happen. And it can be any number of different things. And so the newsletter is probably the best way to kind of track on what we're doing. And along the way we find, you know, we're helping, trying to help people find jobs, we're trying to work on collaborating on what training might look like, research, all of these things become something where we can do it. And by the way, we're bringing the buy side in too into this conversation. It's not like we've been ignoring it, it's just been a matter of doing it in a meaningful way. So I have a couple of big events coming up this next year. One's going to be in Newport beach, one's going to be in Edinburgh. So I'm excited about that one. Ye like. And along the way, you know, a lot of what I focus on is actually the people more than some of the ad tech. So don't come to me to sit there and ask me whether I think, you know, some, some particular code is going to work. Ask me whether you're organized in a way that's going to be successful because again, I think, I think we found some. It's a very interesting space to be in. And I think that there's an aspect that like I want to see these future rock stars that are, that are out there succeed. And I can't wait for almost like the generational change of when some of these people are in charge. Right. Because they just sit there and think that they're going to be part of this change that gets us to all the things that you work on, to all the things I'm talking about where you start to actually see meaningful change within organization to be successful.

Great. And what types of people you want to listen to, speak to. Who are the kind of people you're looking to talk to right now?

Yeah, I mean I, you know, anyone in an operations, client, services, we have a lot of crossover with this. I do have CROs that come to my events and so forth. You know, I do get and talk to CEOs about what they're up to, but in terms of my events, it is really the core of that revenue, operations, ad operations type of role and those, the more senior level people because again, what I've, what I have found is some of the people that are really trying to help navigate forward are those that do know how the sausage is made. Do you understand some of that technology? And so them paired with a CRO or someone with more of A sales background could be a really powerful dynamic, and I just like to see more and more of that happening. And so I'm hoping to create those opportunities.

Great. And what's coming up? So the next thing you said you're going to ces? Anything happening before that?

I just took my last trip. I was in Toronto for dinner. It was freezing. I got my first snow of the, of the year, and so I think I'm just gonna enjoy the holidays with my family and, and use this time to prep and get ready. I'll be honest. Yeah, I'm going to ces, but there's a part of it I was like, starting. You know, I'll make the joke that I'm starting the year off with a hangover is just the best way.

So I'm with you.

I. I'm kind of on the, on the fence, but IAB will have their large event and it's. Events are back.

Yeah, I think so, too. I do think so. I mean, I've been going to a lot more. I'm actually going to be at 1 next week as well.

More people are questioning, though, the value. And that's the part that I've been really focused on with. What I'm doing is how do you provide value to the event more than just the FaceTime? And, you know, I think we're gonna. Everyone's gonna have to do that because it just isn't the same. Just say, hey, we were in the same place at the same time. I mean, no one does business cards anymore.

Nope.

I haven't gotten a business card from anyone in years, so it's so true.

Great. Well, look, I, I thank you for being here. As I said, I always like these. It seems like we're having like one conversation. We just kind of like, it happens and stops and then happens and stops. And thanks again also for supporting what we're doing here and working together. And I look forward to the next opportunity to do that. So everybody again, Rob Beeler. It's Bealer Tech. That's Bealer Tech, check him out. And Rob, thank you so much for being here today.

Warren, thank you. It's always a privilege. And again, I always enjoy our conversation, so thank you.

Got it.