2017 was the year brands buy media companies, according to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose who made the declaration in a This Old Marketing podcast last May. Did it happen? Has your organization bought any media companies or even maybe built its own media arm?
Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, you’re probably curious about what it looks like for a brand to run a media organization. What’s the best way for the marketing and media teams to relate to each other? Should they keep a “church-state” separation (like the separation that newspapers traditionally uphold between reporting and advertising teams), or should they collaborate? What can organizations do to ensure that the brand –and its audiences – benefit?
One person who can speak to these questions is Victor Gao, vice president of digital and managing director at Arrow Media Group at Arrow Electronics. He did just that at Content Marketing World in his talk, How the Enterprise Marketing Department Can Build and Scale Media.
This post reviews Victor’s story of what Arrow Electronics has learned from its bold foray into the media business.
What Arrow Electronics has learned about running media companies
In their new book, Killing Marketing, Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose recount the story of how Arrow Electronics, one of the world’s largest companies, spent millions between 2015 and 2016 to purchase more than 50 media properties to acquire their valuable subscriber lists and editorial talent. In all cases, the subscribers are electrical engineers, the company’s target market.
Before making the media acquisitions, Arrow Electronics had been watching the struggles of the publications because it advertised in them. Here’s a passage from Killing Marketing that tells the story:
For the company’s customers, electrical engineers, not only were these publications how they kept up with what was going on in the industry – they were how kids became enamored and inspired to become electrical engineers. These publications are … the lifeline for increasing the knowledge and population size of the Arrow Electronics customer base … Arrow has seized this opportunity. The company saw the tremendous need to serve engineers.
Arrow Electronics bought media properties because of the niche they appealed to, not the size of their audiences. Many of the publications had been “buried in the belly of much larger media conglomerates,” as Victor explained in Joe and Robert’s book. “Arrow believed it could deliver the very best information to smaller sections and segments” of the electrical-engineer audience.
Your company doesn’t have to buy 50 media properties – or even one – to benefit from the lessons that Arrow Electronics has learned, including these shared by Victor:
- Align your media teams in a meta-architecture.
- Let journalists be journalists.
- Focus on engagement over reach.
- Involve managing editors in all the information your customers see.
1. Align your media teams in a meta-architecture
The first thing Arrow Electronics did was reorient the newly acquired media teams so they focused on customers in a coordinated way. Victor compares this effort to the movie Transformers, in which three of four transformers get together to form a bigger, more powerful transformer – Combiner.
Think of your portfolio of media companies. Each serves an audience. How do you bring them together so there is an inner relationship between the media brands? The way we did that was to look at the life cycle or design cycle and the production cycle for a typical electrical-engineer team.
The Arrow marketing team created a wheel model and mapped each audience segment to part of the cycle of electronics design and manufacturing. One audience segment, shown at the top, develops concepts. The next creates detailed designs. The next creates prototypes and tests them, and so on, around the wheel.
Think of each of these segments as a Transformer.
When you fit the segments together to form this wheel, your independent media teams form…
