Customer Data Not Advertising To Save Papers?

An article in the Independent reports that News International has a database of 11 million British readers and plans to manipulate the heck out of it to save it from experiencing sector-wide decline. The database contains information on a large chunk of the 23 million readers of the The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World papers.

Vanneck is managing director, Customer Direct, at News International, which means she is responsible for the management of all four of its national newspaper brands, across all the platforms on which they operate… Vanneck’s vision involves rejecting some of the perceived truths that have emerged elsewhere in the industry. She dismisses the idea that advertising is the only revenue stream that will matter, and she is sceptical of the value of those mass audiences which come in their tens of millions each month to the websites of many British newspapers. Instead of regarding the web as a threat to circulation revenue, she talks of a “seamless experience” where a brand performs diverse functions on different platforms and thinks the word “digital” is divisive and should be considered “defunct”.

…”In newspapers we’ve all been guilty of not giving enough justice to circulation as a direct customer revenue stream – we’ve very much thought of ourselves as driven by our advertising businesses,” says Vanneck. “If you keep thinking about your consumers as readers you create the ongoing belief in volume versus value and you don’t mind whether they’ve purchased you. It’s quite a big change for us because actually a customer is someone you have a transactional relationship with, someone you deal with differently, it leads you to think about their customer experience and customer service.”

…For The Times and The Sunday Times that means travel, wine, culture and fitness. Those titles now have 140,000 “contract customers” who take the papers on subscription.

Some 80,000 of these have activated their membership to the Culture+ programme, which offers discounts on products and services from the Royal Academy of Arts and the National Theatre as well as Murdoch businesses such as Sky Arts and Harper Collins. “80,000 doesn’t make us the biggest arts organisation but we are not far off,” says Vanneck. The Sunday Times Wine Club, set up 30 years ago, has a database of 300,000 customers who have purchased 80m worth of wine in the past year, making it “one of the largest direct wine businesses in Europe”. The Times Health Club has 100,000 members who share tips on how to lose weight. When Vanneck studied her database of “most valuable customers”, she came across one man who had entered a Sunday Times travel competition 90 times. She wrote to suggest he bought one of the paper’s escorted holiday tours. “He immediately bought one,” she says…

The Independent: The first lady of Wapping – may the force be with her?