Best of the Week: Killing The Source (and launching Mumbrella Pro)

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK [Cooperate]( And another thing... August 3, 2019 Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written on Wednesday morning in beautiful, chilly Sisters Beach, Tasmania. And by chilly, I mean seeing-your-breath-indoors chilly. Indeed, so chilly that I’m starting to suspect that the unmoving rabbit on the frosty grass outside isn’t taking in the sunrise, but actually froze to death in the night. More on that later. And you may notice there’s a dateline at the start of this email. There’s a boring, practical reason why. More on that later. Today’s writing soundtrack: ABC Classic. Mumbrella Pro There were a couple of reasons for writing this on Wednesday. Prosaically, while I’ve been working remotely for most of the week, I fancied making a long weekend of it and taking Thursday and Friday off. It was a good way to mark the end of Dry July (which was slightly harder to stick with than I anticipated), and indeed to stay up later for The Ashes than I otherwise would have (based on the first two nights it’s going to be a great series). But more practically, I’ve known for some time that Wednesday would be a big moment for us. We launched Mumbrella Pro. We’re not new to subscription products. We launched The Source, which shares some DNA with Mumbrella Pro, more than six years ago. Mumbrella Pro is a wider offering though. As well as a database of which agencies work with which brands, it also digs deeper into Mumbrella’s world, including video of our best conference presentations and an online archive of Best of the Week. But the world has changed a bit since we launched The Source and, I hope, so have we. This isn’t a chest-beating piece. When people unveil their finished product they often give the impression that they got everything right first time. As is our way, it took us at least a couple of runs at the strategy, and, indeed, execution to get where we’ve got. It’s usually harder than it looks. Like most things we do, we got some bits right and plenty more wrong. But we kept going. For one thing, when we launched The Source in 2013, we were experiencing one of our periodic confidence crises about how the industry viewed Mumbrella. We held a focus group with some industry bigwigs. And then we made the mistake of listening to what the focus group told us. Although Mumbrella was already a well known industry site, at the time we were at our most polarising. How would that sit with the ambition of being an authoritative information database? Should we launch a new, neutral brand? So rather than focusing on the trust and awareness we’d hopefully built up with our readers, we thought rather too hard about bigwigs we’d annoyed. We decided to start a completely new brand - The Source. To use Ritson-esque language, we sacrificed salience for safety. And that was around the point where I went a bit multi-brand mad and created a lot of unnecessary confusion. We called our PR event CommsCon. The first time we ran it somebody congratulated me (sincerely) on having sold the naming rights to CommBank. Our event on the running of good agencies was Sage, or rather SAgE - for Secrets of Agency Excellence. Not that anybody ever really understood that. Mumbrella’s sister iPad edition was Encore. I leaned rather heavily on acronyms. We published a book which was a guide to industry perceptions of agencies. Or MCAR as I incomprehensibly called it. Then there was beFEST - The Festival of Branded Entertainment. We launched MSIX - Marketing Science Ideas eXchange - with consumer psychologist Adam Ferrier as curator. The back of my business card was starting to look like an explosion in a logo factory. Then I saw Adam speak at an event, where he argued, persuasively, that the best number of brands is one. It made me want to smack myself on the forehead. He was completely right. From that moment The Source’s days as a brand were numbered. A few months ago, we cleaned up the look of The Source and as a first step relabelled it as Mumbrella The Source. Another mistake we made at the time was one that characterises Mumbrella’s development. We - and by “we”, I mean “I” - have never been very good at project management. The problem of being a journalist for my whole working life is that I’ve been hard wired for the short term. Give me a breaking news story, and I’ll have 240 words for you in no time at all. But give me a big project and I’ll dawdle until the very last minute. It's one reason why, no matter what the planning, I seem to put the finishing touches to Best of the Week at 10am on a Saturday morning, with my self-imposed 10.10am deadline looming. Even today, having written most of this back on Wednesday, I’m still polishing at 8.15am this morning. And in the early days of Mumbrella, I was a journalist surrounded by journalists. So our culture was one where structured project management did not figure particularly highly. Or at all. Ready, fire, aim, was our way of doing business. We valued our nimbleness. We’d launch things fast. But commercially, that wasn’t great. We never used to announce content for our events until VERY late in the day because I never had the programs locked in until then. It was only when we got big enough to bring in people from the events industry who were fond of these things called critical paths that we discovered that if we announced the content of our events months rather than days before we sold more tickets. As a result we took a less-than-textbook project management approach to launching The Source back in 2013. In those days we called it The Book Project. The idea behind The Source remains a good one. People working in media sales need to know which media agency currently represents a brand when it comes to pitching an opportunity. And people responsible for new business in agencies of all types need to know where the brands currently reside. That information is relatively easy to get, but time consuming to stay on top of - we could do that instead. We gave our developer a fortnight to put together The Source (and not enough of a budget to do it properly). We didn’t give him a detailed brief that went much beyond our ambition to host a directory that listed which agencies work with which brands, and that we wanted to have a means of taking people’s money. We left him to figure out the details. We got a seed list of subscribers almost by accident. In the small amount of market research we did before launching, we approached the owners of the old industry directory AdBrief to subscribe. It had obviously been a while since they’d had a call. They came straight back and sold us AdBrief itself for not much more than the price of a subscription. We built a team of researchers and created that database of useful information which we thought was worth paying for. The plan was to launch, as the jargon goes, with minimum viable product, then improve. We’d build on the number of brands listed and develop our subscription marketing plan as we went. The person who launched the first version, and would have taken that minimal viable product on to success, moved on to a big job at a major media company. And we struggled in hiring the right successor. Finding somebody who combined operational rigour with an ability to manage and drive a subscription strategy, and perhaps bring some entrepreneurial flair too was - as you might expect - difficult. We made a hire who talked a good game, and spent nearly six months working on a plan. He argued that we could make a big saving by taking our researchers offshore, and dismantled our local structure. Then his old employer offered him his job back, on much more money. Being just within his probationary period, his notice period was a week. We went back into caretaker mode while we looked for somebody else. After a time consuming recruitment process, we found someone who seemed perfect. He turned us down. Eventually we found somebody else. Initially, we hired him to do a strategic review with a view to it becoming a permanent role. At the end of the two-month process, he gave a presentation that George Costanza would have felt disappointed with. We bade him farewell. But to be honest, there’s no point in blaming anyone else for the drift. That was on us as the owners. We let that go on for too long. Meanwhile, committed admins and ops managers kept it ticking over. We dropped the attempt to use overseas researchers. It didn’t work. Our re-recruited teams of local researchers did their best to keep it up to date although we’d built a complex series of spreadsheets that meant double or triple handling before even a small update could go live. I noticed that whenever The Source researchers were on the phone to verify information they’d tell the person on the other end they were calling from Mumbrella. It was the recognisable brand. Meanwhile, there was always something more urgent for us to focus our management time on, even if it was less strategically important than getting to grips with The Source.. Initially we didn’t have a proper subscription marketing plan, and didn’t really recognise that selling (and more importantly retaining) subs are different to shifting conference tickets. We ran an occasional house ad or email to Mumbrella readers and nothing more strategic than that. Yet it was clearly a product the industry wanted. Even without much love from us, The Source broke even. But the product began to fall behind. As I say, it wasn’t getting management love, and we didn’t have the systems in place to catch incorrect information becoming permanent. Our launch had been focused on creating rather than making a plan on how we rigorously kept the data up to date. Early in 2017, I realised I was losing faith in the product myself. I wrote an article about the merger of Maxus and MEC into Wavemaker and included background info from The Source, which proved to be out of date. I was embarrassed, and asking around in the office realised that our own journos had stopped relying on it too. That was a pretty important indicator. It was the shock I needed. It was time to put up or shut up. If it was going to improve, I’d need to take some responsibility for it, rather than moaning about it. We agreed that The Source team would now report in to me. Over the following months as I got a little more under the hood, I began to realise how little we knew about our customers. There were no analytics to tell us how subscribers were actually using The Source. We didn’t know if they logged in every day, or not at all. We struggled to even keep track of revenues. Two different systems threw up slightly different results each month. Once again that problem was on us - we hadn’t spelled out those needs in the original brief. But the world was moving in our direction. By then, industry cynicism about paywalls was beginning to subside. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were proving it globally. The Australian was beginning to make a go of it locally. Today we’re in the era of subscription media. I find myself with subscriptions to newspaper mastheads The Oz, The AFR, and Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph. And also to Private Eye magazine from the UK. (There’d be no Dr Mumbo without Private Eye’s tone.) And to the Crikey newsletter. And also to video streaming services including Stan, Netflix and Kayo. And to Apple Music. Jeez, my streaming is getting expensive. And this week, I also made an embarrassing climbdown. A few months back, I did my usual thing of threatening to leave Foxtel in order to get a price reduction. Only this time, they called my bluff and let me go. Only, I found myself missing my daytime wallpaper of Sky News, so I’ve resubscribed. (Mind you, I’m not sure about Paul Murray’s Thredbo jumper this week…) Now, I have a new IQ4 box and a funky new remote control with a working Netflix button and a non-working voice control button. (Coming soon, apparently.) Plus I’m a voluntary supporter, or subscriber, or member, or funder, however you like to describe it, of The Guardian and tax-scrutinising journalist Michael West. It may not be everybody, but I do think people are getting used to the idea that they should expect to pay for their digital content. Regardless of the world’s move towards subscriptions, it was still a battle to fight on after years of spinning our wheels. This was all going on just before we sold Mumbrella to Diversified Communications. At one point I found myself outvoted two-to-one by my fellow owners about whether to cut our losses. Rationally, they argued that if we hadn’t made a go of it by now, we weren’t going to. I still felt we were on to something. I won the day by proposing that we should leave a vacancy open on the editorial team so we could make our budget work. And then we began to focus on a plan which wasn’t just about recovery, but hopefully seeing our subscription play reach its full potential. Stage one was to improve The Source. Stage two was to build something bigger. The first part was simple. And hard. Improve the content on The Source so it was more up to date again. Make it prettier to look at, and more clearly part of the Mumbrella family. And then, when we were proud enough of it that we were willing to put the Mumbrella name to it, rebrand with the bigger Mumbrella Pro offering we launched on Wednesday. In stage one we talked about putting lipstick on a pig. We redesigned The Source’s templates to look more like Mumbrella, and we increased our researchers’ hours to catch up on the data. But we left the horrible back end alone. Our duplicated spreadsheets, unhelpful analytics and mysterious financial reporting persisted for a little longer while we planned for the next stage. Late last year, we pitched the biggest capital expenditure investment in Mumbrella’s history to the powers-that-be at Diversified’s HQ. They approved the budget to build what has become Mumbrella Pro. It was part of a bigger plan. Over time, we’d realised that whenever we’ve had a project sitting on the side of too many people’s desks (including mine), it’s failed. We needed somebody within the Mumbrella leadership team to live and breathe the new project. Early this year we promoted our head of event content Damian Francis to the new role of head of paid content. It was a slightly weird job title, but it summed up our intentions. Damo’s job is to deliver content that our audience is willing to pay to consume, not just by attending our events in person, but also online. Which is how The Source has evolved into Mumbrella Pro. (Our working title for Mumbrella Pro was Mumbrella Plus, by the way. That sounded a bit too much like a caffeinated beverage.) Damo led the project, working with our long-time developer The Code Co and designer Ingrid Kool-Clarke from One Rise East. The look was based on the original Mumbrella designs created by Vanessa Ackland in our 2016 redesign. We’ve carried across the data, but taken the platform that drove The Source, soaked it in petrol and set fire to it. I suspect it was a happy day for our longer suffering operations manager. But Mumbrella Pro is a much wider product, and we’ve got bigger ambitions for it. It saddens me to watch a great session at one of our conferences and know that at the most, only a few hundred people saw it. This year, [Initiaitve’s global CEO Mat Baxter lit a bomb under the client-pitch system in his keynote]( at Mumbrella360. It was so well argued, backed with data from years of Initiative pitches. But you had to see the whole thing to fully appreciate the strength of his case. The industry really does have a problem with too much time being taken away from actual work in pursuit of potential work. Pitches are taking longer, are happening more often, and the clients are squeezing for ever greater savings. The pressures also have a worrying effect on the staff. It started a debate across the industry. And anyone with a dog in the race would benefit from seeing the preso, whether they were in Sydney on the day or not. That’s the sort of thing you’ll now find on Mumbrella Pro. Or for me, I was sad to be on stage in another room at Mumbrella360 while real life hero, [Richard De Crespigny, the Qantas pilot who saved QF32, was presenting in another room](. I’m looking forward to watching his preso. Or, one more example, I learned as much about the academic principles of marketing as I ever have in just 42 minutes in [Prof Mark Ritson’s condensed preso drawing on the lessons from his mini MBA in brand management](. Indeed, if ever you were to look for a snapshot of Mumbrella’s strengths and weaknesses, it came in the minutes that followed the session back in early June. We were due to hold an impromptu team meeting in the Hilton’s coffee shop to agree on the pricing model for Mumbrella Pro, but I was late for the meeting because I couldn’t bear to walk out on Ritson’s session before the end. We’d left it until the last moment to make the decision, and as usual we were relying more on tummy compass than research. As we got under way, Ritson walked past and I dragged him over for a bravura five minute session on best practice pricing principles. Ten minutes later, Tony Faure, a long time friend of Mumbrella and former boss of the likes of Yahoo and nineMSN as well as current chairman of Ooh Media, pulled up a chair and gave us some more free advice. To an outside observer it would have seemed a little chaotic, but in a few minutes we got to consult with two of the smartest marketing and media brains in the southern hemisphere as we made our decision. That’s a focus group we can use, but also a very Mumbrella way of making a plan. Mumbrella Pro feels like a closing of the loop. I’ve always believed that one of Mumbrella’s secret weapons is the fact that journalists rather than traditional content producers curate our events. And there’s more than just content from our conferences. I’m glad to tell you that the [Best of the Week archive]( now also has a home. I like the slightly clubby feel of this email simply being for those who opt in, and not subject to the vagaries of SEO or (whisper it…) the comment thread on the website. Those who email me in response to BOTW have read and thought about what I’ve written, whether they agree or disagree. But I often get asked why it can’t be found online. Now it can, within Mumbrella Pro. (And that’s the boring, practical reason why I now include a dateline at the start of the copy.) And there’s so much more journo-led content to come. But I’ve noticed that since we sold Mumbrella to Diversified Communications, we’ve developed another way of gauging how we’re travelling with any given product. They ask if I’m proud of it. I am. Mumbrella Pro is not yet perfect, but I am proud of what our team has built, and hopeful for what it can become. Of course I’d love you to give it a try. There’s even a seven-day risk-free trial option. Please tell me what you think. I welcome your emails to [tim@mumbrella.com.au](mailto:tim@mumbrella.com.ai). And our editor Vivienne Kelly - viivienne@mumbrella.com.au has the pleasure of covering the newsdesk this weekend. Before I go though, one important final update: The rabbit made it. He was indeed merely enjoying the sun coming up over Sisters Island. After a few minutes, he scampered away. Have a great weekend. Toodlepip... Tim Burrowes Content Director - Mumbrella [Cooperate]( Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia This email was sent to {EMAIL}. If you would rather not receive Mumbrella's Best of the Week email you can [unsubscribe]( or [manage subscriptions](. [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](