[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey. Got a lot of good feedback on last week's episode with Adam Ryan from Workweek.
Love to hear from all of you, and especially what you like best about the show and what you wanna see more of. You can always email me at bmorrissey@therebooting.com. That's M-O-R-R-I-S-S-E-Y.
And also give the podcast a rating or review if you can. Supposedly this helps with discovery. Always wanna grow this.
Another thing is, before we get into the, the conversation this week, I wanna tell you a little bit about a new research report we have out from the Rebooting. I'm very proud of this.
I teamed up with former eMarketer analyst Deborah Aho-Williamson to put this together. We keep improving on these. I think this is about the fifth or sixth we've done.
This one was done in collaboration with our partners at Amida, and it examined how publishers are adapting their audience development strategies.
This was a great time to do this research since the shifts in priorities on audience development comes up constantly in my conversations with publishing executives.
And we surveyed about a hundred publishers to compile this report. I'll leave a link to it in the show notes. I'm biased, but I think it's worth checking out.
Thanks in particular to Deborah, but also to Amida for its partnership to make this report possible.
Amida is an audience management platform that allows publishers to better understand and activate their audiences, and they're great people. Really enjoyed working with them and Deborah on this project.
We have more coming up, so get in touch if you run a tech company or some other business that wants to reach key decision-makers or publishers, because we can partner on a research report or any of our other programs, or you can just email me.
So anyway, about the show. This week I spoke with Robert Dipple. He is the recently named CEO of Morning Brew. Robert succeeds Austin Rief, who is a Morning Brew co-founder and has exited the business.
And over its first ten years of Morning Brew's business, it has only been run by its founders both. First it was Alex Lieberman and then Austin.
So this is-- makes it an important transition, and it was a great time to catch up with Robert. You know, and one of the interesting things is that he comes from the B2B world.
We actually first knew each other when he was an executive at Amida, in fact.
So we dig into how Morning Brew has built up its B2B business, and this was an issue I really wanted to go deep on because I have seen countless examples of consumer media publications who see the different economics of B2B and go running towards it, and invariably they fail.
Okay? Morning Brew, on, on the other hand, from everything I could see, has made it work, right? And they now have seven B2B brands.
They're gonna be adding an eighth, which Robert disclosed here, although he wouldn't tell me which vertical.
He's-- Anyone who has a guess and sends it to me, I'll, I'll give you a complimentary TRB Pro membership when Morning Brew does finally announce which this vertical is.
But we also talk about, we talk about how the dynamics of B2B are different than B2C and, and why they usually trip up consumer media businesses that, that wanna operate in, have a foot in both worlds.
And I, I think in my view, like, Morning Brew has a big advantage having come from the email world.
A lot of the dynamics there port over to the B2B business, whereas the dynamics of a typical B2C publishing business that, you know, is going from, like, let's say a page view and a traffic model do not really translate, and I think that's where a lot of the disconnect ends up happening.
But anyway, as we discuss, Morning Brew is more than a newsletter company. I find it...
You know, it was a little ironic that, you know, Morning Brew was brought up so many times at this newsletter growth conference when it's really not a newsletter company and hasn't been for several years.
And we talk about that diversification. It's not just B2B. You know, they have greatly expanded into, into multimedia, into video and audio, and, and, and particularly with its burgeoning creator-led business lines.
Those are pretty interesting. So I really loved getting into all of this with Robert. We have a bunch of great guests coming up.
And again, I would love to hear from you to know, you know, the kinds of, of people you'd like to hear from.
I'm trying to take what I consider a more ecumenical approach to media, so I have plans to have more smaller niche publishers on, you know, B2B of course, as well as executives of cour- at the big consumer media publishers.
I think they've always been a majority of the focus of the show.
They, they still will be, but, you know, the, the information space is very big and very deep, as I keep saying, so I wanna branch out and really get at, like, all the nooks and crannies of it.
And I might even mix in some new formats too. Maybe one of those mailback, uh, mailbag episodes I see, like, a lot of sports podcasts do where I go solo. I don't know.
We'll see how, how it works, but I think it's good to mix it up. So your feedback is appreciated. Just send me a note. It's bmorrissey@therebooting.com. Now on to my conversation with Robert.
[upbeat music] Robert, thank you so much for doing this, and congrats on your new role as CEO of Morning Brew. Thank you, Brian. Happy to be here. Okay.
So I was at this newsletter growth marketing conference, I think those are the three words, a couple weeks ago, and Alex Lieberman, one of Morning Brew's co-founders, was there, and Morning Brew was, like, name-checked, like, nonstop, right?
It was like Morning Brew, The Hustle. Skimm a little, little less so, right? But it's like newsletter people, and, like, newsletters is, like... It's a sector. It's a weird sector.
I'm, like, obsessed with it a little bit. And I was, like, sitting there and I was like, "Yeah." But at the same time, like, Morning Brew [chuckles] isn't, like, a newsletter company anymore.
It kinda is, but it kinda isn't, right? Because, like, to me, like, newsletters are amazing. I send a, a lot of newsletters out.
But, you know, it depends on what you wanna build, but usually you wanna build a, a multifaceted media company and, and go beyond newsletters. So what is Morning Brew now at 10 versus...
Like, I felt like they were in a little bit of a time machine to, like, soon after the University of Michigan DormerYeah, I mean, I can, I can picture you sitting in that, in that crowd and, and hearing that.
I mean, it's very much an and not an or. Like- Yeah...
we, we cannot deny that the newsletter side of our business has been absolutely tremendous over the last ten years and still is a huge part of our revenue, and luckily has stabilized to be a big part of our business and a big way that we still engage with people, and our open rates are still on average north of fifty percent.
All those metrics that we would look at to feel like the newsletter business is healthy is there.
But Austin and, and Alex, who you referenced, really kind of saw into the future a couple years ago and, and said, "This can't be it. It can't just be that."
And they started to make some bets to, to really extend that relationship with our, our audience outside of the inbox.
And just like how they saw newsletters, I do think they saw that a little bit earlier than other people could act on it. And as you and I were, were talking about separately, like, they very much are entrepreneurs.
They're very much founders and builders.
So they got to work a couple years ago kind of making two large bets with a, a million bets underneath it, one being that multimedia, audio, video, social, and the creator-led side could, could really be something that's a nice natural extension for Morning Brew.
And then on the other side, that we had license to dive into a bunch of B2B verticals, and that the people that read the newsletter or, or, or listen to the podcast, you know, they, they like that general information, but they also have jobs, and they also really want help with professional guidance on how to be a marketer or how to be in HR or how to be in, in the healthcare industry.
So they kind of put that in motion, and, you know, I joined about two years ago to really help push the gas on, on that and specifically, you know, build out a lot of the B2B side.
But like I started, it's, it's kind of an and. We've added a lot of things in addition to the newsletter. It's, it's still just a huge part of our business though. Yeah. It, it's interesting 'cause it...
when you say that they're... I mean, they are, like, to me, like, pure entrepreneurs. Like, you can drop them anywhere, and they'd figure out, like, a business, and- Totally...
so I'm excited to see [chuckles] what they do, do next and building their, their next businesses. And along the way, I think was interesting to me, just, like, as observing Morning Brew is they tried a lot of things.
Some things didn't work. Like, you're not doing that, like, MBA. The Morning Brew MBA is no longer. You know, courses- No... had a moment. But you gotta, like, try all these different things- Yeah... until you hit on it.
Totally. And, like, B2B was, to me, like, a, a really, you know, great move obviously.
I mean, I've spent a lot of time in B2B, so I, I understand the, the dynamics there and, and the upsides of that kind of business versus a consumer business.
Even if it's a, even if it's a, you know, business media publication, when you get into the hardcore B2B, the economics change.
And I think when you're sitting on a mass of emails, you know, emails, particularly engaged email subscribers like Morning Brew was and is, you can do a lot of things with that. And- Yep...
you know, the, the, quote unquote, "niching down" is, 'cause I...
your background is very much in B2B, is very attractive because the LTV of a person who is, like, a top marketer as just a regular, you know, business person is, you know, it's, it's high, but them as, like, a marketer [chuckles] is higher.
Yep. Yeah, it's interesting. Even the consumer side of our business, Devin Emery, who, who's now our president, has done a great job building out, like, the content strategy on that side.
If you step back, it's interesting. Like, even that strategy is about finding niche topics that really appeal to big segments of our audience.
And what I mean by that is we've developed this kind of Venn diagram that's hard to visually talk about on an audio podcast, but, but basically just looking at, like, the different interests of our audience from work life and, like, what you would talk about around the water cooler to entre-- being an entrepreneur and, like, raising money and founding a company and, and all the tools you need and, and, you know, and new tools that could help you be more efficient to, to more investing and, like, what you could do with your personal money.
So there's all these different circles within a Venn diagram, even on the consumer side, and it's kinda the same move, Brian, to, like, what you and I have done on the B2B is, like, how do you build tailored content that speaks to those interests and give them more reason to engage with us?
And then how do you find advertisers that are kind of, like, center of the dartboard for those interests? Mm-hmm.
So we were already playing the game over there, and we've been doubling down and launching more consumer franchises.
We're launching a new one in the next forty-five days called Out There, which is actually from one of our consumer creators. Her name's Macy.
She's super popular on, on Morning Brew Social, and she's done such a good job that we're actually building and giving her her own show called Out There. We've been testing that for a while.
So we're constantly cultivating on the consumer side and on the B2B side trying to- Right... build that. So let's talk B2B, and then we'll get into, like- Sure... the creator and the consumer side.
So I mean, the way I sort of understand it, it probably works with, with sort of both ways, is, like, the Morning Brew mothership, right, has how many subscribers? Four point two million active. Four point two million.
Total database, bigger than that. And, and you can, like, filter those down into high-value professional areas, right? Absolutely.
I mean, is that- Yeah, we have, we have deep professional and industry data on, on that whole, that whole group.
Okay, so you've got, like, a bunch of marketers in there, and they get filtered down then into Marketing Brew, and then you're, you're not only getting sort of two bites of the apple, but, like, you're getting a bigger second bite probably because that same person who's on a Morning Brew list and active has, has a certain value.
But then if, if they're on the Marketing Brew, they probably have higher value. I mean, higher depending on who the advertiser is or the action that we're asking them to take.
Like, we launched a whole new event strategy last year, so, like, defining higher value would be that I can now sell that person a ticket to a live event that-We didn't have before.
But, but yeah, there's, there's I would say additive value to being able to, to engage them on the consumer side and on the professional side.
So how many of the like four point two million like Morning Brew subscribers are also subscribers to one of the B to B publications? Ooh, good question.
I don't know the exact percentage like live as of today, to be honest, so I don't wanna throw something out- Okay... and lie to you this, this early in the podcast.
[chuckles] If I had to guess, I would say probably around sixty percent. It's definitely- Oh, okay... more, more than half.
But keep in mind that we-- we're adding a lot of subscribers naturally organically to those B to B publications.
So we, we have, you know, in some cases, fifty thousand new people signing up to a B to B publication on a monthly basis. That doesn't mean they necessarily came from the mothership.
It, it could come from just other exposure and organic things or from paid marketing that we're doing to, to drive the right people to subscribe for that.
But we have this huge advantage that we do have the mothership- Yeah... and we could get better and better at cross-pollinating. Like, there actually hasn't been enough of that. We're, we're trying to improve it. Yeah.
But I mean that's where you're sort of like quote unquote unfair advantage, right?
Like, I mean, I think about it like how in your, in, in Morning Brew's growth, you know, you guys were early to a lot of things, I feel like during that time, and timing is a lot of things.
That's why when I see people pattern matching and saying, "I'm gonna build the Morning Brew of X," still they're saying that, right? And I'm like- So hard... I'm like, this isn't ten years ago.
Like, it's a different environment. And, you know, the, the reality is like, you know, every media company that succeeds hits some kinda distribution seam oftentimes, and that really turbocharges.
You know, the taking nothing away, the execution is everything, right? But like the reality is to, to... You couldn't necessarily execute the Morning Brew strategy in twenty twenty-five.
Like, I mean, it would just be way harder, right? And- Oh, yeah... I always felt there was like an unfair advantage back then was like you guys were early with like something like a recommendation system, right?
Where a reward system. And that made your kinda CAC lower because you could like, you, you could-- you weren't just like quote unquote buying one, you were buying like one point seven. Yeah.
And that was a brilliant strategy. Like that's the way I think about it. Brilliant strategy, but a great, great example of like what got you here won't get you there. Yeah.
Like that strategy is not the bet moving forward. But it was amazing. Like, I remember reading about that and being like, "These, these guys are brilliant." Yeah.
And just like the, I think it drove, you know, two million new people for them in a pretty short amount of time, and just nobody else was nimble enough to think of something like that and put it in place.
But yeah, I mean, we have to have new tricks now, and then beyond anything, we just have to have really damn good content. Right.
But I mean, the unfair distribution advantage on a B to B is that you've got this mothership of four point two million, and let's say it's like close to sixty percent, like you can filter those down.
Do you have to do other things to, to build distribution? Of course. But if, if you were building from scratch, if you were building Marketing Brew from scratch, you would not have that like- Yeah, absolutely...
and, and all business is just looking for this sort of the leverage that you have in, in different places. So how many of the B to B publications do you have now? Seven. Seven. Yep. Okay.
And how do you determine like which areas you end up going into?
I would guess you just look at your overall database and see where you have a, a critical mass, and then you, you figure out the, whether the, the market can support... I don't know. How do you do it? Yeah. Roughly.
I mean, I'll, I'll share some breaking news that we are planning on launching an eighth, which I haven't said publicly, and, and we're aiming to do that in June or July.
And the kind of thought process there was really thinking about verticals where we, Morning Brew, has license to go out there and build another B to B vertical where we have a significant part of our existing audience that is interested.
So this one, for example, ten percent of the core four point two million are already in jobs that are relevant to this vertical that we're gonna go into.
And then we also look at where we're winning from an advertiser standpoint categories and where we think there is additive potential and more spend if, if we went more deeper into a specific vertical rather than kind of like adjacently talking about it in other ones, if that makes sense.
Mm-hmm. And just trying to find that kind of overlap, and then also thinking about where is there, you know, enough competitive noise or not enough competitive noise. Like Sean Griffey is super well-spoken about this.
Like, he's not intimidated by noise going into markets if he thinks that he can, he can do better there. This one is actually pretty open greenfield.
There's like a lot of noise on LinkedIn and more educational content, but not many people are writing about the industry of this vertical the way we're going to. So just trying to like- There's a good hint...
connect all those dots. So I'm gonna try to guess which this is, 'cause you're not gonna tell me what it is. You'll probably get it. You've been doing this long enough. I don't know. [chuckles] I don't know.
Give me, give me a day.
I can't say, I can't say the exact one yet, but we'll, we will announce it in, in not too long, and, and it's gonna be one of those things you're gonna be like, "Yeah, that makes total sense, like why the hell didn't you guys already do that?"
Which is the way it should feel, and hopefully, you know, lots of subscribers and advertisers feel that way. So a lot of consumer, and particularly these days, a lot of consumer publishers wanna get into B to B, right?
And sometimes they call things B to B that I'm like, "Really? Is that B to B?"
I mean, like, like Jess Sibley at Time, like I love Jess, but like she talks about their B to B business, I'm like, "Eh, that's a different kind of B to B."
And, you know, it's like B to B has different dynamics, and there's a lot of struggles that I found in, in consumer publications getting into B to B.
Otherwise, like why wouldn't The Wall Street Journal have a massive B to B business? Like why, why would that not...
I mean, yes, there's FT specialists and, and Wall Street Journal like dabbles a little bit here and there.
They've got a lot of-- Dow Jones has a lot of B to B businesses, like energy pricing services and those kind of B to B businesses. Yeah.
But as far as B to B media businesses, it's like I've, I've always felt like it, the dynamicsAnd you know this as someone, you know, who's been in a lot of B2B businesses, the dy-dy- the dynamics are different than, than consumer, and a lot of times the type of sales that you're doing needs to be different.
It's hard to do it with the both. But like talk to me about like some of the, the, the sort of specifics that aren't just like on like the surface of- Yeah...
why Morning Brew's been able to, to, to succeed in, in adding a B2B business to a consumer business. Well, first, just like a, an industry comment, which is where you started.
It is shockingly confusing for consumer publications to actually understand how to operate B2B businesses, very specifically, how to monetize B2B businesses. Yeah.
I think there's a lot of assumption that if you have a really good consumer sales team, that they can just magically understand how do you penetrate B2B verticals and sell into them, and that your team can build ad products and, and have enough data, first party owned data, to make those products effective.
I was consulting for seven years before I came in here and helped... was operating two to three media companies at a time during that time period, and some of them were B2B and some of them were B2C.
And I was always just like baffled when I got into these larger B2C companies that, a, just the assumption that they could do it, and then b, how much the fundamentals were like a foreign language to them.
Like if you talked about segmentation of content or writing for certain topics or the power of like targeting, they would look at you as if you were speaking a different language and somehow find a way to default back to scale.
Just like more, more, more. Yeah. Like how do I... How do you have more scale?
And it took me like literally years to get my head around how to speak to them and how to get them to, to really understand like, no, no, like where this is going is going to be terrifying for you, but where it's going is where B2B has been operating for a very, very long time.
And like you need to own your audience. You need to have information on them.
You need to have license and credibility and permission to send them targeted, very niche things that make them better at their jobs or better at their lives.
If you are not doing any of those things, then there is a time limit to the success of your business. Mm. When I showed up here at Morning Brew, the...
one of the reasons it was working is they had some people here who understood those things. They had Jacob Donnelly, who I know you know. Mm-hmm. They had Josh Sternberg, our executive editor.
They had some people that- He used to be on my team. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Amazing. So you know Josh. [laughs] So I, I...
We had people here who like knew that stuff, and then we had to, we had to reinvent and improve the product side and, and a lot of the sales side.
And I spent my first year really trying to break in and break through with the sales team about how to sell B2B and, and then we built a whole team that is our professional sales team, and they've become really successful.
So e-explain that, because I think this is one that doesn't get a lot of focus, but probably should, right? Because I think, you know, someone would just be like, "Okay. Well, you got a sales team already."
It's like, just take... they, they, they got something else, something new to sell. Perfect. Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, that's exactly- Let's go... what I was kind of alluding to. [laughs] LFG.
People see it, people see it as like a, like an account sorting exercise. Yeah. There's like, there's consumer accounts, and there's B2B accounts.
And like, yes, you're right, but the sales motion to the B2B accounts is so wildly different.
And, and, and the, and the inverse is also important to say, like the sales motion to large consumer accounts and the way that operates is very different. And these are all like, none of this is a mystery.
I mean, selling to large consumer accounts, the sales cycle is going to be longer. It's going to be heavier RFP based. You're going to lose a significant amount of those RFPs.
You're going to only capture a percentage of the ones that you, you win. Meaning like you might win half of your RFPs, and you might only capture thirty percent of the value of those RFPs for the ones you win.
So you like manage that business very different. Also, the products you sell on the consumer side, a lot of times are large brand campaigns. They are sometimes rooted in scale.
And like we have enough scale to be dangerous, but we're not Dotdash Meredith, we're not New York Times, and we don't do programmatic. On the B2B side, like though...
that, that kind of lazy answer doesn't take into account that you have to be selling high volume. It's not like high RFP.
It's you need to be going out there and pitching high volume of clients, and the pool of clients is much bigger.
Like, all the clients that we can access for our HR vertical, marketing vertical, healthcare, it's a large pool, and we have to be getting a lot of shots on goal.
The average transaction size is gonna be a little bit less, but we're gonna get more of them. The product set is gonna be different. It's gonna be much more some lead generation, performance marketing.
There's gonna be brand, but it's gonna be a lot more like thought leadership. Yeah. Like how the hell do I explain my company?
All this stuff to you is table stakes, but like explaining that difference and building sales teams that can speak both languages is very, very difficult. We've successfully done it here, and it's not like a...
it's not perfect. We're gonna continue to get better, but we've hired really smart people, and we've really focused on training and it's working. But we have, we have differentiation.
We have a professional B2B sales team that that is what they do, and their motion and the way they prospect and the way they sell and the products they lean on is noticeably different than our consumer team.
Everybody can sell everything, and there's a lot of power in that too, as far as building diversified campaigns. Mm-hmm. But you gotta, you gotta have some level of focus and, and, and train them on that. Yeah.
I mean, I would guess you'll have someone like, I'm just gonna choose, like I have no idea if they're a client, but like Salesforce, right?
That is gonna work with you on the sort of mothership side, but they're, they're a great fit for a lot of different like verticals.
But the reality is, within a lot of B2B, you're going after, you know, their own like endemic, right? I mean, there's a lot of-Technology companies in particular that- Definitely...
you know, some professional services too but are specific to, to that vertical.
And I think like the way you broke it out is interesting 'cause the way I look at it is think of myself, it's like thought leadership, which is the B2B version of branding really and that is smaller, at least in my experience.
Maybe it's just in, in the area I'm in, but that's, that's the smaller part of the budgets.
[chuckles] There's lead gen, you know, which is like you do things, you put something in front of people for them to give information that then goes to the, the client and in B2B, they've got, particularly the SaaS companies, they got a playbook, they got their MQLs, they got their SQLs.
They're-- they got a different language, I feel like that, that they speak that consumer publishers generally do not speak, but you know, it's a little bit different.
And then you got what I call like in person, like kind of sales enablement. I don't know what else to call it, right?
But like when you get into B2B, at least in the areas I'm most familiar with, the reason that there are so many freaking events that, that happen is because that's where the money is.
Because these companies overall are incredibly sales-driven. Like the marketing is different in a lot of B2B companies, at least from what I can tell. I don't know what your experience is. I'm speaking- A lot of my own.
[chuckles] No, I mean, all of that is true. I think our approach, which is not, is not BS, is to do like the healthiest version of all of those things. Yeah.
So we do lead gen, but we're not dependent on it, and we don't give away the farm, but we provide value to some clients without abusing our audience. We do events. Do you do a dedic- do, will you do a dedicated email?
That's- We do dedicated emails with huge amounts of guardrails on them only to our B2B verticals, and because of our list sizes, we can be very disciplined with like monitoring saturation. Got it.
But, you know, we're probably the most conservative in the industry as far as how many we send. [chuckles] Well.
And then, yeah, and then we do events, and our events have become a huge part of our, our, our business model. It's also just really cool to be able to touch Morning Brew, like have Morning Brew be live.
We found people are really excited by that. But, you know, it's not a, it's not a because we have to thing. It's actually an additive gravy thing for us in, in a really exciting way. Yeah.
I mean, you have a different kind of B2B business, I feel, like B2B media business in that...
And maybe this is just my-- like, maybe I'm missing it, but like most are way heavier on events, and you came from BizNow, like, you know, like this events industry.
And I mean, you guys do some events, but, you know, like I came from Digiday, like a, it was like eighty-five percent events for a while.
Like I think- Yeah, and, and that model, I, I think the Digiday model has become pretty unhealthy. I, I think that the, it's not set up to have good value for either side of, of the table that go to that.
Um- Explain that. Why, why do you? I just think the ratio of decision makers that are there versus, you know- Well, your incentives-... piranhas in the water... come on. Your incentives are- But that, that's preventable.
I- Like that's preventable... yeah, but it's hard to prevent, honestly. And like I, I feel like a lot of times, you know, there's almost like a B2B triumphalism against like B2C.
It's like, well, you junk your sites up with all these autoplay videos and all these other things, and you do all this stuff for traffic, and I'm like, "Yeah, but you've just pounded me about fifteen dedicated emails," which I call spam, and also, by the way, the fifty to fifty ratio of buyers to sellers at the event is really seventy-thirty vendors.
[chuckles] Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. All this is a choice. Nobody is pure. Media-- Well, I mean, we're, we're really trying to be.
And, and again, I mean, all those decisions get made when other parts of the business are unhealthy, is my, is my take.
Like when you are dependent on a certain type of, of revenue that's maybe traffic based or something like that, and it starts going down, you start making other decisions and, and those things add up over time and can, can really put you in a tough spot.
Yeah. We have had the luxury of not having to make those decisions, and I'm incredibly disciplined to not expose us to things like that. Okay, so last thing on the B2B business.
How much of it is the, of the overall business? I don't think I should say that. Come on. Percentage? No, Axel Springer doesn't care. It's fine. No, they do care, for sure. [laughs] It's, it's healthy and growing.
I think it is growing faster than most people probably expect and will continue to grow. Okay, but you're not a B- I gotta be vague... you're not a B2B company yet. You're not a newsletter company.
You're not a B2B- No... media company. Not yet. It's a, it's a pretty solid mix.
Yeah, the newsletter is stabilized in a, in a great place, and then we've been able to build a ton of consumer stuff, stuff around it, which we can talk about. B2B is, is not the majority yet. It could be someday.
I think that that- Okay... that is absolutely possible and would be exciting because I think the rest would be stable as well. Yes. But the growth opportunity could be there.
So let's talk about the other area of growth, at least the way I see it is like, is on the, the quote unquote like creator and multimedia side. I mean, I think- Yeah...
what's interesting is like the w- w- Morning Brew was built in a very interesting way that was of the time, and I wonder if you would, if, if that, it would've been built like that now.
I should do one with like Austin or something. Maybe they would tell me.
Because now it's like, you know, it's like personal brands and everything like this and then, and there is like a lot of leverage in the market around the individual.
There's a lot of downsides to that when it comes to enterprise value. I think about this all the time.
But Morning Brew, you know, I mean, Alex started, you know, writing it, but it wasn't like Alex Lieberman's Morning Brew.
I mean, Alex and Austin became sort of identified with it, but like it wasn't dependent on them, and then you can build real franchise value there and, and that's why Axel Springer bought Morning Brew really.
But at the same time, obviously, there's been this shift, you know, from institutions to individuals and explain how you guys think about that, particularly when it comes to expanding beyond the inbox and beyond site when it gets into these video podcasting.
When you're talking about these areas-There, the, I feel like the pendulum swings a little bit more towards the individual having a lot of leverage, and you can protect against that by having it be a sort of, I think A-Adam White calls it like faces and franchises.
It's like you've got- Yep... you've got a face, but you got a franchise because, like, you know, I hope everyone stays until they retire, I hope they get the gold watch at Morning Brew. But, like, the reality [laughs]
is, you know, you, you know, faces tend to come and go, and so you wanna keep franchise value. So talk to me about- Yeah... how you guys think about that. Definitely. And those are the right words.
I mean, so on the consumer side, we, we've built a series of franch- a portfolio of franchises, and they try to serve that Venn diagram I was talking about earlier of like, where are the interests of our users, of our, our subscribers and our viewers?
Where can we double down? And, you know, we have our, our podcast, Morning Brew Daily, has been a massive success. That's an extension of the Morning Brew brand.
Neil and Toby are, you know, beloved, and they're the faces of that thing, and it's a franchise that we've delivered.
We've also created these other franchises and, you know, the faces that are on them are hugely important, and we wanna kind of support those people in their career, but it is definitely a value exchange.
Like, I think that really strong creators right now, it can be tough out on the street to do that on your own, and there's certainly value to being a part of a mothership like us.
And our goal is to develop homegrown talent and, and really give them their own show. So, like, two great examples is Dan Toomey, who's brilliant, and like every day that he's not on SNL- Oh, yes. He's hilarious...
is a, is a blessing. I'm a big Dan Toomey fan. Dan, if you're listening, big fan. He's great.
And, you know, he started out doing a lot of stuff for Morning Brew, the brand, and then was doing such a good job, they were trying to find the right fit for him and, and, you know, Good Work came to life.
And now he owns Good Work and it's, you know, it's his thing. It's our franchise, but he is, he's very much the face of it. The one I mentioned with Macy is another one. Macy is a star.
We've, you know, developed her here. She's been hugely valuable to the company, and we're, we're giving her her own show called Out There and doubling down on a format that has been, been doing well.
What, what is Out There? What is, like, so- I'm so glad you asked. Yeah. It's, it's a really cool concept. So, like, her whole thing is she, she's never in the office.
She's always out there showing how interesting businesses that you wish you understood how they operated, how they operate, and then the economics of them. So a couple cool examples. One, there is a hotdog vendor.
He's like the number one hotdog vendor in New York City and he's out in front of The Met in like the prime position every day. Oh, yeah.
And the way he gets that prime position is he sleeps in a van in front of The Met every night.
So we rented Macy a van, and she slept in front of his van, and then she did the whole day with him and was the top hotdog vendor in the city with him every day.
And as you're going through the day and you see the lunch rush and you see people coming in, all the like economics of operating- Yeah... the business are popping up on your screen.
How long has he been, how long has he been sleeping in the van to do this? I think he's- People in media complain about this business. I mean [laughs]...
[laughs] He seems pretty pumped about his job too, and he was, he was super nice. Another one is, you might remember 'cause you're in the city- It also is another, it shows that distribution is, is everything.
You know- Yeah... you gotta get, you gotta get distribution. The other thing is, you might remember when food deliveries, there was all these like changing policies in New York City about how to tip them.
So like Uber Eats- Oh, yeah...
and Caviar were like taking out the tip, and they were putting it before the, you know, before the transaction, after the transaction, and Macy wanted to do a video about like what this all means for the delivery drivers.
So in order to do that, she strapped a GoPro to a bike, and she delivered ramen and sandwiches around the city for a couple days, and she filmed it.
And while she was riding, she was narrating how the economics were, were hitting and the way that the, the tips were changing. Gave a whole background on it. Super interesting. So that's Out There.
To get back to your original question though, like I feel great about cultivating this, this talent and building these franchises. Do I think that they're all gonna be here forever? No.
But most of these people that I've been mentioning have been here for three, four, five years and, and I think that we've created a good environment for them where they, they get support to develop this stuff.
There's a bunch of value to us, and the credibility of, of the brand really helps them. And are you sc- you're scaling these things on, on YouTube mostly? 'Cause I think the other thing- Social and YouTube...
social and YouTube is, and this is something I've really, I have admired about Morning Brew over the years is, you know, sometimes you can get comfortable. A lot of people are one-trick ponies, right?
Like, and doesn't matter what you do, and, and I don't mean it as like knock, it's just like, well, it is kind of a knock. But it's, it's just a reality of, of, of life.
And, you know, the real, the magic is when you can, you can switch lanes, and you can build on what your strengths are.
It's very easy to stay, okay, obviously, you know, Morning Brew developed a really good email muscle, right? Grow sell, I think, was what like Alex and Austin talked about, man.
It just like kept it simple, completely worked, and it's very easy. You can do that. You can just stay with that, but you gotta master other things.
And I remember saying like growing a podcast compared to growing a newsletter, totally different, and by the way, like probably five times harder at least. [laughs] But we've done it.
I mean, Morning, Morning Brew Daily is one of the biggest success stories of- Yeah, it's, but it's like it required-... of the business... different muscles. Like you, you couldn't- Totally...
run the playbook that, you know, uh, that Tyler was, was doing with, with growing the newsletter. It's totally different. Yeah. You know? Yeah.
And I, I do think we're, we're pretty comfortable taking, taking bets here and, and the business is at a point now where we do have some, some veterans in seat who kind of know, know the guardrails to make sure those bets are appropriately risky, but kind of within our capabilities.
Yeah. So I mean, you have to get these, a lot of these creator business to a, a bigger...
To me it's almost like it's a bigger swing than B2B, and maybe it's 'cause I sort of understand the dynamics of B2B 'cause I'm like, you know, just like here, n- everything is hard in media and just probably in life that, but-To me, like, you know, when you start with four million plus email subscribers to a business-focused list, like, you know, you can, you can sort it out.
You gotta execute well, like, on the content side and do all the rest of that. But like, you know, it's not... Like,
moving into a totally different, particularly the dynamics are very different when you talk about these kind of creator-focused businesses y- on, you know, YouTube and social, you know.
Yeah, and it's the polar opposite of B2B. I mean- Yeah... we're not leveraging the newsletter to build those- Right... audiences. Like, we're leveraging the content and the platforms in order to get there. And- Right.
So you have less com- uh, I guess my point is like you almost have le- a fewer competitive advantages than you, you do, like, on the B2B side.
I mean, our advantage is the, the Morning Brew tone, the talent we have, and just kind of nailing the interest of our audience and just knowing exactly what they want and the kind of the loyalty we have with them.
And again, making the bet that they were gonna wanna interact with us in other ways, like on YouTube and, and on social and with audio.
Like, we-- I think we did, and I don't get credit for this at all, I think we did nail that transition timing as well. Like you were saying, the timing was really good with the newsletter.
I think the timing of launching a Morning Brew Daily or deciding to go and, you know, have Dan Tumi do, do videos was also really good. So now we just have to push the gas on it. And we have some really exciting ones.
Like, one that I'm not sure you've checked out is Maxonomics. We have this guy, Phil, this creator, and I, I think he's one of our, one of our best, and his videos are tremendous. Mm-hmm.
But he's kind of at the, the curvy part of the hockey stick, and I think about to really explode just be- purely because of the quality of his content.
But we, he had a video go out a week ago about the Epic ski pass and, like, all of the mountains being bought up over the last couple years- Heh, yeah... and what that means for the ski industry.
It's a, it's apparently cheaper- It's fascinating... it's cheaper to go on a ski vacation to, like, Gstaad in, like, Switzerland than it is to, like, Colorado now. Yeah. That's outrageous.
And he explains, he explains why, and, like, the weather considerations and- My explanation is private equity, but maybe it's more complicated, but [laughs] More complicated.
Nothing against private equity to any of the PE people listening. Yeah, so w- talk to me about, like, making those into, like, businesses though, right? Yeah.
I mean, you gotta, you gotta build, you know, the audience and whatnot, but it's different than, again, this is another one, you have to learn other muscles.
That's why, like, I wrote a thing, it's like, you know, newsletters aren't necessarily a business, it's a distribution channel. Oh, yeah.
So we had to- Like, you have to build different muscles, and you, you monetize differently. So how, talk to me about that. Yeah. We had to rethink aspects of the revenue work. So- Mm-hmm...
you know, we never had a, a defined lifestyle focus, so we, you know, our, our sales team is broken up into a couple verticals, and one of the verticals that we really pushed last year is this lifestyle team directly to cater to all of the consumer products that we just got done talking about.
So, you know, bringing in advertisers in categories like travel and beauty and personal finance and package, you know, products and things like that.
And that was not a muscle that we really had, so we brought in a director for that team that came from Bustle.
We brought in sellers that were at companies like Wall Street Journal and, and other more consumer-facing publications that were used to selling multimedia and that had kind of knowledge of how to sell those types of clients.
And then we just started chopping wood and, and, like, learning what we're learning. And we didn't have the right products at first.
Like, when we brought in that director, you know, she, she's incredibly good at what she does, and I think the first couple months she had to come to me all the time and be like, "We don't have what they're gonna wanna buy."
Like, "We have to think about our data differently," or, "We need this type of targeting." And it was a little bit of learning to swim in the middle of the ocean just to, like, get those things going quickly.
But, you know, we're, we're a small company. We're, what, two hundred and twenty people. We, we can move pretty fast.
So last year was really about that bobbing and weaving to get the lifestyle team and other groups that were gonna sell into this consumer stuff in an even better place, because as you know, in media, there's this, like, ever-changing chase of supply and demand.
Like, sometimes your content is crushing, but you're not monetizing it. And sometimes your sales team is doing amazing, and you, you don't have the right content.
We scaled engagement on the multimedia side last year by, like, or the previous year into last year by, like, a hundred and twenty-five percent. Like, the way people engaged- Mm-hmm...
with Morning Brew just jumped to in-feed video, YouTube, audio.
And the, what we raced to do last year was to catch up with that and to build ad products and hire people that knew how to, to leverage that new engagement and, and monetize it.
And then this year is just about executing and, and, and hitting it. Yeah. Talk to me about direct revenue, 'cause that doesn't seem like a mi- a major part. Maybe I'm missing it.
I mean, maybe you sell some event tickets- At all... but, like, it's, that doesn't seem- What do you mean by... Wait, how do you define direct? Everything we do is direct. Oh, no, no, no.
I meant, like, direct from the audience. Like consumer revenue. Oh, like paid... Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Um- Like paying for subscriptions, memberships to, you know, there's, you know, not through an advertiser, whether that, I know you don't do programmatic, but like, you know... I, I don't know.
I did, I didn't check, I didn't check the stock market today, but it's probably down. That's my guess. You know, the, the chances of recession are going up, and, you know, we all know what happens in a recession.
You know, the, the people rush to Ad Age to, to do, "The worst thing you could do is cut your budgets in a recession," and all the CFOs cut the budgets.
And, you know, the reality of any kind of a-advertising business is it can be lumpy, it can be, you know, there's a lot of stuff outside of your control. So Q4 is great, like Q1, hmm.
And in the weight of the overall media business, a lot of people are moving, you know, or trying to, particularly if they're in, in verticals and niches, to move to direct to consumer revenue. Yeah.
Couple different questions in there. First one on our audience paying us for things or, or what you're defining as direct. We don't do a lot.
I mean, we, we sell tickets to our events at a, a reasonable rate, and we have a couple products.
Like, we, we have our Money with Katie franchise has a, a wealth planner that comes out once a year that is, like-The most robust spreadsheet you've ever seen, and just helps you, like, plan out your finances and, and people pay about sixty dollars each for that.
We debuted a crossword puzzle in Q4 book, a crossword puzzle book, because people liked our crossword so much, and we sell that for twenty-nine dollars.
We have a couple things like that, but it's not a huge part of the business. It could be more.
To go to your other question on the recession, I mean, I've been through, been through a couple ups and downs, and I think that the best defense is optionality.
And if I've done anything in the last two years here, it's to build a lot of different paths to hitting revenue goals. And Morning Brew is very fortunate that we're not dependent on any one big industry.
Like, we, we serve finance, we serve lifestyle. We have seven different B2B verticals. Within those seven B2B verticals, there's ten each of sub-verticals that are all spending.
So it would have to be a pretty wholesale halt for us to feel major pain, and I'm obviously doing a bunch of stuff behind the scenes to make sure that- Mm-hmm... that we are protected.
But to go back to the subscriptions, like, why not go down... I mean, it's a, it's a normal part of a lo- of, of almost most, like, B2B media models. There's- Yeah... you know, look, there, there's no...
I think w- you mentioned Sean before, Sean Griffith, the, the, the, the founder of, I guess he was a co-founder of, of Industry Dive.
You know, they did great without, they did great, they did great in B2B media witho- without subscriptions, without events. [chuckles] I was like, "Wow." [chuckles] Yeah. You know? Yeah, he did tremendous, right?
So there's a lot of different ways to succeed, and it's not like everything needs to be subscriptions and... But I- I, I would agree. It's timing. Yeah. It's like everything else. Okay.
Like, I, I haven't- It's a sequence. Yeah, it's a sequence, and I...
W- we have so much loyalty with our audience, it's, it's kind of like the ultimate lever to pull to be like, "Most of you should now pay us money for something."
The value exchange of doing that, I will wanna make sure is, is clear. Like, what are we providing them besides just access to something they already had access to?
Which I think is a lot of times the model that, that has been implemented. So I think when the timing is right to do that, we'll, we'll do it. It's, it's not today. Yeah.
Tell me about some of the ancillary businesses, 'cause I, I didn't, I, I didn't actually know about, like, a couple of them. You have, like, a, a data, like an insights business. What is, what is that? We have...
One of our biggest secret weapons, which I hope someday you'll have me back on and I'll talk about how incredibly profitable it is and how it's grown, is our data and insights team.
I, I think it's one of the things I, I would have just loved to have at, like, five other companies before this. Yeah.
And I couldn't believe when I got under the hood that they have, but we have this really capable, and not huge, but capable data and insights team that can basically go out to our audience and get first party feedback on anything.
And we can get twenty, thirty thousand people to fill out a survey in, in a couple days, which is wild coming from, you know, the background that I've had.
You just, you just email them and they'll, they'll fill it out, or do you have some sort of incentive for them to do it? We, we, we email them.
We also, without getting into too much detail, 'cause we haven't launched it, launched it yet, we have basically a, a room, if you will, where they all are opt-in participants and are excited to give feedback to Morning Brew, and we can basically step into that focus group and ask them questions whenever we feel like it.
And we also have the ability to, to kinda do lots of custom research to, to the whole audience.
So most of the time, though, Brian, it's leveraged in pre-sale in order to win and convince clients that, you know, we, we hold their audience and, and that they are, you know, very active with us.
Okay, so you haven't so much... I mean, that's like a typ- you haven't, like, productized it as- We have. We have products... a little bit. I just think there's way more opportunity there.
We do, we do paid research, and companies like Apple have paid us to do paid research, but we are using it for a lot of blocking and tackling as well.
I think that there's more opportunity to do more paid research, and because of the audience we have, it could be a huge advantage that hasn't yet been tapped. Okay, got it.
So final thing is, is, is I'm always interested in media brands that start out with a particular, like, age cohort, right? Like, and they become synonymous a little bit with it.
Sometimes people probably lean too far into it. I, I'm not saying probably, they do in my view, because you kinda get stuck. It's like, am I gonna, are we gonna age up with our audience?
[chuckles] Are we gonna, like, cycle through them? I mean, I think- Yeah... in some ways, The Skimm might have gotten, like, caught in that.
It's like they were talking f- about like, you know, young women, and then they've got kids, and, like, they've got different interests. Like, and then it's like, okay, what, are we about, like, young moms now? Or...
Yeah. And I think there's a, a challenge to that, is, is, is Morning Brew s- is it a millennial brand? Is it a Gen Z brand? Is it just a business- Well, funny enough-... media brand?...
today is our ten-year anniversary. Like, literally today. Oh, wow. We should have started with that. So I think that's an important, that's an important data point to keep in mind.
Like, I do think that people have grown up with Morning Brew, a lot of people. Like, I, I actually looked back yesterday, 'cause I was doing a toast with, with the team, and I subscribed to it seven years ago.
And I looked back at that first issue and, like, who's the advertiser and, and stuff like that, and it was just like, man, like, a lot of us have grown up a lot in the last seven, ten years with this.
And the company has changed from just being that newsletter in a lot of way to, to continue to provide more content.
So, like, we went heavy into personal investing last year and we launched Brew Markets, we launched After Earnings, things that go with you when you're a little bit older.
So point being, I, I think that we have scaled the kind of content of the company. I also just think the Morning Brew tone is something that, like, my parents read and love and their friends love, that college kids love.
Like, it is kind of a sweet spot that I think can transcend.
Our audience as we market it is younger, affluent, up and coming professionals, but that's probably defined as, like, eighteen to forty-five, and it's a, it's a broad range. Yeah.
So we haven't been, like, niched into one, I don't think. You can tell me if you think that's- No. So I, I, I... This is sort of a leading question- Great. I knew it...
to end on, Robert, because, like, yesterday, I didn't prepare you for this, I g- [chuckles] I just happened to get a text message from my mother that said, "Do you know anything about the website Morning Brew for news?"
[laughs] Mom. That's awesome. I, I said, I said, "Oh yeah, I'm doing a podcast tomorrow with the CEO," as it happens, you know? That's so funny. And I said, "You know, it's a bit for young people, Mom."
And- But it's not. The tone is mom-friendly... she says, "Let them know..." She uses them, so she's very progressive. "Let them know that your eighty plus [chuckles] year old mother is signed, is signed on."
So I'll let you know. I love it. I love it. Yeah. I do, I do think our tone is from college student to mom friendly. To Pelican Preserve retirement community. Yeah. But tell your mom thank you.
[chuckles] Okay, no problem. And I'll definitely send her some merch if she wants. [laughs] Yeah, definitely. Stickers and everything for her laptop. Okay. Thanks, Robert. This was great. Yeah.
Really appreciate you doing it. Thank you, Brian. [outro music]