How The Conversation is rising above the chatter
On this episode of The CMO Show we meet Margy Vary, CMO at The Conversation: a global, not-for-profit publication that pairs academics with journalists to share knowledge for free.
Margy shares her tactics for building trust and growing an audience and why social impact and responsibility is on The Conversation’s radar as much as it is for any other organisation.
Post truth, fake news, deep-fakes: it’s getting harder to know what to believe when it comes to the media we consume. But where some despair, others see opportunity.
Publications that lead with integrity and journalistic rigour stand out and attract readers looking for trust and reliability.
Margy Vary is CMO at The Conversation, a global, not-for-profit publication that pairs academics with journalists to share knowledge for free.
“The Conversation doesn't break news, but it explains the news in a way that people can understand and trust,” says Margy.
She recently joined Mark to talk about her experience growing the brand in a tumultuous media environment, and why social impact and responsibility is on her radar as much as it is for any other organisation.
“Our editor gave a talk recently about how he'd done some research into what sources of information the generative AI models like Chat GPT are actually drawing from and The Conversation was in there,” says Margy.
“So if we think about our mission and our purpose is to ensure that we can inject quality and impartial information into the public sphere, that means that we can work with AI and could actually have a significant role in the future of information which is really exciting.”
We also touch on different tactics for building trust and growing an audience, and how Margy’s team is approaching the struggle for the philanthropic dollar.
It’s a brilliant chat, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
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Credits
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The CMO Show production team
Producer – Rian Newman
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
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Transcript:
Hello, Mark Jones here. You're listening to The CMO Show, a marketing podcast made for and by marketing professionals here at ImpactInstitute. Now, it's no secret that the internet is full of chatter about post-truth fake news and deepfakes.
It's getting harder to know what to believe when it comes to the media we consume, but where some see despair, others are finding opportunity. Publications that lead with integrity attract readers looking for trust and reliability. But in a sea of loud angry voices, how can they make themselves heard?
In today's episode of The CMO Show, we're chatting with Margy Vary, Chief Marketing Officer of The Conversation.
The Conversation, as I think many of you will know, pairs academics with journalists to share free, reliable and easy to digest information. We had a chat about how mission and purpose are at the forefront of the work being done by The Conversation and how this organisation is working to get the message out. It's a tumultuous environment to grow a brand. But I think if anyone's up for the challenge, it's Margy.
You're gonna love this chat, so let's get into it.
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Mark Jones
Margy, great to have you with us.
Margy Vary
Hi. And thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.
Mark Jones
Now for the listener who doesn't know what The Conversation is, can you give us a quick definition?
Margy Vary
Yes. I know some people confuse it with a particular radio show on the ABC. The Conversation is an Australian invention. I'd like to start with that because I'm very proud of that fact. It was started 12 years ago with a brilliant idea that pairs academics with journalists to share knowledge for free. So it doesn't break news, but it explains the news in a way that people can understand and trust. So The Conversation doesn't employ writers directly. It employs journalists as editors, and then they can pick the best experts in any field to explain the most important topics that we're all concerned with.
The Conversation is entirely mission driven. Although The Guardian talks about being mission driven, it still has to run advertising and The Conversation doesn't require advertising to really meet its business goals. It doesn't have to answer to advertisers in any way. And I guess the beauty of this model is that all the money comes from the members who are universities in Australia, plus some philanthropy plus reader donations. And all of these parties are funding it for the reason that it exists, which is to serve the public interest. So the purpose is a 100% connected to 100% of the revenue. There's no need to compromise quality or to dumb down the science to ensure that you can deliver a number of impressions to a mass audience that you have committed to for your advertisers.
One of the things I find fascinating about marketing for media is that it's quite meta. You're telling stories about the stories. So how do you do that?
Margy Vary
Oh, that is a great question. And actually I've noticed in the media, there is a reluctance to talk about yourselves, right?
Mark Jones
Yes.
Margy Vary
Media organisations, they like the journalists talking about the issues, they discuss the issues, but talking about themselves as organisations is often hard. And I think it's particularly hard if you are mission driven and purpose driven. Obviously you don't want to bang the drum too much or sound too self-satisfied. You don't want to make over claims. Especially for journalists, I think there's incredible reluctance to make anything that sounds like marketing, because it can very quickly into hyperbole and over claim. But the other slightly more serious problem that I've found in the media is because of the imbalance, I think, in the general media landscape, there's a strong push for the left media on the left side of politics to want to talk about truth because often it can get misconstrued with a left, right political leaning or bias, and then you end up with the risk that, say the left side of politics is perceived as claiming to having some monopoly on the truth. And that actually can turn people off. And then also you can end up exacerbating the problems with the lack of trust in media if you're veering into any territory of over claim or arrogance. And then once people lump you all together as the mainstream media and you're all bad, and then it's a race at the bottom. We're undermining our own trust all the time. So we do have to think about this a lot. It's a tricky issue.
Margy Vary
But as a marketer, I try and be invisible. I don't want to have a voice. Nobody wants to hear from the marketer, do they?
Mark Jones
Except on this show...
Margy Vary
Thank you.
Mark Jones
... No. That's fine. So I think one of the interesting ways to summarise that is this idea of an echo chamber. And unless you're an active participant and in the fight around politics or in fact any other issue, it can actually be quite a turnoff. So I get that. But the other way that media has done this, I think reasonably successfully, is with above the line campaigns. And I know all the major mastheads have done that pretty successfully over the years, and that really allows you to make that clear distinction between editorial and advertising obviously. What's your thoughts on what works and what doesn't work in that context?
Margy Vary
Well, actually, it's funny because I used to work for an advertising agency and do the advertising for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun Herald. So we actually used to produce a above line campaign for them every month. And the biggest challenge is not the medium. Well, there's a challenge with the medium, and that's measurement obviously which I don't need to talk about. Everybody in marketing knows the challenge of measuring an attribution towards above the line advertising. But particularly for media brands, it's the message and trying to direct funding towards a brand message for above the line advertising and trying to convince, particularly an editor that is a better spend of money than employ more journalists.
That's a really hard thing to say, if that's the choice you've got to make. Obviously you'd want to hire more journalists, but at some point you go, well, we've got this many journalists writing this much, but if people don't know who we are, you're not going to read or trust somebody that you've never heard of. So you have to be able to get that balance right. And that's a really difficult thing to quantify is where's what point do you get that balance of spend right.
Mark Jones
And look, just to jump in there in media terms, that's about how do you grow your audience because that's the currency, and without that, effectively you're in a holding pattern, and that's not good for anybody. So that's the dilemma, right?
Margy Vary
Yes. But how do you grow your audience from media organisation can mean just producing more content because supposedly the content will find an audience. However, that has become increasingly more challenging, especially with the changes to the algorithms. We used to get a lot of traffic from Google and Facebook. Now we're seeing a lot of that traffic is declining because those organisations are not necessarily prioritising the type of news that we're producing. When you're a purpose driven organisation and a not-for-profit, you have to be very careful about how you prove the return on that investment for that spend.
But also I think the biggest challenge for marketing for news organisations is being able to agree on and be confident with a brand message. It's very easy to explain the need and the justification for a sort of direct response message if that's about signing people up to your newsletter or getting people to subscribe or getting people to donate. But as we know, it's all tactical direct response, that doesn't build long term brand over time. It's very hard for people, and I think this comes back to the general reluctance of journalists to talk about themselves as a brand. I think they don't even like the term brand or the term customer.
Mark Jones
No, you're quite right. Well, and again, from my experience, this is very much ingrained from the beginning of anybody's career in journalism which is that sales and marketing is the enemy, right-
Margy Vary
Yes.
Mark Jones
. So can we go back to the thought leadership thing? Because that seems to me a particularly interesting focus for you. What's the way that you approach that?
Margy Vary
Well, I found through working at my work at The Guardian and at The Conversation that the best approach is always to start with the mission and the purpose, and everything always needs to come back to that. So we always come back to what is our mission, how are we best articulating that? And then all the marketing tactics that we use need to come from that.
So I can give you a specific example of some of the advertising that we're testing on Facebook. We've tried to shift from not just talking about what we do which is providing news by experts, but the purpose and the reason that we do that which is to help people make better decisions through better informed information. So I'm really trying to work on the why and focus on the why of what we're doing. And that really is the heart of brand messaging, isn't it? But I think it's easier to talk about it as your purpose or your mission rather than brand when you're in a news environment.
Mark Jones
Yes, you're quite right. And again, touching on this dilemma is that journalists and editors don't like to be thought of as a product, nor do they like to be thought of as a commodity that can be traded, in these sort of crass marketing terms. So that's interesting. What's the way into that? How do you delicately dance around those issues with an editor or an editorial team?
Margy Vary
Well, I'm very lucky. At The Conversation, it's not tricky at all. The tricky bit actually is the measurement stuff is actually being able to use some of the marketing tactics to optimise campaigns. The messaging is easy when you're all working for the same mission and you've all bought into the mission. The slightly sensitive bit is how much are you tracking people? A lot of people at The Conversation want to protect people's privacy. They're very sensitive to the issues. And of course, marketing is seen as always trying to challenge that. We are the evil ones that always want to track and trace people.
So that's where it's important to have a more open conversation and say, well, we want to track people, but we are going to be completely open and transparent about how we're doing it and not use it for anything evil. We'll only use it for a purpose that is actually useful to people. So for example, if we get people to sign into the site and we track that they're on our site, then we can not serve the messages about donations if they've already donated. So that's a valuable reason to use data and marketing analytics, et cetera. And then obviously there are certain aspects of marketing that we just not to touch because it doesn't fit well with the ethical values of the organisation.
Mark Jones
So from that audience perspective, there's the shift from third party data which is that tracking and the cookies and so forth through to who are these people. And particularly if you focus on the login side of it or the membership side, even though it's free, is that where you see your focus increasingly going, where you can actually effectively look at what these subscribers or members are doing over a period of time and infer some insights from that?
Margy Vary
Yes, I think the main thing is to try and build a habit for people, because as I explained before, we don't have this necessarily need to drive page views to hit advertiser targets. What I'm more focused on is trying to serve the mission of ensuring that people have access to quality information, but that it's easy for them to find. And a regular email in the inbox is, at the moment, one of the best ways of doing that. But that means we have to try and convert them. So I'm trying to understand the user behaviours that can drive email sign up, and how to get that habitual behaviour and not just through email. What other forms of products and services can we provide that might help build those habits.
Mark Jones
That's great. Well, let's get tactical then for a minute. So you mentioned email, you've mentioned Facebook. Do you want to just give us a quick sketch of what you're doing? And I'm quite keen to know what's working, what's not, what are you discovering on this path? Because again, it's a really fascinating area, quite different to B2B and B2C marketing.
Margy Vary
So there's a lot of work that's going on in journalism at the moment, looking at how to drive the funnel from unknown readers down to known, having a more known relationship with somebody. So how do you get them to sign in, sign up for a newsletter? So I'm looking at all of that. How to nudge those behaviours to get them to, from the point of just dropping into one article from say Google search, where they might have their query answered to then saying, "Hey, actually you need to come back for more." So I'm working on how we can deliver a message to somebody at that point, at the point where we can see them coming in for the first time. At that point, not saying to them, "Hey, give us money," because they're like, "Whoa, that's too much for a first date." But, in the cheesy advertising terms, how do we get them to a second date?
How do we get them to say, "Yes, okay, we're open to seeing you again and come back again for more information." And that's about using obviously the analytics of their behaviours on site and then connecting that to those offsite platforms. So Google and Facebook to try and find them and bring them back. And then once we've got them into the email, a lot of rigorous analytics of at what point are they becoming more engaged through reading more emails regularly or less engaged, and how can we intervene at that point through automation. There's some great work being done in America around this about automating and personalising emails to people at the point where they're looking like they're becoming less engaged and reminding them of some of the great content that they've missed in an area that we know they care about. But also, one of the big things I did at The Conversation, which everybody does, but I found most useful to inform my work now is the Reader Survey.
I'll call them customers now for the general marketing audience, but customers who are actually generally engaged with your product, you can talk to them really easily. And they want to tell you their thoughts and opinions and ideas. So doing reader service is great. You get a huge amount of responses, huge amount of suggestions and information about who they are, what they care about, why they read, why they don't read, et cetera. And I've just found that's just a treasure trove of insights that I can keep drawing on to understand the behaviours that I need to influence and the messages that I need to deliver to influence those behaviours.
Mark Jones
What's the role of technology in that versus the insights that you can infer from the data?
Margy Vary
Well, the technology is essential to organise the data. Sorry, I want to call it data because you did, but I just can't. It's easy to collect data in this day and age, right, but organising it is the challenge. Organising it into a point where you can actually understand it and draw inference from it is really hard. We're sort of overwhelmed. And in a small organisation, I don't have data scientists, so it's actually quite easy to come to the wrong conclusions because you're looking at the data in the wrong way or you're not quite understanding how to do it. And that's the real challenge. And I think that's where technology can really help us, I'd love to have a customer data platform. I don't have one, but just something that better links in all the data that I'm getting from the onsite behaviour, from the email behaviours, from social media behaviours and helps me link all that together would be great.
Mark Jones
Just briefly, what tools are you using?
Margy Vary
Well, we've got our own custom-built CMS and our own custom-built analytics platform as a part of that. But then we have obviously Google Analytics just transitioning over to Google Analytics 4. We use Campaign Monitor for emails and Salesforce for donations. And then obviously in between that we've got a Big Query and Google Looker Studio as our way of collating data and trying to analyse it. But it's becoming, I think, increasingly obvious that we need more of an organising platform to bring all that together. So I can connect the dots.
Mark Jones
Look, I wouldn't be half surprised if somebody reaches out to you after this chat. Somebody's going to hear that and go, "Wow, here's an-"
Margy Vary
Feel free.
Mark Jones
Yes, there you go. Well, in the executive ranks as it were, one of the things that any CMO has to deal with is applying that data to a strategic level. We've touched on the mission and the ethics and aligning with the editor. What other pressure points that you are finding when it comes to your contribution to that C-level decision making? What's been changing for you in recent times, whether it's membership issues or is it predominantly sort of an editorial, ethical thing that you're being drawn on or was there other things? And I guess the reason I ask that is that from a customer experience point of view, we are increasingly seeing the CMO as not just the advocate for the customer, but also there's a demand for growth and above all else, and we expect the CMO to do most of the heavy lifting. So is there a parallel there to the commercial world for you?
Margy Vary
There is, but we are very collaborative at The Conversation which is lovely. I don't feel probably the same pressure that I would in other organisations. And there's a great cross learning across the team. People understand the pressures of each other's jobs very well. They're very literate in each other's, I think because they've had to grow from such a small team. The CEO and the editor are incredibly literate in marketing, and particularly the marketing related to reader revenue. So I feel like I've got full support. And really the pain challenge that we have is simply the resources. When you're a not-for-profit, you have to be very careful about how you apply the resources because you're eligible particularly to your stakeholders, your funders, donors, on making sure that you are as lean as possible so that most of the money goes to the journalism that produces the impact.
So I think that's the biggest challenge because obviously we're all going to say, "Oh, I'd love another team member. I'd love more engineers." That's our biggest challenge at the moment. We have a very small engineering team and we all want to do more things, but how do you decide which of those things is going to shift the needle the most to achieve those organisational goals? And for us, I think probably the biggest challenge as opposed to a commercial organisation is that we don't just have the one goal of making the most money, our goal is to have the most impact and making money is the way to achieve more impact because it goes back into the organisation, which is a lovely goal to have.
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Mark Jones
There's a couple of things that I'm hearing from you which is that attribution measurement itself is difficult in marketing. And then now you're touching on what are the long-term outcomes of our work, which sort of speaks to research, doesn't it? That's for you, how are people's lives changing as a result of the content that you're producing?
Margy Vary
Yes. And for us, I found it easy with journalism to measure outputs. We've got a raft of data on our outputs. What's hard is to measure outcomes. And it's almost be partly because it's an indirect outcome. So we'll produce an article that will be read by a policymaker that will then inform a decision that significantly changes policy. But it's very hard to prove that directly came from the work that we did. It's very hard to quantify it. But the great thing, the thing that I love about The Conversation actually is I think the real genius of it is that it has a greater impact than other media because the articles are published for free and we actively encourage other media to republish them.
So that in a way is part of marketing is how do we not just get the brand out there, but how do we actually get the content out to more people through trying to explain to everybody that we publish for free and we are open to republishing and then make it easy for them to republish and then make it obviously possible for us to measure the effect of that republishing.
And the republishing is great because not only does it support the funding model for The Conversation because everybody's happy to see the work of that academic spread more widely, but it also contributes more positively to the whole media landscape and the whole media ecosystem because other publishers who run articles can run ads around those articles, run their donation asks around those articles, and it supports their own businesses. So other publishers in a way, are part of my target audience. So again, I have to be very careful I don't criticise any of the competition because they're my customers.
Mark Jones
I love it. And again, it's part of the nuance that's required in your role. I think it's fascinating. I wonder whether you need to then think about some of the big social issues and environmental issues, for example, that we're facing in Australia. And if you're using them as indicators, can you measure your contribution to that? And I'm wondering about if we see the dial move on, just to use an example, the YES campaign and the number of articles we wrote to educate people on that debate. Can you take it from that perspective whether people's views have changed in a certain way?
Margy Vary
Yes. And actually this is something that I've been thinking about is how to measure change in sentiment because it's something that you do for advertisers. At The Guardian, we used to do it for big brand campaigns is you do the pre and post surveys, but say, have you changed sentiment or awareness of an issue? And that's definitely something that I'd like to look at The Conversation. But in terms of the big crisis that we are really trying to address, it's about the crisis of misinformation, right? That's extraordinary how much of a problem that is, it's almost becoming overwhelming now. We thought social media was a real threat to it, but now with AI, we're looking at a situation where people may not even know where any of their information necessarily has come from a trusted source or not. And increasingly the problem with regulation is that governments just can't keep up with the pace of change or technology.
The only people that really understand it are the people who are making it and that there isn't ethics necessarily at the heart of that creation. So these are some of the big issues that we are trying to address and it's not necessarily a disaster, I think. So Misha, our editor gave a talk recently about how he'd done some research into what sources of information the generative AI models like Chat GPT are actually drawing from. And I think he quoted an article from the Washington Post which revealed that the secret list of the top 200 websites that chat GPT uses to sound smart. And The Conversation was in there.
So when I was listening to Ed Husic talking about governments have suddenly realised the need to introduce regulation for AI or that they're starting to take steps, and he talked about the way in which misinformation might influence the way communities or our community will make our decisions about things and why that's a critical problem for us, especially policy makers as well. And it was so reassuring to hear that actually The Conversation is one of the sources that's being drawn on. So if we think about our mission and our purpose is to ensure that we can inject quality and impartial information into the public sphere, that means that actually as long as we can work with the AI and not just panic about it and block it out, we could actually have a significant role in the future of information which is I think is really exciting.
Mark Jones
The phrase that popped into my mind just then was truth at scale. So I know truth is a controversial word, but it's that idea. If the reach of our information is increased over time, then obviously proportionally we've got a greater voice. So I think that's again, tapping into that sharing, re-sharing, almost open source type model, right?
Margy Vary
Yes, absolutely.
Mark Jones
So what's the future look like for you then? There's quite a few areas that we've touched on, and I can see that there's a big focus on digital, a big focus on engaging in social issues, a huge focus on really understanding the audience. Do you have a goal for the next year, three years? What are the levers that you are pulling on to bring about some change?
Margy Vary
Well, I think our goals are to ensure that we are delivering a good service for our members. So for the universities who fund us, we have to make sure that we continuing to deliver good impact for them because obviously everyone's challenged in this economic environment, we're all feeling the pinch. We also have a philanthropy target that we need to hit. And I was just listening to a talk by professor Peter Shergold, who is the founding CEO of the Centre for Social Impact, and I think it's an old talk, but it's a brilliant one.
And he says the struggle for the philanthropic dollar is just as intense as the struggle for the market dollar. And that was a big wake-up call for me. And it's getting even more intense as the market squeezes. We're all asking for more money from the same people. So that is a challenge. And again, that if we think about philanthropy and the need, again, to prove the social return on investment, it's much easier to do that if you're frontline service saving lives than if you are producing journalism that it's harder to see the direct impact of it. So that's going to be a challenge to hit that target. And then obviously I've got a direct target on my head to grow the reader donations.
So again, I'll be trying to employ all the tricks that I learned at The Guardian, just pick the best ones because at The Guardian we had something like a team of 130 developers and I've got 11 now. So I have to try and think, well, what was the few key things that we did that shifted the dial the most that I can implement and test? And try and bring again that culture into the marketing here. So I'm really looking forward to it. Some great challenges.
Mark Jones
That's awesome. I am just trying to picture you with the team of developers. I think that's something that a lot of marketing people don't have the luxury of is spending time with marketers in effectively what a product marketing capacity, isn't it? It's how do we change this product to give us information to be very innovative in the way that we're engaging with people at a UX level, right? That's very dynamic.
Margy Vary
Yes. And as you pointed out before in media that there's an aversion to marketing, but the product is the marketing. So the more time we can spend on the service that we provide in terms of UX, the better is going to be for achieving all of our outcomes. And I love that aspect. I love the fact that my job isn't really so much focused on producing advertising. It's actually focused on producing a great product.
Mark Jones
That's amazing. And I feel like we probably need another whole show on marketing to philanthropists. That's probably a bit of an aha for me as well, I got to say. The philanthropy dollar. And I think the point of empathy too is if only they knew how good we were, why wouldn't they just give it to us, right?
Margy Vary
Yes.
Mark Jones
And you've actually now got to prove it, really?
Margy Vary
Yes.
Mark Jones
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for being my guest. I really enjoyed speaking with you. There's, as you say, plenty more work ahead and the world of journalism, of course, is changing, continues to change and shape the way that we think about the world. So I'm very grateful to have The Conversation in the mix and here’s to it becoming an even greater portion of the mix to our Conversation.
Margy Vary
Thank you. Thank you very much.
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And there you have it, a bright future for The Conversation, it seems, led by an even brighter force.
The Conversation, in my view, strives to inject quality and impartial information into the public sphere. And it's quite clear that they know their mission and they know it well.
Margy made a really excellent point in that changing algorithms means it can be tough for the right people to find the right content. But if you keep your mission at the centre of everything you do, you're halfway there.
And that's a great lesson for any organisation in any sector. So that's it for today. That's a wrap. Thanks for joining us on today's episode and we'll see you next time.