Dow Jones’ Sherry Weiss on marketing at the speed of a newsroom

Dow Jones CMO Sherry Weiss reveals the marketing strategy behind growing subscription businesses for publications like The Wall Street Journal. 

 

Episode Transcript

Please note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.

 

Damian Fowler (00:00):

I'm Damian Fowler.

Ilyse Liffreing (00:01):

And I'm Ilyse Liffreing

Damian Fowler (00:02):

And welcome to this edition of The Current Podcast.

Ilyse Liffreing (00:09):

This week we're delighted to talk with Sherry Weiss, the CMO of Dow Jones.

Damian Fowler (00:14):

And Sherry's responsible for growing Dow Jones' subscription business across the publisher's. Numerous business titles, which include the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, and Investors Business Daily,

Ilyse Liffreing (00:26):

But that's not all. Sherry also heads up the brand and enterprise go-to-market strategy for Dow Jones Research and Newswire services like Tiba

Damian Fowler (00:35):

In an era where publishers are facing many challenges to their business models. From the pullback of third party cookies to the advance of ai, Sherry gets into how the publishers answering back by building a subscription strategy.

Ilyse Liffreing (00:48):

We start off by talking about the Wall Street Journal's latest campaign.

Sherry Weiss (00:56):

So it's your business. It's not only our new campaign, but our new brand platform, which we launched in June of last year. A little bit about the history of how we got into this new platform. So our previous platform was Trust Your Decisions and I joined the organization about two and a half years ago. One of the first things that the team and I did at that point in time is really dive deeply into understanding our current and then our future growth audience needs. And when we were going through that research, one of the things that came out was the idea around trust and how that's table stakes

(01:33):

And what our audience are saying that's a given and kind of don't tell us to trust you, we will determine that. And so we realized that there was this need to speak a little bit differently to our future audiences and also to crack the code on what Wall Street Journal is. So Wall Street Journal is a storied brand, it's well known, but oftentimes we were seeing with our growth audiences that people did not think the journal applied to them. And in all of our customer research, what we were beginning to piece together is the folks that read the journal and folks that we believe are our editorial content applies to. They have a lot of similarities underlying them. They're all ambitious, they want to be knowledgeable, they're quite intellectual, but they may be in different stages of their career. And so part of what we needed to do with this brand platform was help bridge the gap is to explain to our future audiences why the journalist for them.

(02:31):

And the other thing that's interesting about this campaign is that it's the first time in quite some time that we truly leaned into the journalism, our actual core product. And in that campaign we brought out specific articles into the actual campaign and balance those articles between things that you would expect the journal to write about and things that you would not expect us to write about. And a really good example is that we had an article around folks that were becoming lifelong renters and those were decisions that they were making. And