I wrote in a recent blog about a key takeaway at the recent INMA Roundtable at Vail: that companies need to shift the viewpoint from the company value chain to the customer value chain.

But which customer?

No two customers are the same. The slides below were presented by Karl Oskar Teien, director of product and UX at Schibsted Subscription News, at a previous INMA event. It’s an excellent representation of the fact that we absolutely need to differentiate our offering if we want to target different cohorts.

AI-enabled personalisation redefines business models and allows us to serve ever-narrower niches and one-on-one personalisation of content at scale.

While we have spent time looking at personalisation of content in the Product Initiative — something I fundamentally believe in as a necessity for mainstream media companies — I have yet to find concrete examples of personalising formats (if I am wrong, please send me examples). 

I asked the CEOs in Vail if format personalisation was on anyone’s radar, and they all said no. Perhaps it’s too expensive and/or labour intensive for the payback. But I think that will change as AI tools develop and we understand our customer preferences at different points in their lives and in their day to day activities. Maybe serve up summaries in the morning as briefings (much as e-mail newsletters often do now), videos with captions or audio during commutes, and longer reads in the evening. 

Maybe full scale, one-to-one personalisation doesn’t make sense as a blanket approach: We are unlikely to be all things to all people. Therefore we need to focus on the most important audiences. How do we define that?  

We’re seeing that engaging and monetising loyal users is becoming more important. This is represented by the replacing of metrics such as reach and scale with customer lifetime value. You may be familiar with the RFV North Star metric championed by the FT. They have since layered this with an LTV metric (see below presented by Lucy Butler, formerly head of data at the FT). 

It’s important to identify audiences that will give you the most potential for lifetime value. That starts with engaged subscribers and likely then unengaged subscribers and those with the most propensity to subscribe, etc. In other words, this likely starts with behaviours rather than ages. 

During one of the Vail sessions, a couple of numbers came up that threw me. Greg Piechota, INMA’s our researcher-in-residence and lead of the Readers First Initiative, pointed out the average ages of print subscribers and digital subscribers are higher than many think. The latest 2023 survey by Oxford’s Reuters Institute, whose study is across 45 markets, found that among those who paid for a subscription or membership to a digital news service, 60% were men and 53% were 45 years old or older (37% were 55 or older, and 19% were 65 or older).

So should we really be focusing on Gen Z when Gen X and Millennials are likely to give more short-term growth? And we are likely to learn from this focus, too.

My biggest concern for our industry is not AI; it’s that we are making an assumption that as people age up and become civically engaged (buying houses, having children, etc.) they will have more demand for our services, and frankly that is not proving true.

If we can’t engage Gen X and Millennials, then we will have to have a much more dramatic refocusing of our strategies.

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