Executives expect collaboration among departments to achieve marketing goals. But this is easier said than done.

IT is critical for integrating digital technologies that the marketing team needs to succeed, but the two departments often speak different languages.

So, how can you get your departments to work together for success?

In this article, I’ll discuss how you can integrate digital technologies and strategies across all areas of your business.

Marketing and IT can achieve a lot when they work together. By tapping into the IT department’s skills and knowledge, marketing can use data more effectively to drive decision making and measure performance. 

IT also provides key technology infrastructure, tools, and platforms. To make it all work, IT must understand marketing’s goals and objectives.

Here are some examples of what marketing can deliver when they align with IT.

Consumer expectations for marketing have evolved. Today’s consumers demand a personalized experience. Research shows that companies that deliver it enjoy higher revenue and stronger brand loyalty.

In fact, fast-growing companies derive 40% of revenue from personalized marketing actions.

Source: McKinsey

Personalization relies on capturing and analyzing customer data to understand their preferences, behaviors, and needs. IT plays a crucial role in building and maintaining systems that collect, store, and process customer data.

IT also manages the systems that help marketing segment customers based on criteria such as demographics, purchase history, browsing behavior, and interactions.

IT doesn’t just hold the keys to these systems. It also ensures data accuracy, integrity, and security, and helps marketing conduct campaigns that comply with data protection regulations.

When they work effectively together, marketers can tap into the business’s entire body of knowledge to meet consumers’ personalization expectations.

For example, Amazon’s homepage provides a highly personalized experience that uses data from a variety of systems:

Though non-personalized content appears on the homepage as well, the balance is toward personalized content. The consumer feels like Amazon knows them, and the user experience promotes purchasing (and repurchasing).

It’s easier to click the “Pick up where you left off” or “Buy Again” buttons than to find the exact specification of a product and look for it on a different website.

Highly tailored campaigns don’t just perform better in terms of clicks and conversions. They also make marketing spend more efficient.

For example, we helped MIT Sloan Executive Education (MITSEE) develop an omnichannel marketing program to improve the customer journey while maximizing marketing spend. To balance those competing priorities, we invested in personalization.

By being more targeted on the intent of prospects, MITSEE decreased search engine marketing (SEM) spend by 56% while increasing conversations by 67%. MITSEE also rebuilt its remarketing campaigns with a focus on better targeting, with notable decreases in cost per click (-74%) and cost per acquisition (-70%).

Marketing can achieve these kinds of results independently up to a point. In larger organizations with more complex (and richer) data landscapes, marketers will typically need IT’s support to get access to relevant systems.

Likewise, the more touchpoints in a campaign, the more marketing will benefit from IT’s help in integrating data to act on results. According to McKinsey, more than half of B2C customers engage with three to five channels during each purchasing journey.

Each channel represents a new data source that must be unified with the others—ideally in an AI-powered engine that can automate personalization (e.g., delivering Next Best Offer recommendations). Marketing needs to combine its business acumen with IT’s technical skills to build such a sophisticated capability.

Marketing also needs IT to evaluate the impact of its activities on business objectives.

The global insurer Allianz learned the importance of IT and marketing collaboration when it created a marketing experimentation function.

Allianz’s marketing teams historically had access only to top- and mid-funnel metrics. Without access to sales data, they couldn’t assess the impact of their work on business growth.

By bringing together marketing and IT team members in a cross-functional unit, Allianz developed a sophisticated measurement capability that included an AI-powered ROI model.

For the first time, the insurer could measure the impact of marketing on each stage of their sales funnel, down to key business growth metrics such as the number of new policies. This resulted in a 25% lift in marketing effectiveness.

Without access to business data or sophisticated analytics, marketers are hard-pressed to measure how their work performs in a meaningful way. They can optimize for top-of-funnel metrics, such as reach and awareness, but they can’t improve or even understand the impact of their work on the business.

Somewhere along the way, marketing and IT built their own islands. 

“Historically, marketing has tried to build its own tech stack because of a perception that IT, as a more generalized business function, didn’t understand the needs of the technology marketers wanted,” says Gartner analyst Ben Bloom.

The siloed approach doesn’t cut it in a world where consumer expectations are growing, the media mix is becoming more complex, and technology options are increasing. Marketing needs to learn to educate, motivate, and partner with IT to make an impact on business objectives.

Without alignment, marketing will face:

Acquiring and retaining customers requires marketing to:

All of these activities depend on access to data from business systems managed by IT. While many of the levers that digital marketers use to create campaigns sit squarely with marketing (such as ideating social media content), some require or simply benefit from the support of IT.

The landscape grows even more complex when you consider in-person channels. This chart from McKinsey summarizes just some of the options for personalization as the customer journey crosses into the physical world:

Many of the systems and locations that appear in this chart sit outside of marketing’s purview, and many of the tactics require strong technical skills.

Without insight into how marketing activities influence business KPIs, marketing can’t make the most effective use of its paid media budget.

Marketing can monitor the performance of a campaign using return on ad spend (ROAS). ROAS, however, provides limited insight into how an omnichannel campaign affects business growth because the reality is that attribution is highly technical.

Considering all the possible touches a person may have with your brand, even subliminally, makes it extremely difficult to determine the effectiveness of an ad.

To understand the impact of each of those touches and optimize spend across an increasingly broad number of channels, marketing needs to integrate and analyze omnichannel data into a unified view.

Marketing also needs access to bottom-of-funnel metrics that provide more actionable insight into campaign performance. This could include new sales, growth per region, or acquisition costs for a specific demographic. Once again, marketing needs IT’s access, skills, and knowledge.

Marketing needs IT’s help to deliver and manage campaigns that meet the bar in a world of increasingly complex customer journeys. Without IT, costs will rise and revenues will fall due to lower customer acquisition rates, higher churn, and inefficient media spend.

Ultimately, marketing will face the blame for failing to meet business objectives.

Marketers are feeling the pressure. The CMO Council found that 70% of marketers “don’t feel very confident in their current sales and marketing model to sell effectively to the self-reliant buyer in the digitalized customer journey.”

Efficiently delivering seamless customer journeys in a complex omnichannel landscape is within reach. Marketing leaders are positioned to achieve this goal—as long as they can align with IT.

Bridging the gap between marketing and IT requires more than a one-time conversation. It requires redefining the way the two departments operate. Depending on the size, scale, and culture of your organization, this may take the form of restructuring, developing cross-functional “tiger teams,” or rotating personnel across departments.

Realigning two departments that historically haven’t spoken the same language may be tough, but it is possible. Here are the steps you can take to make the experience positive and productive:

Transitioning to a new objective, way of working, or organizational structure can be disruptive and disorienting for marketing and IT. Department leadership needs to partner with business leadership to get everyone on board and moving in the same direction.

Marketers must shift their mindset away from lead generation and toward business growth.

Business leaders need to communicate that marketing and IT are integral to the company’s success, and department leaders need to reiterate that throughout the process of alignment.

CEO David Paragamian spoke on this in his book about transforming his company:

“Change relies on people. For them to buy into transformation, to make it happen, you’ve got to give them a vision. People would rather know they’re building Notre-Dame Cathedral than just chiseling stone.” 

A sense of shared purpose is a great start, but it isn’t specific enough to achieve alignment.

Next, marketing and IT need to identify the business objectives they’re working toward, and determine what each department is accountable for on the path forward.

Objectives should align with overarching company objectives. For example, if the company’s north star is to reduce costs, IT and marketing might identify an objective such as making paid media spend more efficient. Eventually, objectives will inform lower-level goals for specific experiments.

After the two departments have aligned on shared goals, they can determine what each function is responsible for and how it will be held accountable. The breakdown may look like this:

Marketing and IT leadership should define this breakdown more granularly and get it on paper so that everyone involved has a common reference point.

Once marketing and IT know where the two departments are going, it’s time to figure out how to get there.

The right organizational structures and project management methodologies for a company depend on its size, scale, and culture. But here are some high-level tactics that have helped a variety of companies align siloed functions:

Some companies opt for building smaller teams that are each dedicated to a narrowly defined goal, product, or service. Such teams are typically organized ad hoc. Members are seconded from their day jobs until the team meets its goal, then the core marketing and IT departments scale the results across the organization and team members return to their usual duties.

The makeup of an ad hoc team (also known as a war room, tiger team, pod, or any number of other nicknames) depends on how the company does business and the nature of the goal in question.

A retailer seeking to improve the customer journey in-store and online could bring together marketers, data scientists, in-store operations managers, and hardware technicians.

A telecommunications company that wants to reduce churn could opt for call center managers, marketers, UX experts, and data scientists.

When Coca-Cola wanted to understand how tweaking its media mix would impact its sales in certain countries, it set up a small orchestration team and deployed people around the world to augment local marketers with data analytics skills.

In its first experiment, this team identified the optimal range for connected television (CTV) in the media mix and connected CTV ad investment to sales, not just media impressions, for the first time. Now, Coca-Cola runs 50–100 experiments each quarter.

Formally introduced in 2001, the Agile project management methodology has become the de facto standard for technology teams. It’s also become popular among non-technical teams looking to develop a culture of iteration and experimentation.

Agile has many offshoots that incorporate the core principles, such as continuous delivery of value, cross-functional teamwork, and face-to-face communication.

For example, Smart Panda Labs uses the Lean methodology, which incorporates elements from Agile (along with Six Sigma, design thinking, and other popular management philosophies). It’s an effective methodology for optimizing every touchpoint of the digital experience.

To stay productive, minimize interpersonal conflict, and promote transparency, it’s helpful to set guardrails around how these two departments communicate. For example:

Pick communication channels and stick to them. If IT captures project conversations on ClickUp, but marketing only chats on Slack, conversations will fragment across the two channels. Choose the channels that both departments will use and define how and when to use them. Push conversations that start elsewhere to the appropriate channel.

Make decision-making processes clear, transparent, and consistent. Involve all relevant stakeholders in discussions that affect them, and minimize side conversations. When a person or team makes a decision, share the rationale to minimize gossip and speculation.

Establish a process for conflict resolution. Organizational change tends to generate and exacerbate interpersonal issues that can quickly become toxic to the culture. Encourage open and respectful dialogue, and provide channels for raising and resolving issues.

These are just a few examples of how to promote open, constructive communication between two groups that often don’t speak the same language.

Today’s omnichannel landscape offers marketers the opportunity to meet consumers anywhere and everywhere, with content that caters to their individual needs, characteristics, and interests.

Companies that take advantage of this opportunity are poised to succeed, but marketing can’t do it alone. The department needs to find common ground with IT to gain access to relevant systems, tap into technical skills, and integrate data and digital experiences. Alignment calls for dramatic changes in how each department operates and how the two departments interact.

Aligning marketing and IT takes dedication and commitment from the C-suite down, but the effort pays off when the departments can jointly deliver the seamless digital experiences that today’s consumers demand.

Marketing and IT alignment is the only way to increase revenue, reduce costs, and sustain business growth long term.

Experimentation in every industry is critical for development. Items we use every day have iterated to where they are now thanks to experimentation: the car, the computer, the smartphone, and more. 

Experimentation in marketing is no different. Simply put, marketing experimentation tests data-led ideas to see whether they affect a variable, such as product usage, user acquisition, trial sign-ups, etc. 

Many marketers are intimidated by or misunderstand experimentation. Add to that challenges like getting boardroom buy-in and securing budget for experimentation, and you can see why it’s a growth technique that struggles to gain adoption within many organizations.

In this article, I’ll illustrate the importance of marketing experimentation as part of your digital transformation.

Marketers spend a lot of time collecting and interpreting data. A study conducted by PHD and Warc found that 88% of marketers spend most of their time on reporting tasks, like tracking performance and producing digestible audience insights for stakeholders and other departments. 

From measuring and reporting traffic trends and conversion rates to sending surveys and facilitating focus groups, so much of marketing is about gathering data. Marketers then use these findings to blindly change the customer experience, with the hope of increasing conversions, and hitting KPIs. 

With so much dedication to reporting on the data you already have, it’s understandable that spending additional resources on experimentation makes some marketers nervous. 

Before I get into why experimentation is actually a good thing for digital transformation, let’s take a look at why many marketers avoid experimentation. 

While I understand why marketers sometimes avoid experimentation (see above), the benefits far outweigh the risks. Sometimes the biggest challenge for those new to marketing experimentation is understanding that experimentation is not a replacement for data-driven decisions.

On the contrary, when done correctly, an experiment is entirely data-driven: it begins with methodology and analysis and concludes with supporting or refuting evidence. Experimentation and data work together to drive better business decision-making.

Here’s an example of a company that used strategic experimentation to produce real results. 

When the Smart Panda Labs team started working with Viceroy, we suggested A/B testing. Like many stakeholders, they were skeptical.

Our team focused on a button on the hotel group’s website that acted as a “submit” button and linked to their booking engine. The goal was to increase room searches by determining which copy led to the highest click-through rate. 

There was a clear winner from the first experiment (“Book Your Room”), which we then pitted against a slightly more descriptive alternative: “Check Availability.” Check Availability won out overall, and this change in something as small as button copy increased room reservations by $30,000 per month. 

When you’re trying something new, it’s best to start small, confirm your hypothesis, and then go for bigger fish. After proving that experimentation had a genuine impact on revenue, we ran a larger test based on a hypothesis about a new landing page. The result was a $600,000 increase in incremental revenue per year. 

There are many benefits to experimenting, which can be seen across an array of marketing activities. Here are some experiments to consider and the benefits that come with them.

While great marketing is data-driven, there’s also an emotional component to consider. Everyone develops cognitive biases based on our experiences with the world—including your customers. Marketers often leverage these biases to see if they deliver the desired results.

For example, maybe you’re building a hypothesis around CTA conversion rates and decide to test “Your favorited item is selling out—only 5 left!” (employing the bandwagon effect and scarcity mindset) against “10% off your favorite” (the belief that you’re getting an exclusive bargain). 

This experiment may lead you to use a more effective CTA and help you better understand your customer. Are they more socially motivated, wanting your product because it’s popular? Or, are they more motivated by a good deal?

Experimentation doesn’t need to be complex. A/B testing projects can result in real revenue wins. Real estate firm Related Companies increased their lead conversion by 26% using a similar experimentation method. 

Speaking of knowing your customer, it may not come as a surprise to hear that people consume information in very different ways. Rapidly experimenting with different content formats and platforms will ensure you don’t miss any opportunities to reach your target audience.

For example, you may be surprised to learn from market research that your competitors are using TikTok. The move here isn’t to hire a full-time TikTok expert and invest half your budget into marketing on this platform. Instead, run very specific tests based on what you learned. 

There are many additional ways to experiment with digital marketing. Hopefully you can see that experimentation can have real financial results. Even when experiments fail to support your hypothesis, you benefit from a valuable takeaway and a clearer direction, as well as saving your company from a revenue loss if the change had simply been rolled out without testing. 

Ignoring experimentation is detrimental to a digital transformation because without actioning data or analytics, marketing teams are just sitting on reports. 

While your tried and true marketing strategies may keep you afloat, it will be hard to compete when other companies are willing to take risks to accelerate their growth. 

Of course, it’s important not to experiment for the sake of experimenting. Let’s carry on with our TikTok example above. 

If, overwhelmingly, the data shows your audience prefers email marketing and they never use TikTok, experimenting on the video platform would likely be a waste of time. You should only experiment when the data can be interpreted to fit multiple hypotheses, which you would then test to determine the direction for greater marketing efforts. 

On the other hand, if you ignored survey data that showed TikTok is a growing platform of interest, you could be missing out on reaching potential customers in the way they want to be reached. 

Here are a few key actions you can take to begin accelerating growth with experimentation. 

Identify the specific component of your marketing strategy that would benefit from an experimentation project. From there, set goals and objectives. Be as specific as possible in determining needs unique to your business and competitive landscape. 

If you’re a retailer, you may want to optimize the checkout flow of your ecommerce site based on data that tells you where users are dropping off (perhaps survey results point to customers feeling annoyed they have to log in again). Your goal would be to convert more customers by coaxing them past this drop-off stage. Then you would design experiments based on the data (perhaps by creating a guest checkout option or moving log-in requirements to post-purchase).

We know that experiments should be rooted in some type of data. But data comes in many different forms. Sometimes, you’ll have a lot of it in the form of reports, surveys, performance metrics for past marketing campaigns, etc. 

Sometimes, the data can be based on competitor insights. For example, perhaps several of your direct competitors have gated their webinar content. You learn from customer research that many of your best leads have watched your webinars and find value in them. Your hypothesis for this example might be: putting our webinars behind a gate will lead to more leads because this content is in high demand with our prospects. 

Stakeholders can be reluctant to experiment. Start small and prove the concept is worth pursuing. Consider A/B testing copy instead of a website overhaul. Test different types of email subject lines. Before pivoting from long-form written content to TikTok videos, run a test to see how they perform against each other. 

When you have a clear understanding of your organization, its competitive landscape, and relevant testing opportunities available to you, it’s time to take your findings to the boardroom. 

Remember, at least one person around the table will likely be skeptical when it comes to experimentation. Come prepared with data-backed hypotheses, as well as success stories from competitors to get them excited. Pick a pilot program to get started with so you don’t overwhelm them with requests for budget and resources. 

The best marketing strategies leverage a combination of data and thinking outside the box. While it can feel counterintuitive, the data helps you narrow down what you’re getting creative about—should we be on TikTok or LinkedIn? Should we be driving our content topics by SEO or leveraging influential experts? 

Once you have evidence that a specific marketing activity is where you should be experimenting, then it’s time to create your hypothesis, test, and learn. 

Experimenting is an exciting way to test hypotheses and ensure you’re staying relevant to your customer. With thoughtful, actionable hypotheses backed by data, you’ll be amazed by what you may learn through the experimentation process.

The newspaper industry has been in a steady downward trend for decades now, but they faced their sharpest decline in 2020. It’s no surprise that print newspapers aren’t the household staple they used to be. 

Where readers once turned the thin pages of the latest issue over their morning coffee, they now get their daily news digest the way they get most other information—digitally. 

While many media companies have struggled to create a relevant, high-quality digital experience in the new business model, the New York Times continued to add paid subscribers to its online news product. They now have over 7.6 million digital subscribers.

In this article, I’ll walk you through how the New York Times has managed to cut through the noise and secure subscribers in a crowded media landscape. 

Transitioning a product to fit changing behaviors is challenging. Alongside the need for a shifting product, demands for top-tier standards also tend to increase. People still expect high-quality journalism; only, they want more of it. 

To create an effective digital strategy, the New York Times listened to the people who canceled their physical newspaper subscription in favor of solely consuming digital news. They also realized early on it wouldn’t be as simple as pasting their high-quality journalism onto a digital medium.

Of the transition to digital, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said: 

Understanding how to transfer paper-based readers over to digital subscribers would take a combination of listening to the customer, experimentation, and a willingness to iterate until they got it right. 

The Times uses data to understand why a person might come to their pages, how engaged they are once they arrive, and finally, their demographic profile. Based on this data, they then decide what actions they can take to create a meaningful experience for that person that eventually drives them to pay for a full-access subscription. 

I should also note that here, a subscription means paying to access different aspects of the New York Times content, whether that’s unlimited digital access to the times, digital access plus a print subscription, or add-ons such as the New York Times cooking app (more on that later). 

Getting to know their customers was step one to creating a digital media platform that could evolve with, and for, its audience. One period that proved particularly helpful in enabling the Times to get to know their audience was the very traffic-heavy first quarter of 2017. This increase was a result of the 2016 presidential election and Trump’s inauguration. 

Even since then, Thompson said the Times has become increasingly expert at understanding its subscribers at every stage of the marketing cycle, including retention and churn. He describes the entire organization as focused on the customer journey and the customers’ fundamental experience of Times journalism. 

By understanding where people spend time and how they navigate the site, you can begin to understand what your customer values and what makes them tick, both critical for figuring out what might make them become paying subscribers. You can get a basic understanding of user behavior in Google Analytics and then go deeper based on your findings. 

Top Tip: Customer loyalty is crucial to profitability and sustained growth. Here’s how to use customer intelligence to turn data into actionable insights 🐼

Gaining digital subscribers was always going to look different from the tactics for gaining print subscribers. Fortunately, there are many more opportunities to grab the attention of many different types of people. The caveat to the wealth of access to people online is knowing how to even begin identifying who these people are and what they want from your brand or platform. 

Increased experimentation with product development has been pivotal to the New York Times’ digital transformation success (and new subscriptions). 

At the helm of new product development is Times’ internal team: Beta. Beta is responsible for now well-known features like the NYTimes Crossword, the Times’ real estate app, and NYT Cooking (more on that later). 

It’s Beta’s job to take the Times’ already excellent journalism and turn it into a digital experience that solves a specific reader problem. From helping people figure out what to eat for dinner to how to exercise and where to live, Beta helps make the Times a daily, trusted destination for its readers.

It’s also Beta’s job to understand where to allocate resources. If something isn’t performing (for example, NYT Opinion which failed to attract a sizable paying audience), it’s shuttered. For every failed Times product, there’s a slam dunk. The Cooking newsletter has over 600,000 subscribers and its weekday edition has a 50% open rate. 

Top Tip: In order to analyze and iterate, you’ll need data. Here’s our guide to digital analytics 🐼

One example is the Times’ cooking site and app. You’ve likely come into contact with it through one viral recipe or another. To access their comprehensive list of thousands of unique recipes, you’ll have to purchase a subscription: $5 per month or $40 annually. The product (including an app) has attracted over five million monthly users since 2014.

In addition to creating new products (other examples include podcasts like the highly popular The Daily and products like the crossword app), the Times has also acquired several external products—and their users. In 2016, the Times acquired Wirecutter, a product recommendation service, and it generates digital revenue through both affiliate links and a paid subscription version. 

Most recently (and perhaps most notably), the Times acquired global puzzle sensation, Wordle.

Players get six chances per day to guess a five-letter word. It may sound simple, but the Times knew it would appeal to its digital audience.

While the player count sat at an unimpressive 90 in November of 2021, it is now estimated that 14% of US adults are logging in daily.

Addressing the acquisition in a recent statement, the Times noted it “remains focused on becoming the essential subscription for every English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world”, supporting the company’s “quest to increase digital subscriptions to 10 million by 2025”.

According to Thompson, building and acquiring different products over the last several years was highly strategic. He said, “It was about trying to get a conveyor belt of improvements and ideas and things to develop and optimize that was constantly being added to—and that we were constantly exploiting.” 

Not every new product involves creating or buying an entire app. The Times has also experimented with creating content in different formats, like interactive long-form articles and digital advertising efforts like sponsored articles. These efforts may not correlate directly to subscription revenue but add to the high-quality experience someone may come to expect from the Times, which could lead them to become a new subscriber.

As mentioned, one of the new products the Times began testing in the past five or so years is podcasting. The end goal of any new channel is ultimately to increase digital subscriptions. But there are many different ways the Times can introduce itself to a potential subscriber. 

For example, someone may come across The Daily by browsing top podcast recommendations. After listening, they may be more likely to turn to the Times for other news, putting them in the top of the Times’ marketing funnel. Additionally, podcasts feature ads, so this channel is also a means of increasing and diversifying advertising revenue. 

Other channels the Times has tested include social media, like the Snapchat Discover feature and Facebook Instant articles, as well as 360 videos, virtual reality, and the popular messaging app, WeChat. 

Not every team will be able to build and buy products at the scale or speed of the Times. A takeaway most teams can relate to is that it’s important to give autonomy to team members outside of the boardroom to move quickly. 

Thompson said, “We moved to a matrix structure where the team leaders—often very young, late 20s, early 30s—have power over the product and tech road maps and can make decisions based on what they learn from the testing-and-learning platforms, without regard to senior leadership.”

By giving agency to up-and-coming decision-makers, the Times could test, gain insights, and pivot or scale rapidly. 

To accelerate digital transformation, it’s important to have the whole team on board—starting with leadership. While Thompson was replaced as CEO in 2020 by Meredith Kopit Levien, he was brought on board as president and CEO of the New York Times Company in 2012 to figure out how the Times could succeed in a digital-first world. 

Top Tip: The pressure is on for businesses to digitally transform. Here’s how to accelerate the process 🐼

Right away, Thompson and executive editor Dean Baquet saw an enormous opportunity in a digital-first newsroom, as well as experimenting until they got it right. 

Getting the rest of the leadership and stakeholder team on board took time. Thompson describes six difficult months of debating, but eventually, the right people were in place, and stakeholders bought into the strategy. 

The Times created a 14-person executive committee, one of whom (Roland Caputo) was tasked with keeping print on track. The other 13 (including EVP, Product and Technology, and Editor for Innovation and Strategy) have been assigned to think primarily about digital.

Another notable digital move came in 2015. “Project 2020” was a plan put in place to emphasize using innovative, high-quality digital content to attract and retain subscribers and double digital revenue to “at least $800 million” by the end of 2020 (a goal they surpassed in 2019).

Speaking on Project 2020’s digital goals, Baquet wrote, “Make no mistake, this is the only way to protect our journalistic ambitions. To do nothing, or to be timid in imagining the future, would mean being left behind.”

The Times’ focus on subscribers emerges from a universal challenge facing modern media: the weakness in the markets for print advertising and traditional forms of digital-display advertising. 

By focusing on subscribers, The Times also maintains a stronger advertising business than competitors. Advertisers crave engagement—readers who linger on content and who return repeatedly.

Thanks to their interactive graphics, virtual reality and Snapchat Discovery features, and Emmy-winning videos that redefine storytelling, The Times attracts an audience that advertisers want to reach.

Top Tip: If Thompson’s early struggle resonates, we wrote a whole article about how to get boardroom buy-in for your digital maturity initiatives 🐼

Baquet, who was managing editor before becoming executive editor, brought an enormous cultural change to the Times. He empowered conversation and collaboration between the newsroom and business departments of the company, with the teams now working side-by-side.

While this was a huge change for previously siloed departments, Thompson describes how Baquet had trust and buy-in because of his traditional news background. A former investigative journalist and experienced editor, Baquet is a “newsman down to his fingertips and is trusted by everyone because of that,” according to Thompson. 

Even with his traditional newsroom background, Baquet gave his blessing to radical digital change. But because of this very same traditional background, people trusted him not to compromise the integrity of the content or journalism in favor of digital growth. 

The role Baquet played in the internal buy-in is an important lesson: having a change leader like Baquet, who is both a trusted industry expert and open to radical digital change, helped create a path forward for the entire Times team. 

Creating a cross-platform experience requires a lot of tools and often a complete rehaul of your tech stack. This isn’t a change that can happen overnight, and it’s important to plan for what you’ll need as well as rank in order of urgency. 

Top Tip: Building a digital roadmap that shows objectives, a timeline, and resources needed to achieve each goal will help you get organized 🐼

The Times has allocated a third of its budget to restructuring its data architecture and aligning teams on the proposed changes. This investment has gone into modernizing and integrating its data systems to enable the data-driven decision-making discussed above, and also machine learning capabilities. In today’s media and technology landscape, people expect personalization. We log onto Netflix and see shows recommended just for us, and we expect the same when we read the news. 

Similarly, the Times newsroom team decides which information should be displayed on their homepage or in push notifications using data architecture. The data team builds tools that help the newsroom understand a user’s behavior. Then, the newsroom can deliver the right messaging at the right time. 

The Times can also use data to personalize a reader’s experience. Leveraging behavioral analytics, the team can deliver relevant, fresh content or target them with the right messaging for the best subscription package for that reader. 

When it comes to teams, the Times has not only reduced silos but sought multidimensional hires who understand both great journalism and great technology. The Times boasted in 2017 that “no other newsroom in the world has more journalists who can code.” These are undoubtedly more difficult hires to make, but someone who can write a great piece and then code and publish it makes the entire operation significantly more agile. 

Assess your current team to determine where people’s primary and secondary talents lie. Understanding where and how you can lean on team members—and where they want to boost their own skills—will be mutually beneficial and help expedite your digital maturation process. 

When print subscriptions became all but obsolete, media companies faced an uphill battle—one which the New York Times is winning. By rigorously analyzing customer data, the team can make educated attempts to deliver content their readers will love. That framework allowed them to create momentum to keep them moving in the right direction.

This process has worked because of rapid experimentation and team members with agency and autonomy over their products.

Also critical to the Times’ success is a leadership team that fully believes in their digital-first strategy, and that content quality need not be compromised for profitability. 

The Times put in the resources to get the right tools, technology, and team in place to create a superior digital experience for their audience. With such a strong foundation, they were able to build something that empowered their growth into digital maturity.