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Platform Strategies 2023: Digital to Data: Marketing Strategies & Technologies for the Next Era of Scholarly Publishing
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Platform Strategies 2023: Digital to Data: Marketing Strategies & Technologies for the Next Era of Scholarly Publishing
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Segment:0 .
DUSTIN SMITH: Well, I'm Dustin Smith from Hum, Co-founder and President. And delighted to be here to have this chat today. It's called Digital to Data. What we're really focused on is the next big shift in scholarly publishing. The last big one, which is a mostly not done deal, but a bit settled, is the shift from print to digital. This is the shift from digital to day-to-day-- sorry to data and AI.
DUSTIN SMITH: We're going to talk a little bit less on the AI portion. The data is actually really quite important here. And what we're really talking about is how do you have a deep understanding of your business and your customers, the people who are interacting with your content, your authors, reviewers, editors, librarians, all of the people in the ecosystem. Data is really reflective of that sort of understanding. So what I'd like the panelists to do is to introduce themselves in just a moment.
DUSTIN SMITH: One more sort of matter of house rules. We're going to have the conversation that we want to have. The panelists can ask each other questions and prompt each other. We can also say we don't want to answer it or answer it later. So we're going to ask whatever questions we want. And it's OK to say no. I'm going to pass on that.
DUSTIN SMITH: But go ahead, Erin. Why don't you introduce yourself?
ERIN GANLEY: 2 everybody. I'm Erin Ganley. I am director of Researcher Marketing at Oxford University Press. And I'm based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
RORY WILLIAMS: Hi, everyone. I'm Rory Williams, the director of communications and marketing at Rockefeller University Press, based in New York.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Hi, I'm Colleen Scollans. I run the marketing and customer experience practice at Clarke & Esposito. And I'm in Montclair, New Jersey.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yes, and part of the OUP mafia, of course.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I am.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yes. Well, Colleen, can you tell us a little bit about the shift from what marketers in the outside world know as B2B to B2C, and what's happening? What is this moment like?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, it's one of high-velocity change, Historically, most publishers have been focused on brand marketing, perhaps some usage marketing, and supporting their sales teams in a B2B environment. But with the shift to open access, really, it's all about author marketing, recruiting authors, engendering author loyalty, understanding your audience, and all the insights and data you can derive from that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And as you said, Dustin, this has been happening outside of our industry for probably 12-ish years. E-commerce companies, particularly, and consumer publications, magazines, newspapers, et cetera, focus a lot of energy and effort on collecting their audience data, and really kind of personalizing and automating that marketing experience.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And our industry is at this moment of inflection. And we see many, many organizations realizing they need to scale up their marketing teams. They need to relook at the technology that they have. And the good news is technology has changed dramatically in the last couple of years. And so lots of different tools. It's easier to kind of be like these e-commerce and consumer media companies.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: We're seeing marketing and analytics teams converging into one. We're seeing digital and marketing teams coming together to really understand what experience means, author experience, reader experience. We're seeing editorial teams being challenged to really be in almost a business development capacity sometimes, going out there--
DUSTIN SMITH: They love that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: --cultivating community. They love that, cultivating community and commissioning. So really, an awful lot of change. And a real moment for marketing to shine, but is a very, very big transformation for many organizations.
DUSTIN SMITH: What does it feel like on the inside? I mean, you're OUP. Been around for a few years. So I'm told.
ERIN GANLEY: A couple hundred.
DUSTIN SMITH: A couple hundred. So what does it feel like being, sort of, sharp tip of the spear on marketing?
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah. It's really interesting is, as the description of this session. It said marketers need to nimbly pivot. And it does not feel that graceful at all. It feels like being kind of facing down a wind tunnel, and trying to react because it's, to Colleen's point, the velocity of the change is the velocity of the new tools, which can be massively beneficial, but you have to-- you scale up and scale up a marketing team to understand how to optimize those, otherwise you're just kind of drifting.
ERIN GANLEY: It's a really exciting time for marketers, I think, because, especially researcher marketers, what we used to call end-user marketers, were used to be really focused on usage. And in OUPs world. Use isn't important because your purchasers are institutions, right? But now marketers have a really direct path to authors because the authors are consumers these days.
ERIN GANLEY: And I think a challenge and also an exciting thing for marketing is the kind of thinking about the change management we talked about earlier. That is something that really has to happen within marketing departments. Because culturally, you need to change what your marketers are focused on. You need to get them up to scale with the new tools. But also marketers are often that kind of pivotal communication point with our society partners at OUP, our editorial staff that we work with internally as well.
ERIN GANLEY: And I think more than ever before, marketing is just one part of a very cross-functional, cohesive piece because if you don't have an editor who's on board with what you need to drive forward, if you do not have a society staff who's on board, you're not going to succeed in this ecosystem that's rapidly changing, and is often changed by things outside of our control.
DUSTIN SMITH: What's an example of a skill or a skill set beyond tool-specific training that the sort of new wave of marketers that you're seeing maybe people on your team?
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah, yeah. I think it's starting to be able to communicate to, let's say, you're working with a journal who has an editorial staff and society staff, communicating the criticality of really specifying what you want to achieve with your journal, for example. Because if you don't have that defined, you're not going to succeed. And making sure that's defined on what type of subject that you want to publish, what type of author you want to publish, what's your approach to diversity, what is your approach to recruiting new society members to be part of that core community.
ERIN GANLEY: So I think, in my perspective, communication and how you're communicating out to your stakeholders is really key.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I would jump in, Erin. I think that's exactly right. But I think the other thing that's interesting is there's all of this data, all of this technology, and that makes you think the hard side of marketing. But actually, messaging has never been more important, branding has never been more important. Authors, like any consumer really use brand as a rubric to make kind of purchasing decisions. Not copywriting, which generative AI can do, I think, but really knowing how you structure your messaging.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And I would say planning, right? It can be really easy to get tools in and just kind of everything is happening at once. And so that foundations of knowing what you should do, why you should do it, what the goals are, what the metrics. And then, I would say testing and optimization is really, really important, too, and you can do that at scale now.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I always say it's silly to think the same message for a journal is going to resonate with every single author. You need to be testing it. You need to be trying different messages and kind of arbitrating those messages in real-time. So testing and optimization skills.
RORY WILLIAMS: Absolutely. I think, just building on what Erin was saying, it is about managing relationships now. Not only with stakeholders but also within the organization. For us, with the move to open access, it really is all hands on deck. And that's what we're seeing. Every single department is contributing to the success of establishing more business cases for open access.
RORY WILLIAMS: And we see examples of that with our manager of sales reaching out to production, working with them to reach out to authors to remind them that they qualify for a read-and-publish deal, and therefore they don't have to pay. It also relates to editors who might be at a scientific meeting, speaking with an author and finding out right then and there if they actually belong to an institution that has a read-and-publish.
RORY WILLIAMS: So for us, that's been the big change. And then training your team to not only just work within the department but also to have relationships beyond communications and marketing is extremely important.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yes.
DUSTIN SMITH: So, Rory, haven't you gone recently through a sort of value proposition exercise for individual journals?
RORY WILLIAMS: Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
DUSTIN SMITH: Can you just talk about what that's like? And how receptive are the editors?
RORY WILLIAMS: OK, so I should actually also take a step back and give credit to where credit's due. The author outreach and author marketing and manuscript recruitment, that's been going on for years, at least for Rockefeller, with our scientific editors. We have professional editors in-house who go out and recruit manuscripts. So they'll go to site visits. They'll go to scientific meetings. They work with us directly on marketing campaigns, pulling together special collections.
RORY WILLIAMS: They have input. And full disclosure, too, we use Hum for data enrichment, as well as inbound campaigns as well, and editorials involved in that. So not only have they been very directly involved in the messaging but also in the efforts that were engaged in,
ERIN GANLEY: I think that goes back to what Colleen was saying about brand. And also what you were saying, Rory, about setting expectations, which is also about setting expectations with your authors and understanding what is important to them as a more narrow cohort. Is it speed to publication? Well, your editors have a heck of a lot to do with that, your editorial teams have a heck of a lot to do with that.
ERIN GANLEY: And understanding that, as much as I wish marketing was the solution to everything, it's really the on the ground author experience, and Colleen has written a lot about this, that is so important. We can have the most targeted, beautifully scripted marketing campaign, but if the author has an unfortunate experience with the journal, like that is the thing that's going to stick with them.
ERIN GANLEY: So I think author experience and retention is more important than ever, really.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And I think relationships, particularly if there are authors that are on your wish list to have commission for you. Authors publish with editors they trust. Relationship building and community building is really important, sort of like the roles you have in-house Rory, really, really important. I think we're going to see this. How does marketing and editorial work together in a kind of harmonious way?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And I think there's going to be just as much change in those editorial roles as in the marketing roles.
DUSTIN SMITH: Colleen, do you want to borrow some apostasy from the B2B software-as-a-service sort of template of how you actually market and then sell software? And is that applicable for --
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, I certainly think that it is. We're starting to see editorial teams, and here, I'm largely talking about in-house editorial teams, wanting to understand. So they're doing the research in their bibliometric tools, they're finding the authors that they're interested in reaching out to at conferences via email throughout all the ways that they're doing that. But they're looking to see how that author has engaged in the B2B way.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: When you read a white paper for software, that sales rep knows, and they follow up with you. And so, we are seeing editorial teams wanting that kind of data, almost like marketing's lead-gen for them, lead generation, in different kinds of ways, right? Oh, this author that I'm really, really interested in took this webinar that marketing created. OK, that's a really good entry point for me to send an email, or meet them at coffee at this event, or another type of event.
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah. And I think that also speaks to the need for marketing to exist at different points in the author journey, right? Because it's very rare that you're an author, you receive an email, and you're like, right, I have a manuscript ready to send out.
DUSTIN SMITH: In the can.
ERIN GANLEY: Right? I mean, that would be amazing. But it's not, right? So you have to have that kind of awareness. These are the benefits of the journal. Like it's in their mind, they've had good experience, they've heard from colleagues that they've had good experiences. So you're building that brand reputation. But it all has to happen at once.
ERIN GANLEY: And I think that goes to Colleen's point about planning. Like you really can't have a linear marketing campaign anymore. You need to have always-on campaigns. And we piloted some work with Hum about user behavior on the platform. And it's been really great because you're able to hyper-target, but also you're moving beyond your set community.
ERIN GANLEY: You're moving to a potential authors. Not necessarily authors you know or already in the scholarly community, but you can really-- if your goal is diversity of authorship, you're getting out of that echo chamber, , you're reaching authors and reviewers, actually, when they're consuming the content. And that's a really important part of that, the wider ecosystem, I think.
RORY WILLIAMS: That predictive aspect is really exciting. Absolutely. I think also just investing in the technology to be able to reach authors at these different touch points. I mean, we're in the process of implementing the technology, so I can't say that we're totally there yet. But we're working to gradually get there so.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah. And I would say it's technologies, right?
RORY WILLIAMS: Yes. There's a whole--
DUSTIN SMITH: Hum does everything. Excuse me. [LAUGHTER] I'm just kidding.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, it's a whole stack. And to Erin's really, really good point, we often encounter organizations that have invested in tools and are using maybe 1/10 of their capability. So it's the right tools for the right organization that's going to be optimized, and you're going to be able to measure success from, I think, is really, really important.
DUSTIN SMITH: I mean, even within our class of software, we see an average customer a year on, and they're still basically unlocked 40 the capabilities, and it's just because there are many different use cases across the enterprise.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah. I think the thing I call out too is what's really changed, I think, with technology is, it used to be you had these large systems, these monolithic systems. And to a certain degree, they can do--
DUSTIN SMITH: Would that be like a Salesforce? Just to put a sharp point on it.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: That could be a name. Could also be AMS systems, right? If you were a society--
DUSTIN SMITH: Hideous class of software.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, as a class of software. And they can do some of the things that these modern technologies can do, but they can take 18 months to implement. And we're in a phase where I think agility is really, really important, right? You need to be able to get to value quickly and have an iterative roadmap of what you're going to do with your technology.
ERIN GANLEY: Yes, absolutely. And I think there's something there about, again, like a resource because, for example, it has amazing capabilities. But as a marketing organization, how do you move resource, right? I'm sure we would all would love to hire 100 marketers, but I certainly would, but that's just not the reality. So how do you optimize the tools that you have? And also, how are you constantly assessing and refining your approaches?
ERIN GANLEY: And that's not just on-platform marketing, it's also email marketing, it's also conference attendance, and making sure you're maximizing that and understanding where you need to shift budget, you need to shift resource, you need to, as Colleen was saying, do you need to actually have a closer tie between your data analysts and your marketers, your platform, and product folks and your marketers. And my answer would be yes.
ERIN GANLEY: I think you do more than ever.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I would say 95% of the organizations we work with end up changing their organizational design, tweaking it, optimizing it. Because very few organizations are currently structured to meet these new use cases, these use capabilities. And Erin and I used to work together. So I know we think very similarly about this. But you can't fragment things in the way you used to if you want to have that cohesive experience. And I think the thing I would say is, for most publishers, you identify maybe 10% of your audience, right?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And part of what we also have to be doing a much better job, as Erin said, is identifying communicating with people. Even if we don't know who they are, you still can know an awful lot about them.
DUSTIN SMITH: Rory?
RORY WILLIAMS: I was just thinking about what Erin was saying about having to hire hundreds of marketers, right? And just thinking back to the earlier proposal that some of us will-- in white collar positions will lose their jobs, right-- so thinking about how AI will assist you. You don't have to hire hundreds of marketers at this point. There are different platforms now, MarTech platforms, that are racing to get AI implemented.
RORY WILLIAMS: So you don't have to go back to ChatGPT, and hope that you're entering the right phrase, and that your colleague is also entering this the same phrase. Instead, it's actually embedded within the platform itself.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, it puts pressure, I think, on the more strategic sides of marketing, right, knowing-- if you've got really good value propositions and a really good segmenting strategy, then whatever AI tool you're using, it can dump out really good copy. Right? But if you don't have the fundamentals, you don't-- and it's not about the big idea, right? It's about structuring it around values and values, what you value-- because values matter-- and value propositions-- what you're giving the person you're trying to sell something to.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: If you don't have that fundamental stuff, the AI is kind of useless, right? You've got that fundamental stuff, the AI can be tremendously efficient.
DUSTIN SMITH: And there are things like playbooks and templates, which are unsexy and crude technology. But they do work.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: They do, very much so.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah. We dunked on AMSes, probably not enough. Because it's a terrible class of software that should die.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Terrible.
DUSTIN SMITH: Could we pick out any other classes that are, say, unready or difficult to work with as you think of a data integration strategy, and then maybe on the flip side, ones that are particularly well-suited to the data integration and getting your data off those platforms?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I think I wouldn't say that they're ill-suited. I think what's happened--
DUSTIN SMITH: EJP is--
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Oh, author submission systems-- 100%. Thank you, Dustin.
DUSTIN SMITH: Sure, no problem.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I was going to say, on the marketing technology--
DUSTIN SMITH: I was like, please die on that hill.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Author submission systems are clunky. And they need to be, in my opinion-- I think back to how application management systems used to be one system, and now they're kind of atomized. It shouldn't all be in one system, right? The email should not be in SCHOLAR-1, or EJP, or whatever submission system you use.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: That should be in a best in class email server that connects with APIs. 100%, AMSes and author submission systems are ill-fitted for what we need to do today. And we need to solve that. I thought where you were leading is on the marketing automation platforms. And the point that I was going to make is these tools grew up 15 years ago.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: They sometimes can be Frankenstacks of lots of different acquisitions put together without the ability to integrate core data. And so you can have these automation tools-- Erin and I have lived this-- and you can't actually segment. The number of marketing teams we work with that will say, the data is there-- and then the marketer will say, but it takes me two days, four days to segment.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: That doesn't work.
DUSTIN SMITH: There are still people in big publishers that that's their job, like a human computer back in the '50s, like people who actually build segments and email them to people.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: You should be able to build a segment in under a minute. Now, thinking about your segmentation strategy is very, very, very hard. But the actual building of the segment should be very, very quick.
DUSTIN SMITH: I want to take this opportunity to shout-out to both Silverchair and Cadmore for being kick-ass in terms of getting data off their platform. Because that's not their primary job, effectively. It's a delivery platform. And it's really great. And there's the continuum all the way back towards the AMSes, which should fall off into the ocean. Sorry, strong opinions, but we've had to go down that road.
DUSTIN SMITH: I'm wondering if we could shift gears a little bit and talk about some of the other parts of the ecosystem. And particularly over the past 10 years or so, as organizations have been reckoning with open access, there's been the move towards syndication and trying to get your content in as many places as possible. In this new world of data and trying to build audience relationships, how do you think your way through those sort of things?
DUSTIN SMITH: And let's talk some ResearchGate too. So Rory, that's-- you're up, buddy.
RORY WILLIAMS: Sure, yeah. So we have syndication partnerships with ResearchGate as well as PubMed Central PubMed Central is the larger user of content. ResearchGate-- not as much. But we also haven't sent as much content to ResearchGate at this point. They don't have as much. And what we found is, still, users prefer the Silverchair site.
RORY WILLIAMS: They still prefer our site. But I think if-- should I speak specifically?
DUSTIN SMITH: You can say whatever you want.
RORY WILLIAMS: Well, with PubMed Central, it's difficult because of the data that they actually provide. It is not-- because it's in line with the privacy policy of the NLM, you can't really get the same kind of granularity that you can get from ResearchGate now that they have their journal home pages, right? So that's a kind of new feature. I don't know if I'm really-- should be actually explaining what it does.
RORY WILLIAMS: But it, in essence--
DUSTIN SMITH: You basically pay--
RORY WILLIAMS: --gives you a better idea of a deep read, and who could be considered a lead, and that sort of thing. So it's--
DUSTIN SMITH: It's actually lead generation.
RORY WILLIAMS: Yes.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah. I mean, why don't we talk a little bit about-- there was a question at Alps that wasn't fully picked up and addressed. And one of it was the PubMed Central and ResearchGate-like platforms, where your content lives and activity's happening, how do you get data back? And there's also the bigger, gnarlier question of commercial publishers.
DUSTIN SMITH: And Colleen you're, I think, advocating on behalf of societies and commercial deals. So what do you think about the data side of that?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I'm a big believer in data sovereignty. I think it makes sense that the commercial publishers need to collect audience data, digital engagement data, all the data they need to collect. Because they've got use cases that they need to support to do that. Completely great, and they should have the rights to do that. I think we need to move towards-- and I appreciate that it will be difficult to do so-- a world in which the commercial publishers are letting their society partners get back their audience and behavioral data.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And the reason that's so critical is society publishers primarily compete on a community value proposition. It is your community. You have meetings. You have a membership. You have other volunteers, services, et cetera. It is your audience. And your journals are likely a magnet bringing in potential audience, potential eyeballs to all your other products and services.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And it's your data. And so having worked at a really big publisher, I appreciate that it is bringing together legal, and information security, and your technology team. But I think it's incredibly, incredibly doable to do. There's no GDPR violations to do it. There are now, with asynchronous web tags, no platform slowing down issues. There used to be when you were afraid to put too many tags on your websites.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I think the blockers are slowly going away. And I-- so I'm--
DUSTIN SMITH: Have you had success on behalf of any of your society partners?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: There's walls. There are walls.
DUSTIN SMITH: You're working on it?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: It's on my blog post queue.
DUSTIN SMITH: I'll bet it is. Erin, can you talk a little bit about how societies are coming to this and the extent to which they're looking to you to lead this kind of new wave of marketing versus making specific requests when Colleen's maybe not in the picture, beating down your door or climbing over the wall?
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah, I mean, I think-- I mean, to Colleen's point, I don't think-- I can only speak on OUP's behalf. It's not a nefarious gatekeeping. I think it's, truly, we don't have the systems in place to easily pass that data on. And I think from a society perspective too, to that point about planning again, you need to think about what actions you're going to take from that data as well.
ERIN GANLEY: Because I think we've all been in analysis paralysis before, right? And this is the point, right? There's so much data out there that you really need to have a plan to go forward. I mean, as far as interacting with societies, I think we have some really, really savvy societies. And we have some folks, depending on their discipline, that are-- it's a lot more getting them up to speed on what actually happens in a read and publish deal.
ERIN GANLEY: How does that work? How is OUP shifting their sales and marketing strategy to support this massive shift? It's just a completely different business proposition than it was even five years ago. And so there's a lot of educational and informational discussions with folks about the whole environment. And in marketing specifically, I think there is a lot of communication, expectation setting needing to be done that email is essentially like a cold call at this point if you're just emailing a certain segment.
ERIN GANLEY: And we know there's Gartner Research. Email engagement is dropping. So if you are using those sort of channels, you really need to make it resonate with your recipient. And I think that's why it's exciting that we have some new tools there to try to already have-- if we're going to go back to the sales analogy-- some warm leads, right? We know there's interest there already if we know this person has read a couple of articles on this specific topic rather than they've just signed up for your email table of contents alerts, which is great, right?
DUSTIN SMITH: Go get 'em. Go get 'em.
ERIN GANLEY: It's an indicator, but it's not there yet. And I think that's where both marketers, and societies, and editorial offices need to be ready to be agile and to be able to experiment over the next couple years. Because it's-- I hate that term "unprecedented," but it is. It's true, it's a very unprecedented time in our industry, I think.
DUSTIN SMITH: Rory, what are some experiments you're excited about? Things you're hoping to take a crack at over the next couple years?
RORY WILLIAMS: Oh, well, yeah--
DUSTIN SMITH: Where to start?
RORY WILLIAMS: So some of the experiments that-- well, I should back up by saying that, first, using Hum, we've been doing a lot of test campaigns, which have a lot of promise. But I think that we need to put some other technology in place to actually nurture those relationships with the authors, right? So that's what I'm most excited about.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah. How are you feeling and maybe channeling some of the smaller societies? You're fully independent, obviously. I mean, how are you feeling about this kind of next five years, and competing and thriving in this digital ecosystem?
RORY WILLIAMS: Absolutely, I think, for the next five years, publishers like us, we have three titles. We also co-publish the Life Science Alliance-- it's another journal-- with Cold Spring Harbor and EMBO. And that's an example of a successful partnership between several publishers. This is a journal that's now self-sustaining, and for all intents and purposes, a great example.
DUSTIN SMITH: Colleen, can you talk about, maybe, leading lights? And I don't know if you would consider Frontiers one of those. But there's a class of new entrants, born away folks, who's doing it really well. And what aspects might we look up to?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I think what Frontiers does well is they've nailed the author experience piece. So their peer review into what I-- I would call it almost a community platform, a very simple community platform-- is very intuitive. Authors go there because that's where they pay. That's where their metrics are. And they use that to engage authors to create word of mouth marketing-- that, and it's very fast. So I think that they've nailed that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And I did a presentation at CSP, where Julia Kostova was there. And she talked about they measure everything. They measure everything, and they're constantly refining their processes. So I think that they've gotten that right. I think there are organizations who are really investing-- it sounds like you're one of those, Rory--
RORY WILLIAMS: Yeah.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: --these really editorial roles, and training them to really go out there and cultivate community and commissions. There's some players that have made some really, really bold moves. And then I think there's-- we're seeing, I would say in the last 12 months particularly, a lot of publishers wanting to modernize and upskill their marketing department, realizing that this is a transformation, a multi-year transformation.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: They need technology. They need support. They've got roadmaps. And I think they're all leading lights. It all starts with realizing where you need to go. And I think the hard fact that, as an industry, we have grossly underinvested in marketing. And that, historically, has been fine. But it's not probably going to be fine anymore.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And so understanding that and starting to build that roadmap, I think the clients that have started that journey, of course, are going to be ahead of the clients that are starting to come-- or the publishers that are just coming to that realization now, right?
DUSTIN SMITH: Rory, did you have something? No?
RORY WILLIAMS: No, I think she actually summed it up beautifully.
DUSTIN SMITH: Just nailed it?
RORY WILLIAMS: I would also recommend-- and anyone who hasn't read it yet-- The Six Pillars of Author Experience Maturity, , fantastic read.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Oh, thank you.
RORY WILLIAMS: Yeah, this was--
DUSTIN SMITH: This whole panel was a plug for that piece.
RORY WILLIAMS: Yeah, well, I was reading it. And I was just like, this is gospel. I'm going to share it with everybody I know. But yeah, it's-- again, I don't have anything to add.
DUSTIN SMITH: Clark Esposito needs a publishing platform. Rory basically said, I need this to be a permanent object. He has that high of opinion of that piece. So you should absolutely-- we'll link it in the show notes.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, and again, now I feel like I'm plugging. But I think the one on audience engagement is an interesting one as well. Because it gets to the crux of what audience intelligence is and the data that you do need to collect, or should be collecting.
DUSTIN SMITH: I mean, Erin, when you think about things like audience intelligence and building community, how do you-- how do you maybe convey that down to the rank and file? Or how do you build that sort of culture change into the organization?
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to lie, there's been some scare tactics. Like, you really have to say, look at this-- like, look at what is turning open access. Look at our business model, and actually empowering marketers to say, you can make a difference here, actually. Because we can go out and get really good, relevant authors for these journals. And at OUP, we have the luxury of being able to have a stellar reputation, as do all the organizations that are in the audience today.
ERIN GANLEY: And I think that's something that we can't rest on our laurels though. Because we have MDPI and Frontiers, as you said, these digital-born folks, who have the velocity to move faster, whereas it is 500 years old-- and that's great-- at OUP. But there's a bit of bureaucracy there. Though I have to say, I think everybody understands the kind of criticality of marketing support in this shift in the business model.
ERIN GANLEY: I would say over the last five years, that's changed a bit at OUP. But it's really-- I think, again, going back to that clear communication amongst all the stakeholders, both internal and external, and sometimes having difficult conversations, and saying, I can't create a really successful marketing campaign for you unless you tell me what is your development goal for this journal.
ERIN GANLEY: And having those conversations early and often, I think, has led to our most successful relationships with different journals and societies.
DUSTIN SMITH: You guys can get the microphones out. We'll get ready to transition. I mean, Rory, you--
RORY WILLIAMS: Did you want me to add to that?
DUSTIN SMITH: I do. And I also-- I want you to talk a little bit about how you think your way through-- having somewhat recently gone through the transition to open access, how you think about the -
RORY WILLIAMS: I mean, we're hybrid.
DUSTIN SMITH: Hybrid-- hybrid, yes, not fully. Sorry, I didn't mean to mischaracterize. This isn't a character assassination. OK, no, no, go ahead, Rory.
RORY WILLIAMS: No, what I was going to say is, yeah, we're working, right now, on an author-- just a comprehensive author journey map. And about getting everybody aligned, the entire organization on the same page, I think for us, there have already been some really good conversations that we've had so far. And the intent is to have this living document and then share it with the entire staff for their input, and then also come up with ideas.
RORY WILLIAMS: And that's actually where new ideas will start to live. It's like, OK, when you're thinking about a new tactic-- because everybody gets excited about new tools, new ideas, Where can that actually fit within the broader strategy of author outreach and improving author experience? So yeah, I would recommend that. I'm not going to plug the pillars again, but that is the--
DUSTIN SMITH: Get back to the pillars.
RORY WILLIAMS: --one of the pillars. And yeah, so that's--
DUSTIN SMITH: Colleen, do you have a public template for journal value proposition strategy stuff?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: No, we don't have a public template for it, but I'll think about it.
DUSTIN SMITH: I mean, put it on the list. Because apparently, that's what the people want. Do we have-- are we ready for questions? Oh my gosh, this is great.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Alison Belan, Duke University Press. And I'm going to go back to the earlier part of the conversation where you were talking about needing to skill up around author experience, author relationship management, sending editors out to build communities and commission things. And it struck me that when you're saying editors-- figuring out editors you need to figure out. That's journal editors. Because what you're describing is very similar to what book editors have always done in defining a list, developing it, evangelizing it, building community around it, and acquiring authors for it, and then making sure those authors come back.
AUDIENCE: And so it struck me that maybe, for that first decade, for print to digital, the push was to send all the journals people over to the book side of the house to tell them how to do all the new, fancy, right things. And I'm wondering if you're seeing the opposite happen with this, which is book practices migrating into the journal side of the house. And then a related question to that is that's also the most expensive part of book publishing.
AUDIENCE: Because you're throwing out a ton of leads and a ton of relationship management. And you never know what's going to come back and how it's going to pay off. And are those economics going to be the same on the journal side? And can OA support it?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I think-- I'll go first. I think it's a really interesting point about book editorial. And you're 100% right. And it actually hasn't been something that struck me before. But I think there might be some talent in the organization. You know, I don't think you need large amounts of people, necessarily, on the editorial team doing this.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: It's about really selective recruiting. It's about very, very good bibliometric analysis to know the authors you want. And as Erin said, it's about a marketing program that's warming up those leads so that you can be really efficient and have a very small number of people doing that. And then, there are things, I think, when-- there are toolkits and appropriate training your volunteer editors can do as well.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Acts of-- we use the word "ambassadorship." I think, Erin, you use that word too, right? Maybe I got it from you back at OUP-- and really getting them to help as well. So it doesn't have to be-- I think we often hear, oh my goodness, I must need to scale to compete with the Frontiers or an MDPI. I don't really think it's about numbers. I think it's about that right strategy and messaging.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And it sounds like you're [Rory] doing it with a modest--
RORY WILLIAMS: Yeah, and you know, I think it is important to have a proper strategy in place. Because you can be doing a lot of outreach, and you could be getting a lot of submissions. And a lot of those submissions might be rejected. So your campaign, instead of increasing the stature of the journals and really supporting its mission, is instead just piling on workload onto professional editors and peer reviewers. So yeah, that's how I would kind of frame that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Can't stress enough the importance of good bibli enough. Know who you want to be an author. And that should be a very targeted list--
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah, I agree.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: --for the personal outreach.
DUSTIN SMITH: Who's next?
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thanks so much. Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. I'm trying to tie together a couple things in this question, so it's kind of put bluntly to you. Are readers now the product that you deliver to authors? And what are the implications of the way that you're reconceptualizing your marketing for the way-- or more general question about the way readers are conceptualized?
AUDIENCE: Because I'll admit-- and those of you who know some of my writing on privacy will not be surprised that it's interesting to me to hear that the value proposition out of syndicating to NLM is less because of their more strict user data privacy policies, and ResearchGate better, presumably because of less strict. Now I want to posit, I'm not saying anyone's doing anything illegal.
AUDIENCE: I'm asking around the ethics of this, right? So broadly conceived, what is this doing with your reader relationships as you conceptualize your marketing to being so author-focused?
DUSTIN SMITH: Do you want me to take the body blows on that one?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I'm happy to. But if you want to start, whoever.
DUSTIN SMITH: Part of it is-- one of the things we talk about all the time is that your readers are the same people as your authors, and your editors, and your reviewers. And really, what this is about is trying to cultivate an ethical relationship with people. One of the things in the old world, where you have this sort of blindness or monastic privacy, is you email the living bejesus out of everybody. And I'm not-- most people don't like that.
DUSTIN SMITH: So I think the broad mission here is to-- how do you build ethical and consented relationships with people? So Hum, for instance, is blind to people who haven't opted in and given consent. And I think that's part of the bigger project and that sort of reorientation. But I mean, feel free to take the question as you will.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, I think consent is really important. I would argue that some of the historic marketing practices have not been very reader-friendly, to your point. There's been spam. There hasn't been effective targeting. Ultimately, if you're doing your marketing appropriately, you're showing the readers things that they're more interested in. And they've consented to that happening. And most people are fine with that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: But you have to-- I think you have to just have the right privacy policies, the right consent management. And the goal has to be giving them stuff that they really want to see. They were going to see ads anyway, right? It's just, now, that they're a little more targeted.
RORY WILLIAMS: And if you had seen Monday's release notes too, we just implemented CookiePro on Silverchair as well. So now people who visit the site, they have the ability to choose which cookies-- they have the ability to opt in, or opt out, or opt out of all of them. So they do have the choice.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Mm-hmm. I mean, sometimes, we'll talk to people, and they'll be afraid of the privacy consent. And then they'll tell me their customer database is in Excel, right? In some ways, these new systems protect the customer data. They pseudo-anonymize it. They hash out information. The customer is in control of their consent. They can see what's captured.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: In some ways, it's actually better than the old paradigm.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah, and reduce reliance on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, where people will pixel the site and then just kind of turn around. But that's third party data streaming off to another platform. But thank you for the question. And we appreciate hard questions. Who's next?
AUDIENCE: Hey, thanks for the great panel. This is Jay Patel with Cactus. So I mean, we all know Google and social media already changed the relationship between publishers and their readers. And large language models and chat bots are going to change it even more. Because now I can go to Google, and Bard will answer a question that I ask. And the likelihood of a reader finding that answer and clicking on a link, a source, is going to go down further and further as the chat bots get better.
AUDIENCE: How are you planning to address this-- oh, and the drop in traffic?
DUSTIN SMITH: Are you asking anybody in particular, or everybody?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Can you summar-- yeah.
DUSTIN SMITH: Try to summarize the question.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah.
DUSTIN SMITH: So effectively, as Google Bard and internet connected LOMs or chat bots become more powerful and provide, effectively, answers or summaries--
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: What it does to discoverability.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah, what it does to discoverability. And how do you cope around that, probably up to and including, what sort of experiences do you create directly on your own platform to provide relevant alternatives?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, I don't know if there's any easy answers to that. I think what you just alluded to, Dustin's part of it, making your platform a compelling experience and a must-go-to destination, creating your marketing so it's not just a regurgitation of a lay summary, that there's actually some interest and some context to it, author interviews.
ERIN GANLEY: I would say that building of community through multimedia, society connections, podcasts, author interviews, article-based graphical abstracts, things like that actually, I think that is what a lot of journals and editors need to be thinking about beyond just the specific content to potentially mitigate that. But I don't think we have an answer yet, for sure.
DUSTIN SMITH: Not a solved problem. And we'll go 200 rounds on this with Google and the others before it's all done. Who else? Anybody? Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE],, American Chemical Society. I can just move on. So with the transition to these new tools and pulling out data from marketing, there's still the need to keep the trains running. Oh, thank you. I do platform operations support for marketing. So can you talk about the challenges and successes of keeping the trains running while also laying new track for it?
DUSTIN SMITH: Erin, do you want that one?
ERIN GANLEY: It's a challenge. It's a balancing act. And Tanya, from OUP, is going to talk later. So we could approach her too. But I think it's a constant, ongoing discussion of priorities and return to-- at OUP, return to our society partners. How can we maximize value? But it is-- it's an ongoing challenge. And I think that speaks to the need for cross-functional teams and cross-functional priorities at publishers to make sure everybody is actually on the same page.
ERIN GANLEY: And I think the more tools emerge, the more challenging that's going to be, honestly. And I think that's the balance, right? There's so much potential in these tools. But sometimes, I think we need to slow down to map out the strategy to then move at speed. And I think that's important.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Go ahead. Go ahead, Rory.
RORY WILLIAMS: Oh, I was just going to say, we're actually in the process of that right now, moving contacts over to a new tool. And so what I can say to that is that we're going to continue those other campaigns. And we're still going to utilize the old tools until everybody is completely trained and comfortable. And then once we're at that point, that's when we can start to discontinue some of the older marketing tech that we're using.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, I was going to say, very similar to what you said, Erin, good, old-fashioned road maps, campaign planning, all that prioritization is critical. Because the worst thing you can do is go too fast. And that sounds crazy. You want to be agile. But if you just go at 100 miles an hour and aren't really thoughtful about it-- And then I would say you just have to test the campaigns.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Just because it's old doesn't mean it wasn't working well. So you need to test those campaigns against the new campaigns and make sure the new approaches are working. I'm a very big believer in anything in marketing needs to be tested.
DUSTIN SMITH: Right on time. There you go, Steph. Well, thank you, everybody. Thank you to the panelists. Let's give them a round of applause. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:0 .
DUSTIN SMITH: Well, I'm Dustin Smith from Hum, Co-founder and President. And delighted to be here to have this chat today. It's called Digital to Data. What we're really focused on is the next big shift in scholarly publishing. The last big one, which is a mostly not done deal, but a bit settled, is the shift from print to digital. This is the shift from digital to day-to-day-- sorry to data and AI.
DUSTIN SMITH: We're going to talk a little bit less on the AI portion. The data is actually really quite important here. And what we're really talking about is how do you have a deep understanding of your business and your customers, the people who are interacting with your content, your authors, reviewers, editors, librarians, all of the people in the ecosystem. Data is really reflective of that sort of understanding. So what I'd like the panelists to do is to introduce themselves in just a moment.
DUSTIN SMITH: One more sort of matter of house rules. We're going to have the conversation that we want to have. The panelists can ask each other questions and prompt each other. We can also say we don't want to answer it or answer it later. So we're going to ask whatever questions we want. And it's OK to say no. I'm going to pass on that.
DUSTIN SMITH: But go ahead, Erin. Why don't you introduce yourself?
ERIN GANLEY: 2 everybody. I'm Erin Ganley. I am director of Researcher Marketing at Oxford University Press. And I'm based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
RORY WILLIAMS: Hi, everyone. I'm Rory Williams, the director of communications and marketing at Rockefeller University Press, based in New York.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Hi, I'm Colleen Scollans. I run the marketing and customer experience practice at Clarke & Esposito. And I'm in Montclair, New Jersey.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yes, and part of the OUP mafia, of course.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I am.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yes. Well, Colleen, can you tell us a little bit about the shift from what marketers in the outside world know as B2B to B2C, and what's happening? What is this moment like?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, it's one of high-velocity change, Historically, most publishers have been focused on brand marketing, perhaps some usage marketing, and supporting their sales teams in a B2B environment. But with the shift to open access, really, it's all about author marketing, recruiting authors, engendering author loyalty, understanding your audience, and all the insights and data you can derive from that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And as you said, Dustin, this has been happening outside of our industry for probably 12-ish years. E-commerce companies, particularly, and consumer publications, magazines, newspapers, et cetera, focus a lot of energy and effort on collecting their audience data, and really kind of personalizing and automating that marketing experience.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And our industry is at this moment of inflection. And we see many, many organizations realizing they need to scale up their marketing teams. They need to relook at the technology that they have. And the good news is technology has changed dramatically in the last couple of years. And so lots of different tools. It's easier to kind of be like these e-commerce and consumer media companies.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: We're seeing marketing and analytics teams converging into one. We're seeing digital and marketing teams coming together to really understand what experience means, author experience, reader experience. We're seeing editorial teams being challenged to really be in almost a business development capacity sometimes, going out there--
DUSTIN SMITH: They love that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: --cultivating community. They love that, cultivating community and commissioning. So really, an awful lot of change. And a real moment for marketing to shine, but is a very, very big transformation for many organizations.
DUSTIN SMITH: What does it feel like on the inside? I mean, you're OUP. Been around for a few years. So I'm told.
ERIN GANLEY: A couple hundred.
DUSTIN SMITH: A couple hundred. So what does it feel like being, sort of, sharp tip of the spear on marketing?
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah. It's really interesting is, as the description of this session. It said marketers need to nimbly pivot. And it does not feel that graceful at all. It feels like being kind of facing down a wind tunnel, and trying to react because it's, to Colleen's point, the velocity of the change is the velocity of the new tools, which can be massively beneficial, but you have to-- you scale up and scale up a marketing team to understand how to optimize those, otherwise you're just kind of drifting.
ERIN GANLEY: It's a really exciting time for marketers, I think, because, especially researcher marketers, what we used to call end-user marketers, were used to be really focused on usage. And in OUPs world. Use isn't important because your purchasers are institutions, right? But now marketers have a really direct path to authors because the authors are consumers these days.
ERIN GANLEY: And I think a challenge and also an exciting thing for marketing is the kind of thinking about the change management we talked about earlier. That is something that really has to happen within marketing departments. Because culturally, you need to change what your marketers are focused on. You need to get them up to scale with the new tools. But also marketers are often that kind of pivotal communication point with our society partners at OUP, our editorial staff that we work with internally as well.
ERIN GANLEY: And I think more than ever before, marketing is just one part of a very cross-functional, cohesive piece because if you don't have an editor who's on board with what you need to drive forward, if you do not have a society staff who's on board, you're not going to succeed in this ecosystem that's rapidly changing, and is often changed by things outside of our control.
DUSTIN SMITH: What's an example of a skill or a skill set beyond tool-specific training that the sort of new wave of marketers that you're seeing maybe people on your team?
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah, yeah. I think it's starting to be able to communicate to, let's say, you're working with a journal who has an editorial staff and society staff, communicating the criticality of really specifying what you want to achieve with your journal, for example. Because if you don't have that defined, you're not going to succeed. And making sure that's defined on what type of subject that you want to publish, what type of author you want to publish, what's your approach to diversity, what is your approach to recruiting new society members to be part of that core community.
ERIN GANLEY: So I think, in my perspective, communication and how you're communicating out to your stakeholders is really key.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I would jump in, Erin. I think that's exactly right. But I think the other thing that's interesting is there's all of this data, all of this technology, and that makes you think the hard side of marketing. But actually, messaging has never been more important, branding has never been more important. Authors, like any consumer really use brand as a rubric to make kind of purchasing decisions. Not copywriting, which generative AI can do, I think, but really knowing how you structure your messaging.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And I would say planning, right? It can be really easy to get tools in and just kind of everything is happening at once. And so that foundations of knowing what you should do, why you should do it, what the goals are, what the metrics. And then, I would say testing and optimization is really, really important, too, and you can do that at scale now.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I always say it's silly to think the same message for a journal is going to resonate with every single author. You need to be testing it. You need to be trying different messages and kind of arbitrating those messages in real-time. So testing and optimization skills.
RORY WILLIAMS: Absolutely. I think, just building on what Erin was saying, it is about managing relationships now. Not only with stakeholders but also within the organization. For us, with the move to open access, it really is all hands on deck. And that's what we're seeing. Every single department is contributing to the success of establishing more business cases for open access.
RORY WILLIAMS: And we see examples of that with our manager of sales reaching out to production, working with them to reach out to authors to remind them that they qualify for a read-and-publish deal, and therefore they don't have to pay. It also relates to editors who might be at a scientific meeting, speaking with an author and finding out right then and there if they actually belong to an institution that has a read-and-publish.
RORY WILLIAMS: So for us, that's been the big change. And then training your team to not only just work within the department but also to have relationships beyond communications and marketing is extremely important.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yes.
DUSTIN SMITH: So, Rory, haven't you gone recently through a sort of value proposition exercise for individual journals?
RORY WILLIAMS: Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
DUSTIN SMITH: Can you just talk about what that's like? And how receptive are the editors?
RORY WILLIAMS: OK, so I should actually also take a step back and give credit to where credit's due. The author outreach and author marketing and manuscript recruitment, that's been going on for years, at least for Rockefeller, with our scientific editors. We have professional editors in-house who go out and recruit manuscripts. So they'll go to site visits. They'll go to scientific meetings. They work with us directly on marketing campaigns, pulling together special collections.
RORY WILLIAMS: They have input. And full disclosure, too, we use Hum for data enrichment, as well as inbound campaigns as well, and editorials involved in that. So not only have they been very directly involved in the messaging but also in the efforts that were engaged in,
ERIN GANLEY: I think that goes back to what Colleen was saying about brand. And also what you were saying, Rory, about setting expectations, which is also about setting expectations with your authors and understanding what is important to them as a more narrow cohort. Is it speed to publication? Well, your editors have a heck of a lot to do with that, your editorial teams have a heck of a lot to do with that.
ERIN GANLEY: And understanding that, as much as I wish marketing was the solution to everything, it's really the on the ground author experience, and Colleen has written a lot about this, that is so important. We can have the most targeted, beautifully scripted marketing campaign, but if the author has an unfortunate experience with the journal, like that is the thing that's going to stick with them.
ERIN GANLEY: So I think author experience and retention is more important than ever, really.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And I think relationships, particularly if there are authors that are on your wish list to have commission for you. Authors publish with editors they trust. Relationship building and community building is really important, sort of like the roles you have in-house Rory, really, really important. I think we're going to see this. How does marketing and editorial work together in a kind of harmonious way?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And I think there's going to be just as much change in those editorial roles as in the marketing roles.
DUSTIN SMITH: Colleen, do you want to borrow some apostasy from the B2B software-as-a-service sort of template of how you actually market and then sell software? And is that applicable for --
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, I certainly think that it is. We're starting to see editorial teams, and here, I'm largely talking about in-house editorial teams, wanting to understand. So they're doing the research in their bibliometric tools, they're finding the authors that they're interested in reaching out to at conferences via email throughout all the ways that they're doing that. But they're looking to see how that author has engaged in the B2B way.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: When you read a white paper for software, that sales rep knows, and they follow up with you. And so, we are seeing editorial teams wanting that kind of data, almost like marketing's lead-gen for them, lead generation, in different kinds of ways, right? Oh, this author that I'm really, really interested in took this webinar that marketing created. OK, that's a really good entry point for me to send an email, or meet them at coffee at this event, or another type of event.
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah. And I think that also speaks to the need for marketing to exist at different points in the author journey, right? Because it's very rare that you're an author, you receive an email, and you're like, right, I have a manuscript ready to send out.
DUSTIN SMITH: In the can.
ERIN GANLEY: Right? I mean, that would be amazing. But it's not, right? So you have to have that kind of awareness. These are the benefits of the journal. Like it's in their mind, they've had good experience, they've heard from colleagues that they've had good experiences. So you're building that brand reputation. But it all has to happen at once.
ERIN GANLEY: And I think that goes to Colleen's point about planning. Like you really can't have a linear marketing campaign anymore. You need to have always-on campaigns. And we piloted some work with Hum about user behavior on the platform. And it's been really great because you're able to hyper-target, but also you're moving beyond your set community.
ERIN GANLEY: You're moving to a potential authors. Not necessarily authors you know or already in the scholarly community, but you can really-- if your goal is diversity of authorship, you're getting out of that echo chamber, , you're reaching authors and reviewers, actually, when they're consuming the content. And that's a really important part of that, the wider ecosystem, I think.
RORY WILLIAMS: That predictive aspect is really exciting. Absolutely. I think also just investing in the technology to be able to reach authors at these different touch points. I mean, we're in the process of implementing the technology, so I can't say that we're totally there yet. But we're working to gradually get there so.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah. And I would say it's technologies, right?
RORY WILLIAMS: Yes. There's a whole--
DUSTIN SMITH: Hum does everything. Excuse me. [LAUGHTER] I'm just kidding.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, it's a whole stack. And to Erin's really, really good point, we often encounter organizations that have invested in tools and are using maybe 1/10 of their capability. So it's the right tools for the right organization that's going to be optimized, and you're going to be able to measure success from, I think, is really, really important.
DUSTIN SMITH: I mean, even within our class of software, we see an average customer a year on, and they're still basically unlocked 40 the capabilities, and it's just because there are many different use cases across the enterprise.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah. I think the thing I call out too is what's really changed, I think, with technology is, it used to be you had these large systems, these monolithic systems. And to a certain degree, they can do--
DUSTIN SMITH: Would that be like a Salesforce? Just to put a sharp point on it.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: That could be a name. Could also be AMS systems, right? If you were a society--
DUSTIN SMITH: Hideous class of software.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, as a class of software. And they can do some of the things that these modern technologies can do, but they can take 18 months to implement. And we're in a phase where I think agility is really, really important, right? You need to be able to get to value quickly and have an iterative roadmap of what you're going to do with your technology.
ERIN GANLEY: Yes, absolutely. And I think there's something there about, again, like a resource because, for example, it has amazing capabilities. But as a marketing organization, how do you move resource, right? I'm sure we would all would love to hire 100 marketers, but I certainly would, but that's just not the reality. So how do you optimize the tools that you have? And also, how are you constantly assessing and refining your approaches?
ERIN GANLEY: And that's not just on-platform marketing, it's also email marketing, it's also conference attendance, and making sure you're maximizing that and understanding where you need to shift budget, you need to shift resource, you need to, as Colleen was saying, do you need to actually have a closer tie between your data analysts and your marketers, your platform, and product folks and your marketers. And my answer would be yes.
ERIN GANLEY: I think you do more than ever.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I would say 95% of the organizations we work with end up changing their organizational design, tweaking it, optimizing it. Because very few organizations are currently structured to meet these new use cases, these use capabilities. And Erin and I used to work together. So I know we think very similarly about this. But you can't fragment things in the way you used to if you want to have that cohesive experience. And I think the thing I would say is, for most publishers, you identify maybe 10% of your audience, right?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And part of what we also have to be doing a much better job, as Erin said, is identifying communicating with people. Even if we don't know who they are, you still can know an awful lot about them.
DUSTIN SMITH: Rory?
RORY WILLIAMS: I was just thinking about what Erin was saying about having to hire hundreds of marketers, right? And just thinking back to the earlier proposal that some of us will-- in white collar positions will lose their jobs, right-- so thinking about how AI will assist you. You don't have to hire hundreds of marketers at this point. There are different platforms now, MarTech platforms, that are racing to get AI implemented.
RORY WILLIAMS: So you don't have to go back to ChatGPT, and hope that you're entering the right phrase, and that your colleague is also entering this the same phrase. Instead, it's actually embedded within the platform itself.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, it puts pressure, I think, on the more strategic sides of marketing, right, knowing-- if you've got really good value propositions and a really good segmenting strategy, then whatever AI tool you're using, it can dump out really good copy. Right? But if you don't have the fundamentals, you don't-- and it's not about the big idea, right? It's about structuring it around values and values, what you value-- because values matter-- and value propositions-- what you're giving the person you're trying to sell something to.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: If you don't have that fundamental stuff, the AI is kind of useless, right? You've got that fundamental stuff, the AI can be tremendously efficient.
DUSTIN SMITH: And there are things like playbooks and templates, which are unsexy and crude technology. But they do work.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: They do, very much so.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah. We dunked on AMSes, probably not enough. Because it's a terrible class of software that should die.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Terrible.
DUSTIN SMITH: Could we pick out any other classes that are, say, unready or difficult to work with as you think of a data integration strategy, and then maybe on the flip side, ones that are particularly well-suited to the data integration and getting your data off those platforms?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I think I wouldn't say that they're ill-suited. I think what's happened--
DUSTIN SMITH: EJP is--
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Oh, author submission systems-- 100%. Thank you, Dustin.
DUSTIN SMITH: Sure, no problem.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I was going to say, on the marketing technology--
DUSTIN SMITH: I was like, please die on that hill.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Author submission systems are clunky. And they need to be, in my opinion-- I think back to how application management systems used to be one system, and now they're kind of atomized. It shouldn't all be in one system, right? The email should not be in SCHOLAR-1, or EJP, or whatever submission system you use.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: That should be in a best in class email server that connects with APIs. 100%, AMSes and author submission systems are ill-fitted for what we need to do today. And we need to solve that. I thought where you were leading is on the marketing automation platforms. And the point that I was going to make is these tools grew up 15 years ago.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: They sometimes can be Frankenstacks of lots of different acquisitions put together without the ability to integrate core data. And so you can have these automation tools-- Erin and I have lived this-- and you can't actually segment. The number of marketing teams we work with that will say, the data is there-- and then the marketer will say, but it takes me two days, four days to segment.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: That doesn't work.
DUSTIN SMITH: There are still people in big publishers that that's their job, like a human computer back in the '50s, like people who actually build segments and email them to people.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: You should be able to build a segment in under a minute. Now, thinking about your segmentation strategy is very, very, very hard. But the actual building of the segment should be very, very quick.
DUSTIN SMITH: I want to take this opportunity to shout-out to both Silverchair and Cadmore for being kick-ass in terms of getting data off their platform. Because that's not their primary job, effectively. It's a delivery platform. And it's really great. And there's the continuum all the way back towards the AMSes, which should fall off into the ocean. Sorry, strong opinions, but we've had to go down that road.
DUSTIN SMITH: I'm wondering if we could shift gears a little bit and talk about some of the other parts of the ecosystem. And particularly over the past 10 years or so, as organizations have been reckoning with open access, there's been the move towards syndication and trying to get your content in as many places as possible. In this new world of data and trying to build audience relationships, how do you think your way through those sort of things?
DUSTIN SMITH: And let's talk some ResearchGate too. So Rory, that's-- you're up, buddy.
RORY WILLIAMS: Sure, yeah. So we have syndication partnerships with ResearchGate as well as PubMed Central PubMed Central is the larger user of content. ResearchGate-- not as much. But we also haven't sent as much content to ResearchGate at this point. They don't have as much. And what we found is, still, users prefer the Silverchair site.
RORY WILLIAMS: They still prefer our site. But I think if-- should I speak specifically?
DUSTIN SMITH: You can say whatever you want.
RORY WILLIAMS: Well, with PubMed Central, it's difficult because of the data that they actually provide. It is not-- because it's in line with the privacy policy of the NLM, you can't really get the same kind of granularity that you can get from ResearchGate now that they have their journal home pages, right? So that's a kind of new feature. I don't know if I'm really-- should be actually explaining what it does.
RORY WILLIAMS: But it, in essence--
DUSTIN SMITH: You basically pay--
RORY WILLIAMS: --gives you a better idea of a deep read, and who could be considered a lead, and that sort of thing. So it's--
DUSTIN SMITH: It's actually lead generation.
RORY WILLIAMS: Yes.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah. I mean, why don't we talk a little bit about-- there was a question at Alps that wasn't fully picked up and addressed. And one of it was the PubMed Central and ResearchGate-like platforms, where your content lives and activity's happening, how do you get data back? And there's also the bigger, gnarlier question of commercial publishers.
DUSTIN SMITH: And Colleen you're, I think, advocating on behalf of societies and commercial deals. So what do you think about the data side of that?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I'm a big believer in data sovereignty. I think it makes sense that the commercial publishers need to collect audience data, digital engagement data, all the data they need to collect. Because they've got use cases that they need to support to do that. Completely great, and they should have the rights to do that. I think we need to move towards-- and I appreciate that it will be difficult to do so-- a world in which the commercial publishers are letting their society partners get back their audience and behavioral data.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And the reason that's so critical is society publishers primarily compete on a community value proposition. It is your community. You have meetings. You have a membership. You have other volunteers, services, et cetera. It is your audience. And your journals are likely a magnet bringing in potential audience, potential eyeballs to all your other products and services.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And it's your data. And so having worked at a really big publisher, I appreciate that it is bringing together legal, and information security, and your technology team. But I think it's incredibly, incredibly doable to do. There's no GDPR violations to do it. There are now, with asynchronous web tags, no platform slowing down issues. There used to be when you were afraid to put too many tags on your websites.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I think the blockers are slowly going away. And I-- so I'm--
DUSTIN SMITH: Have you had success on behalf of any of your society partners?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: There's walls. There are walls.
DUSTIN SMITH: You're working on it?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: It's on my blog post queue.
DUSTIN SMITH: I'll bet it is. Erin, can you talk a little bit about how societies are coming to this and the extent to which they're looking to you to lead this kind of new wave of marketing versus making specific requests when Colleen's maybe not in the picture, beating down your door or climbing over the wall?
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah, I mean, I think-- I mean, to Colleen's point, I don't think-- I can only speak on OUP's behalf. It's not a nefarious gatekeeping. I think it's, truly, we don't have the systems in place to easily pass that data on. And I think from a society perspective too, to that point about planning again, you need to think about what actions you're going to take from that data as well.
ERIN GANLEY: Because I think we've all been in analysis paralysis before, right? And this is the point, right? There's so much data out there that you really need to have a plan to go forward. I mean, as far as interacting with societies, I think we have some really, really savvy societies. And we have some folks, depending on their discipline, that are-- it's a lot more getting them up to speed on what actually happens in a read and publish deal.
ERIN GANLEY: How does that work? How is OUP shifting their sales and marketing strategy to support this massive shift? It's just a completely different business proposition than it was even five years ago. And so there's a lot of educational and informational discussions with folks about the whole environment. And in marketing specifically, I think there is a lot of communication, expectation setting needing to be done that email is essentially like a cold call at this point if you're just emailing a certain segment.
ERIN GANLEY: And we know there's Gartner Research. Email engagement is dropping. So if you are using those sort of channels, you really need to make it resonate with your recipient. And I think that's why it's exciting that we have some new tools there to try to already have-- if we're going to go back to the sales analogy-- some warm leads, right? We know there's interest there already if we know this person has read a couple of articles on this specific topic rather than they've just signed up for your email table of contents alerts, which is great, right?
DUSTIN SMITH: Go get 'em. Go get 'em.
ERIN GANLEY: It's an indicator, but it's not there yet. And I think that's where both marketers, and societies, and editorial offices need to be ready to be agile and to be able to experiment over the next couple years. Because it's-- I hate that term "unprecedented," but it is. It's true, it's a very unprecedented time in our industry, I think.
DUSTIN SMITH: Rory, what are some experiments you're excited about? Things you're hoping to take a crack at over the next couple years?
RORY WILLIAMS: Oh, well, yeah--
DUSTIN SMITH: Where to start?
RORY WILLIAMS: So some of the experiments that-- well, I should back up by saying that, first, using Hum, we've been doing a lot of test campaigns, which have a lot of promise. But I think that we need to put some other technology in place to actually nurture those relationships with the authors, right? So that's what I'm most excited about.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah. How are you feeling and maybe channeling some of the smaller societies? You're fully independent, obviously. I mean, how are you feeling about this kind of next five years, and competing and thriving in this digital ecosystem?
RORY WILLIAMS: Absolutely, I think, for the next five years, publishers like us, we have three titles. We also co-publish the Life Science Alliance-- it's another journal-- with Cold Spring Harbor and EMBO. And that's an example of a successful partnership between several publishers. This is a journal that's now self-sustaining, and for all intents and purposes, a great example.
DUSTIN SMITH: Colleen, can you talk about, maybe, leading lights? And I don't know if you would consider Frontiers one of those. But there's a class of new entrants, born away folks, who's doing it really well. And what aspects might we look up to?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I think what Frontiers does well is they've nailed the author experience piece. So their peer review into what I-- I would call it almost a community platform, a very simple community platform-- is very intuitive. Authors go there because that's where they pay. That's where their metrics are. And they use that to engage authors to create word of mouth marketing-- that, and it's very fast. So I think that they've nailed that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And I did a presentation at CSP, where Julia Kostova was there. And she talked about they measure everything. They measure everything, and they're constantly refining their processes. So I think that they've gotten that right. I think there are organizations who are really investing-- it sounds like you're one of those, Rory--
RORY WILLIAMS: Yeah.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: --these really editorial roles, and training them to really go out there and cultivate community and commissions. There's some players that have made some really, really bold moves. And then I think there's-- we're seeing, I would say in the last 12 months particularly, a lot of publishers wanting to modernize and upskill their marketing department, realizing that this is a transformation, a multi-year transformation.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: They need technology. They need support. They've got roadmaps. And I think they're all leading lights. It all starts with realizing where you need to go. And I think the hard fact that, as an industry, we have grossly underinvested in marketing. And that, historically, has been fine. But it's not probably going to be fine anymore.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And so understanding that and starting to build that roadmap, I think the clients that have started that journey, of course, are going to be ahead of the clients that are starting to come-- or the publishers that are just coming to that realization now, right?
DUSTIN SMITH: Rory, did you have something? No?
RORY WILLIAMS: No, I think she actually summed it up beautifully.
DUSTIN SMITH: Just nailed it?
RORY WILLIAMS: I would also recommend-- and anyone who hasn't read it yet-- The Six Pillars of Author Experience Maturity, , fantastic read.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Oh, thank you.
RORY WILLIAMS: Yeah, this was--
DUSTIN SMITH: This whole panel was a plug for that piece.
RORY WILLIAMS: Yeah, well, I was reading it. And I was just like, this is gospel. I'm going to share it with everybody I know. But yeah, it's-- again, I don't have anything to add.
DUSTIN SMITH: Clark Esposito needs a publishing platform. Rory basically said, I need this to be a permanent object. He has that high of opinion of that piece. So you should absolutely-- we'll link it in the show notes.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, and again, now I feel like I'm plugging. But I think the one on audience engagement is an interesting one as well. Because it gets to the crux of what audience intelligence is and the data that you do need to collect, or should be collecting.
DUSTIN SMITH: I mean, Erin, when you think about things like audience intelligence and building community, how do you-- how do you maybe convey that down to the rank and file? Or how do you build that sort of culture change into the organization?
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to lie, there's been some scare tactics. Like, you really have to say, look at this-- like, look at what is turning open access. Look at our business model, and actually empowering marketers to say, you can make a difference here, actually. Because we can go out and get really good, relevant authors for these journals. And at OUP, we have the luxury of being able to have a stellar reputation, as do all the organizations that are in the audience today.
ERIN GANLEY: And I think that's something that we can't rest on our laurels though. Because we have MDPI and Frontiers, as you said, these digital-born folks, who have the velocity to move faster, whereas it is 500 years old-- and that's great-- at OUP. But there's a bit of bureaucracy there. Though I have to say, I think everybody understands the kind of criticality of marketing support in this shift in the business model.
ERIN GANLEY: I would say over the last five years, that's changed a bit at OUP. But it's really-- I think, again, going back to that clear communication amongst all the stakeholders, both internal and external, and sometimes having difficult conversations, and saying, I can't create a really successful marketing campaign for you unless you tell me what is your development goal for this journal.
ERIN GANLEY: And having those conversations early and often, I think, has led to our most successful relationships with different journals and societies.
DUSTIN SMITH: You guys can get the microphones out. We'll get ready to transition. I mean, Rory, you--
RORY WILLIAMS: Did you want me to add to that?
DUSTIN SMITH: I do. And I also-- I want you to talk a little bit about how you think your way through-- having somewhat recently gone through the transition to open access, how you think about the -
RORY WILLIAMS: I mean, we're hybrid.
DUSTIN SMITH: Hybrid-- hybrid, yes, not fully. Sorry, I didn't mean to mischaracterize. This isn't a character assassination. OK, no, no, go ahead, Rory.
RORY WILLIAMS: No, what I was going to say is, yeah, we're working, right now, on an author-- just a comprehensive author journey map. And about getting everybody aligned, the entire organization on the same page, I think for us, there have already been some really good conversations that we've had so far. And the intent is to have this living document and then share it with the entire staff for their input, and then also come up with ideas.
RORY WILLIAMS: And that's actually where new ideas will start to live. It's like, OK, when you're thinking about a new tactic-- because everybody gets excited about new tools, new ideas, Where can that actually fit within the broader strategy of author outreach and improving author experience? So yeah, I would recommend that. I'm not going to plug the pillars again, but that is the--
DUSTIN SMITH: Get back to the pillars.
RORY WILLIAMS: --one of the pillars. And yeah, so that's--
DUSTIN SMITH: Colleen, do you have a public template for journal value proposition strategy stuff?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: No, we don't have a public template for it, but I'll think about it.
DUSTIN SMITH: I mean, put it on the list. Because apparently, that's what the people want. Do we have-- are we ready for questions? Oh my gosh, this is great.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Alison Belan, Duke University Press. And I'm going to go back to the earlier part of the conversation where you were talking about needing to skill up around author experience, author relationship management, sending editors out to build communities and commission things. And it struck me that when you're saying editors-- figuring out editors you need to figure out. That's journal editors. Because what you're describing is very similar to what book editors have always done in defining a list, developing it, evangelizing it, building community around it, and acquiring authors for it, and then making sure those authors come back.
AUDIENCE: And so it struck me that maybe, for that first decade, for print to digital, the push was to send all the journals people over to the book side of the house to tell them how to do all the new, fancy, right things. And I'm wondering if you're seeing the opposite happen with this, which is book practices migrating into the journal side of the house. And then a related question to that is that's also the most expensive part of book publishing.
AUDIENCE: Because you're throwing out a ton of leads and a ton of relationship management. And you never know what's going to come back and how it's going to pay off. And are those economics going to be the same on the journal side? And can OA support it?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I think-- I'll go first. I think it's a really interesting point about book editorial. And you're 100% right. And it actually hasn't been something that struck me before. But I think there might be some talent in the organization. You know, I don't think you need large amounts of people, necessarily, on the editorial team doing this.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: It's about really selective recruiting. It's about very, very good bibliometric analysis to know the authors you want. And as Erin said, it's about a marketing program that's warming up those leads so that you can be really efficient and have a very small number of people doing that. And then, there are things, I think, when-- there are toolkits and appropriate training your volunteer editors can do as well.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Acts of-- we use the word "ambassadorship." I think, Erin, you use that word too, right? Maybe I got it from you back at OUP-- and really getting them to help as well. So it doesn't have to be-- I think we often hear, oh my goodness, I must need to scale to compete with the Frontiers or an MDPI. I don't really think it's about numbers. I think it's about that right strategy and messaging.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And it sounds like you're [Rory] doing it with a modest--
RORY WILLIAMS: Yeah, and you know, I think it is important to have a proper strategy in place. Because you can be doing a lot of outreach, and you could be getting a lot of submissions. And a lot of those submissions might be rejected. So your campaign, instead of increasing the stature of the journals and really supporting its mission, is instead just piling on workload onto professional editors and peer reviewers. So yeah, that's how I would kind of frame that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Can't stress enough the importance of good bibli enough. Know who you want to be an author. And that should be a very targeted list--
ERIN GANLEY: Yeah, I agree.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: --for the personal outreach.
DUSTIN SMITH: Who's next?
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thanks so much. Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. I'm trying to tie together a couple things in this question, so it's kind of put bluntly to you. Are readers now the product that you deliver to authors? And what are the implications of the way that you're reconceptualizing your marketing for the way-- or more general question about the way readers are conceptualized?
AUDIENCE: Because I'll admit-- and those of you who know some of my writing on privacy will not be surprised that it's interesting to me to hear that the value proposition out of syndicating to NLM is less because of their more strict user data privacy policies, and ResearchGate better, presumably because of less strict. Now I want to posit, I'm not saying anyone's doing anything illegal.
AUDIENCE: I'm asking around the ethics of this, right? So broadly conceived, what is this doing with your reader relationships as you conceptualize your marketing to being so author-focused?
DUSTIN SMITH: Do you want me to take the body blows on that one?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I'm happy to. But if you want to start, whoever.
DUSTIN SMITH: Part of it is-- one of the things we talk about all the time is that your readers are the same people as your authors, and your editors, and your reviewers. And really, what this is about is trying to cultivate an ethical relationship with people. One of the things in the old world, where you have this sort of blindness or monastic privacy, is you email the living bejesus out of everybody. And I'm not-- most people don't like that.
DUSTIN SMITH: So I think the broad mission here is to-- how do you build ethical and consented relationships with people? So Hum, for instance, is blind to people who haven't opted in and given consent. And I think that's part of the bigger project and that sort of reorientation. But I mean, feel free to take the question as you will.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, I think consent is really important. I would argue that some of the historic marketing practices have not been very reader-friendly, to your point. There's been spam. There hasn't been effective targeting. Ultimately, if you're doing your marketing appropriately, you're showing the readers things that they're more interested in. And they've consented to that happening. And most people are fine with that.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: But you have to-- I think you have to just have the right privacy policies, the right consent management. And the goal has to be giving them stuff that they really want to see. They were going to see ads anyway, right? It's just, now, that they're a little more targeted.
RORY WILLIAMS: And if you had seen Monday's release notes too, we just implemented CookiePro on Silverchair as well. So now people who visit the site, they have the ability to choose which cookies-- they have the ability to opt in, or opt out, or opt out of all of them. So they do have the choice.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Mm-hmm. I mean, sometimes, we'll talk to people, and they'll be afraid of the privacy consent. And then they'll tell me their customer database is in Excel, right? In some ways, these new systems protect the customer data. They pseudo-anonymize it. They hash out information. The customer is in control of their consent. They can see what's captured.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: In some ways, it's actually better than the old paradigm.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah, and reduce reliance on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, where people will pixel the site and then just kind of turn around. But that's third party data streaming off to another platform. But thank you for the question. And we appreciate hard questions. Who's next?
AUDIENCE: Hey, thanks for the great panel. This is Jay Patel with Cactus. So I mean, we all know Google and social media already changed the relationship between publishers and their readers. And large language models and chat bots are going to change it even more. Because now I can go to Google, and Bard will answer a question that I ask. And the likelihood of a reader finding that answer and clicking on a link, a source, is going to go down further and further as the chat bots get better.
AUDIENCE: How are you planning to address this-- oh, and the drop in traffic?
DUSTIN SMITH: Are you asking anybody in particular, or everybody?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Can you summar-- yeah.
DUSTIN SMITH: Try to summarize the question.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah.
DUSTIN SMITH: So effectively, as Google Bard and internet connected LOMs or chat bots become more powerful and provide, effectively, answers or summaries--
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: What it does to discoverability.
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah, what it does to discoverability. And how do you cope around that, probably up to and including, what sort of experiences do you create directly on your own platform to provide relevant alternatives?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, I don't know if there's any easy answers to that. I think what you just alluded to, Dustin's part of it, making your platform a compelling experience and a must-go-to destination, creating your marketing so it's not just a regurgitation of a lay summary, that there's actually some interest and some context to it, author interviews.
ERIN GANLEY: I would say that building of community through multimedia, society connections, podcasts, author interviews, article-based graphical abstracts, things like that actually, I think that is what a lot of journals and editors need to be thinking about beyond just the specific content to potentially mitigate that. But I don't think we have an answer yet, for sure.
DUSTIN SMITH: Not a solved problem. And we'll go 200 rounds on this with Google and the others before it's all done. Who else? Anybody? Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE],, American Chemical Society. I can just move on. So with the transition to these new tools and pulling out data from marketing, there's still the need to keep the trains running. Oh, thank you. I do platform operations support for marketing. So can you talk about the challenges and successes of keeping the trains running while also laying new track for it?
DUSTIN SMITH: Erin, do you want that one?
ERIN GANLEY: It's a challenge. It's a balancing act. And Tanya, from OUP, is going to talk later. So we could approach her too. But I think it's a constant, ongoing discussion of priorities and return to-- at OUP, return to our society partners. How can we maximize value? But it is-- it's an ongoing challenge. And I think that speaks to the need for cross-functional teams and cross-functional priorities at publishers to make sure everybody is actually on the same page.
ERIN GANLEY: And I think the more tools emerge, the more challenging that's going to be, honestly. And I think that's the balance, right? There's so much potential in these tools. But sometimes, I think we need to slow down to map out the strategy to then move at speed. And I think that's important.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Go ahead. Go ahead, Rory.
RORY WILLIAMS: Oh, I was just going to say, we're actually in the process of that right now, moving contacts over to a new tool. And so what I can say to that is that we're going to continue those other campaigns. And we're still going to utilize the old tools until everybody is completely trained and comfortable. And then once we're at that point, that's when we can start to discontinue some of the older marketing tech that we're using.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, I was going to say, very similar to what you said, Erin, good, old-fashioned road maps, campaign planning, all that prioritization is critical. Because the worst thing you can do is go too fast. And that sounds crazy. You want to be agile. But if you just go at 100 miles an hour and aren't really thoughtful about it-- And then I would say you just have to test the campaigns.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Just because it's old doesn't mean it wasn't working well. So you need to test those campaigns against the new campaigns and make sure the new approaches are working. I'm a very big believer in anything in marketing needs to be tested.
DUSTIN SMITH: Right on time. There you go, Steph. Well, thank you, everybody. Thank you to the panelists. Let's give them a round of applause. [APPLAUSE]
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