I’m back from another fantastic Digiday Publishing Summit feeling energized, inspired, and ready for Q4. 💪 Here are some practical takeaways I jotted down after marinating on this year's insight-packed sessions, town halls, and fantastic dinners and conversations with colleagues (and new friends).
1. 📈 Be intentional with traffic. Is this audience at the top of the funnel, or can they be engaged to a registration or subscription?
—Video to Events: Engaging Valuable Online Audiences with Julia Beizer @ Bloomberg
2. The age of free referral traffic is over. Social traffic is falling (or, has fallen) off a cliff.
— Overheard
3. 🧪 Test, test, test. Testing copy, images, and targeting will positively impact the ability to collect 1P data and improve baseline performance.
4. 🤖 Leverage AI and 1P data insights to fact-check your gut-check on which content will drive conversions. The insights may surprise you, and be counter to your initial hypothesis.
— How Business Insider is Using AI to Optimize its Subscription Strategy with Katie Friedman @ Business Insider
5. There is massive cookiepocalypse, and antitrust trial, fatigue. Absent practical solutions, publishers would rather put their attention elsewhere.
— Overheard
6. 📐 To stay focused and maximize impact, stick to a strict prioritization framework and articulate (and stick to) clear requirements before any large product investment.
— How Dow Jones Is Applying AI to Ad Ops with Kedar Prabhu @ Dow Jones
7. 🤝 Be open-minded and clear-headed in AI licensing discussions. Minimum requirements differ from business to business, so have *yours* in your head before you enter the room.
— Ditching the Digital Paywall: A Look at the Time’s Digital Evolution with Mark Howard @ TIME
8. Everyone is a little terrified about the inability to hold AI platforms accountable for, or correct, hallucination.
— Overheard
9. 📣 Audience is splintering, so it's important to know who your audience is, what matters to them, and most importantly — respect their time with your method of communication.
— Creating Community from Fragmented Digital Audience with Jacquelyn L. Cameron @ Axios
10. 🏗️ In a successful, data-informed product strategy, tools and ad products build on each other, becoming more than the mere sum of their parts.
— Using Generative AI, and Other Tools, to Futureproof Business Strategies with Bailey Evans @ The New York Times
