In Pursuit of Reader Revenue, Publishers’ Rebrands Aid the Effort

Last year, for the first time in nearly 15 years, The Economist Group broke from its longtime branding strategy and tapped the creative transformation agency Wolff Olins to overhaul its visual identity, a decision that aligned the legacy publisher with a larger trend transforming the industry. Indeed, The Economist Group is not the only media company taking steps to craft a product that better communicates its value to potential subscribers. In the last year, publishers including The Wall Street Journal, The Verge and The Philadelphia Inquirer have all unveiled redesigns to their product suite. These redesigns were in part to coax readers into deeper relationships with the publishers' products, as doing so builds habit and aids in their larger push to generate reader revenue—from subscriptions, events and commerce—while lessening their reliance on advertising. “The product has to have functionality that is worth revisiting, which over time makes you a loyal customer,” said editor in chief of The Verge Nilay Patel. “Then, down the line, because you have that loyalty, when we ask you to pay for something, you are much more likely to do so.” But the science of converting a reader into a subscriber begins and advances each time they encounter the product, meaning efforts to streamline the process must consider every touchpoint of the consumer experience. And with more publishers competing for reader revenue, branding and design play a critical role in communicating the value of a particular product. From Books to Bookings: Lonely Planet Turns Travel Operator Under Red Ventures Rebranding helps shape market awareness Once recognized purely as a global newspaper company, The Economist Group undertook a rebrand last year in order to recategorize itself as a global media and information services company with four revenue streams. The news publisher sits alongside three other Economist brands: Intelligence, Education and Impact, said Claudia Malley, managing director of Economist Impact partnerships. As part of the rebrand, The Economist sought to expand market awareness that the publisher offered business lines beyond news. “It was a process of balancing the link to The Economist, while also making it clear these were totally separate entities,” said Anj Joseph, strategy director at Wolff Olins, who led the rebranding project. Rather than communicating its suite of products, when The Wall Street Journal rebranded in 2021 it did so to set itself apart in an increasingly saturated news environment, one in which more publishers are vying for reader revenue than ever before. To capture that differentiation, The Journal frequently changes its taglines. Its longstanding partnership with independent creative agency The&Partnership has produced the bon mots “Make Time” in 2015, “Read Ambitiously” in 2017, “Read Yourself Better” in 2019 and “Trust Your Decisions” last year. These changes reflect the need for media brands to adjust their messaging to speak to the era. Compared to legacy brands like McDonald's, which has rested on its resonant “I’m Lovin’ It” tagline for over two decades, the short shelf life of Journal taglines reflects a product whose core premise remains unchanged while its specific language meets the mood of the moment. “There's the massive existential threat of new platforms, as well as the commodification of news and the fact that people have been habituated not to pay for it,” said an industry consultant who declined to be named to preserve relationships with publisher clients. “So if they don't explain why they matter or why they're worth paying for, they will go extinct.” Consumer experiences trumps brand identity Despite the importance of branding, products sell subscriptions, a reality that motivated both The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Verge to recently undertake sweeping overhauls of their core offerings. In September, The Verge unveiled a redesigned homepage whose real-time text feed aims to resemble the timelines readers have come to expect from social platforms. The publisher tackled the project using an in-house team of designers, a decision made possible by the resources available to the Vox Media title and one that allows it to make further iterations to the site with ease. At The Inquirer, under the leadership of publisher and chief executive Lisa Hughes, the 193-year-old newspaper undertook a rebrand that brought all of its surfaces––the print product, app, website and newsletters––into visual consistency. Both redesigns offer two benefits. First, the improved user experience aims to encourage readers to spend more time with the products, building habit that moves them closer to paying for a service in the future. While The Verge lacks a paywall, its new homepage pushes readers to spend more time on the website, where they can sign up for its newsletters and explore companion products like Hot Pod Insider, a subscription podcast product. “We did this rebrand to solve for a better reading experience,” Hughes said. “We wanted every platform to be at its very best. That leads to increased reader engagement, which leads to subscriber and audience growth.” The redesigns also offer visual evidence of a deeper operational shift, Hughes said. When The Inquirer set out to standardize its visual branding, the project afforded the publisher the opportunity to overhaul the process it used to produce the newspaper. The Inquirer worked with a design agency, Pentagram, which drew inspiration from publishers in Europe, to streamline the software and workflow involved in producing a daily newspaper. As a result, the rebrand not only brought an entire suite of products into visual cohesion, it also accomplished the commercial objective of reducing operational costs. Money.com Owner Ad Practitioners Rebrands to Money Group How to rebrand As more publishers diversify their business lines, many provide agency-esque services via their branded content shops like WSJ’s “The Trust,” which has developed branded content for companies including Twitter, Alibaba and Lenovo, or Economist Impact, which offers its clients an array of services including branded content. Low bandwidth makes it hard for publications to use their internal talent or content shops to work on their own rebrands, sometimes pushing them to external parties. “Publishers exist to drive subs and sell ads, and that's a full time gig. So if you're busy making content for Rolex, you have very little time to make content for yourself,” said the consultant. Some publications aim to bring advertising talent in-house, as evidenced by the New York Times hiring former R/GA and Wieden+Kennedy creative Laura Forde to lead its brand creative team, but it's rare that publications design their own award-winning brand campaigns, although Bloomberg Studio achieved some industry recognition from the In-House Agency Forum when it received the trade organization’s 2018 In-House Agency of the Year Award. “This is the paradox: these are organizations that produce world class content, premium journalism, magnificent photography, increasingly great video data visualization—and make shitty, shitty house ads,” said the consultant. Redesigns need to know their 'why' Compared to performance media, which produces immediate results like converting readers into subscribers, measuring the effectiveness of a brand campaign can be challenging. At The Verge and The Philadelphia Inquirer, the redesigns are too new to have produced actionable data, but both publishers have high expectations for the changes. The homepage of The Verge receives more traffic than any other webpage in the Vox Media portfolio, according to the publisher, and the redesign aims to further that lead by upping its number of repeat visitors. The Inquirer, meanwhile, hopes the updated user experience draws readers in more frequently, as well as more effectively converts them into subscribers. The Economist Group measured the effectiveness of its campaign by tracking social platform metrics, and in the first year since its launch, the social reach of Economist Impact grew by five times, according to the publisher. “It is really clear that you need to have a clear proposition,” Malley said. How The Washington Post Topped 6 Million Instagram Followers