Caroline Albanese
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[00:00:00] 

Jeff: Welcome to LaunchPod, the show from LogRocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders.

Today we're talking with Caroline Albanese, product director of data products and capabilities at Dow Jones. Honestly, it was super interesting getting Caroline's insights on

stakeholder groups into editorial. Readers and advertisers and how that drove her award winning innovations in digital advertising products. Why she asked Slate's editorial team to break down where their paychecks came from and how it transformed their understanding of advertising.

And her big reality check moment when an ambitious project early on at Wall Street Journal didn't go as planned. It was a blast chatting with her. So check out our conversation with Caroline Albanese.

Hey Caroline, thanks so much for joining us today. Stoked to have you on the show.

Caroline: Great, thanks for having me. Happy to be

Jeff: Yeah, good. This is gonna be, this'll be a fun one. I think you're in my career parallel a little bit more than other people who we've had on before. So this would be, this'd be fun.

So I don't think we've had someone who went to college for journalism yet. Yeah. We haven't had a J school [00:01:00] grad. So welcome. You're our first,

Caroline: Happy to be here. Happy to break that glass ceiling for you guys.

Jeff: so I guess that's kind of the first thing I want to jump into is like you went to school for journalism and then pretty much graduated and just got right the hell out of Dodge and straight into project management quickly to product marketing.

And then, within two years you were in product management. So what happened there? What's the story behind it? The quick jumpy jump.

Caroline: I think the story behind it isn't I mean, I wish it was super like this. fabulous and crazy things happened. And I was like living the dream, but really I graduated. And while I was in college, I was the science and technology editor of my student newspaper. Then I was the managing editor and that experience led me to doing a lot of local reporting on local businesses, a lot of tech startups especially just in the financial sector.

So when I graduated, I was doing a lot of freelance just in the technology side. I did everything from video game reviews to ad tech conferences where Joe Jonas was there and things like [00:02:00] that. Like I was very much a I'll do anything, very scrappy young journalist. And what I kind of realized was, is that while this was interesting, I had a lot more interest in how things were actually working behind the scenes.

Just doing all the interviews with folks who were building products or folks who were developing products. And so one of my, I guess, clients at the time, one of the, one of the websites that I wrote for, they were looking on the backend for project coordinator and it was a website called the dotas.

I don't even know if it's around anymore so I was hired by them to be a project coordinator, which is basically just like entry level gopher position where whatever they needed, I was just there to kind of help them.

And it worked out for me because I needed health insurance. I was still trying to live on my own, get my first like true salary job. And freelance was just incredibly hard to live off of. And my. Boyfriend at the time now husband was also a reporter. So it's basically like someone needs a job.

And so for me, it aligned with my interest where I always loved writing and I [00:03:00] always had that journalistic mindset, but I have always been interested in like how things work and how to make things work better. And even in my writing, even my reporting and very much had that kind of slant of but what does this product do?

And why does it do it this way? And how is it impacting people? So kind of taking that into project And the project lens, working with the engineers, working with the mark on team, because I had that writing and communications ability, the head of marketing at the time was like, are you interested in product marketing?

And I was like, does it give me more money? Okay. Like again, like very new, very much okay. And I was very lucky because it was a very small group of folks who just believed in me and kind of saw something in me that I didn't even know existed yet. And through the product marketing job, I kind of saw how my communication ability with the advocate, like being able to advocate for products was so important.

So [00:04:00] after I was ready to kind of leave that job, I was really looking for product management, like really being able to get something soup to nuts. And out the door and being able to advocate for not just like a marcom side but for more of a technology side because The way that things just kind of came together just really helped me and that's what kind of led me to zip after But yeah, like that first job Very much taught me the value of putting Like intention and language behind your skills because On paper, I just looked like an average journalism student, right?

I go for my college paper. I went through the ranks. I have all these bylines, but what I learned in that job was. What were the skills I was gaining in those spaces? I learned how to work with people, I learned how to manage people in some cases. I learned how to get to the core of a problem by asking a lot of very direct and impactful questions.

I didn't waste time because I was so used to working on deadlines. Those things are so transferable. And That as a kid, I was like, I'm good at all these things, but [00:05:00] I was very lucky to have way more senior mentors who were able to teach me how to take those, what felt like raw ingredients and really use them to kind of start forging a path in my early career.

Jeff: I never thought about, but it's a good point that like the kind of, prioritization and focus you need to take to, especially a freelancing career. If you can match that, which is an ability to actually execute and then the writing that's inherent in kind of your background. That's a strong, recipe for success there.

I feel like so many people fall down, maybe they can execute well or they can prioritize, but if you can't communicate that that's where I've seen so many people kind of get, get bottlenecked in their careers. They can do the job well, but if you can't communicate, it kind of really hinders you.

So kind of great combo there. And then you jumped over it to Ziff Davis and into just like true, capital P product management. Now I spent, several years of my early career at a company called TechTarget which was a direct competitor with Zipf about a decade before it looks like you were there.

My takeaway from that, I worked closely [00:06:00] with the product team there and my takeaway from what product management looked like there versus, now and, more recently in my career. The two are almost just completely different jobs. We had a bit of time separating us in those times, but is that kind of what you found like product management in advertising and have a large swath in it at one end of it is not, it's basically just packaging pricing and like ad units and stuff like that.

Caroline: Yes, but I'm so happy I did that because now in my career, I go back to that experience and what I learned all the time, especially being someone who's a lot of the products that I work on to this day have revenue generating aspects. They work very close to commercial. And I do think that PMs who I've met just in my career through networking or through just really interesting talks that lack of being able to connect what you're building to why a business should care about it is always the one thing that's missing from really awesome ideas [00:07:00] and what this position and in that era of a product was still like kind of new in this kind of industry that I was like a weird Frankenstein monster of a sales planner, a project manager, a designer, a pro a product manager where like I had a portfolio of products that I had to oversee and make sure got done.

But it was so intense at that time because it was so focused on direct consumer sales, talking to clients, talking to the sales team, that it gave me so much insight into not just having an idea and making the idea, happen, but once you actually build something, how do you get other people to care?

How do you get other people in some cases buy it? And that is always something that I kind of kept close to my chest because I've had some of my best days at that job and probably some of the worst days at that job. But it was definitely something that really [00:08:00] shaped kind of like my first job was more about, understanding my skills, she said, putting words to things.

This job was like, okay, like big girl pants, you got to learn what it's like to wear a lot of hats, work with a lot of different people and still get things done. And I actually didn't realize how much of a toll that like, took on me until after I left that job and then went into slate.

Jeff: I think what. You described there is kind of so illustrative of, there's a lot of positions in the world where it can be a bit of what you make of it. So if you come in and it's just going to be all right, package ad units and, help work with sales to sell them, you can make it that.

And. Maybe it's table stakes. You keep your job, but there's always these places where there's a lever for maybe career acceleration. And that's where you see through kind of the veil of the easy version of the job and to what could it be and how do you write, you almost take product mindset to the job itself of what is the bigger picture here?

And it sounds like that's what [00:09:00] helped you kind of move from Ziff to slate was, There's so much more to this than just ad packaging. And how can I look through this to, to what we're actually doing and create, value for the company and how does this value to the company kind of thing?

So,

Caroline: And just to add to that, it's, it also taught me the value of appreciating other teams that you work with outside of just technology. And I think that's a really important bit there because Once I was working so closely with the sales folks, I think it's really easy to kind of have this idea of people who work in sales are like, they're there to look pretty and be social.

They're like the cheerleaders and jocks of businesses. Right. But by working so closely with them, I got to see how They would work like some of them will work tirelessly to figure out okay, what is it that you're doing? Explain it to me like i'm four I or I only have 40 seconds to talk to this person What is the most important thing about this product you want me to say to them?

And that put me Almost on the back foot at first where I was like, oh crap. Like how do I talk about this to people? and [00:10:00] that skill has stayed with me forever and just like that like respect where While I may like You know, throughout my career work with folks who are like, Oh, salespeople again, emailing me.

I always kind of have a soft spot of no, they're emailing you because they need you.

Jeff: right. They're emailing you cause they care. Like they want to do this, right?

Caroline: Yeah, otherwise they go rogue and they just say like random stuff and you're like, what did you sell? We don't do that.

Jeff: I've never seen that before in my career. So

Caroline: No, never. Never.

Jeff: well, it, I mean, that's another example, right? Where you can do sales with just. And you can probably even hit your number and be an accomplished sales rep. But then there's the version of the sales rep which is the folks I love to work with who I remember not here at log rocket, but a couple years back in a previous role We had a salesperson who moved up and ended up being a sales director I think almost became a vp at one point But they were also, they worked with product management and we're on literally like cross functional teams that defined our product and how we were growing into new areas and adding [00:11:00] services onto it.

And they would work with customers to understand not just what they could sell now, but what they needed so they could help direct our roadmap and just looking at, right, that's kind of seeing through that role into what it can be to really add value to the company.

Caroline: Yeah, and I, something I've also kind of taken from this job, like from the Zip job in particular, is to this day when we have interns at Dow Jones or we have folks who are either transferring into more like commercial tech products versus like more like enterprise or traditional, you realize how much jargon there is in what does RFP stand for?

Like just these small things. And you realize okay, knowing what these terms mean, and then being able to explain it to folks who are coming in, really helped accelerate your team as well. Like we had a data scientist who came from DC. So he was very used to like, Washington government, like that kind of lingo.

And When he was interviewing, he struggled so much when it came to figuring out where people were asking about it. like, Oh, if [00:12:00] you did this with an RP cause he did understand the jargon, but he had such great skill sets. And so during his interview, people were saying, Oh, he doesn't understand things.

Oh, he's dense. He's that. And I'm like, have we thought that maybe we're the problem?

Jeff: No, it's never us. It's always

Caroline: what I did, so what I did was that before one of his like last ways of presenting the project or whatever that he had to do, I messaged him. I'm like, BT dubs, this is what these things mean. And I think you're getting tripped up. And he emailed me back thank you so much. Let me make some changes.

I feel so much better now. And he knocked it out of the park. We hired him. He's still here to this day and he has now become one of the experts in in the org of having to connect like commercial with like data with data science and it's great to kind of see that where sometimes you just have to give people a little bit more information and then you can really see them sore.

But when you're working in any kind of ecosystem, especially in publishing and media, there's a lot of things that people just [00:13:00] assume everyone knows, but then you talk to a normal person and they're like, what are you talking about?

Jeff: And that is, I mean, education is such. Just vital across orgs, no matter if you are, kind of a smaller, maybe smaller public Zatarra was, years ago when you were there or up to Dow Jones, where you are now with wall street journal and Barron's and market watch and IBD. And just the core piece there is people have to know what they need to know, and I think oftentimes we miss that and we expect, because we spend so much time in our piece of the puzzle, we expect everyone has the same level of context and they don't.

And just, I found so often you take that 30 seconds to just, here's the context. Here's what this means. Here's the background. And you can just see people switch on. And you can also see who doesn't and realize eh, maybe they're not long for here.

Caroline: Totally. And I think one good way to kind of test that internally. If you're like, am I, do I do that? Ask your friends, ask your best friend. Hey, do you know what I do for a living? And see if they're able to tell you. And you can be like a Chandler Bing where [00:14:00] none of your friends know what you're doing and they lose their apartment over it.

Or, you can, you may realize that, Oh, I do talk about my job in a way that other people understand it. And like my friends now know that I do bop, bop, bop for bop, bop. Not just like, Oh, I think she's a lawyer. 

Jeff: It's funny that you bring that up the running joke is that my in laws I've been with my wife for 20 years at this point. And they still don't understand what I do. They only recently understand okay, it's marketing. I get that. 

Caroline: My in laws are international journalists, so I have to be like, okay, you know how you guys write the news and you see those ads. They're like, yeah, I'm the one that helps make that happen. So you get your paycheck. And they're like, Oh, okay.

Jeff: Now, how is that viewed on like the kind of journalist side of it? Because, I remember just, there was always a little bit of tension, even at a tech target where the ads people and the journalists sat across each other and talked. But I mean, I can only imagine, I know [00:15:00] some kind of very purist journalists who, who don't necessarily feel great about ads all the time or something like that.

Caroline: So I think this is a great segue to slate because that was very much I wouldn't say situation that slate, but it was very much how https: otter. ai Slate is a very much like political culture website. The writers were amazing. Everyone was super smart and like really interesting like folks to talk to, but how they moved to an office in Brooklyn and when they were in the old office in Manhattan, everyone was kind of just clumbed together because they were like part of the Graham Holdings company.

They were one of many things when they split off from that and went to an office in Brooklyn. When I started, they had just moved into that office and one side of the office Was sales product tech. Then there was a whole in between us was a whole bunch of conference rooms. And then on the other side was editorial.

We were literally divided by a physical

Jeff: between editorial and [00:16:00] ads.

Caroline: We literally only cross paths in the kitchen sometimes. But what's so funny was that, and I guess this makes sense when you think about writers, you think about folks who are, especially writers at Slate who are so quick witted, who are known for like their slate takes, and are very much intellectuals.

If you talk to these folks on Slack, they would type your ear off. Like they were so active on Slack. And Slack had all these different communities. They had a bachelorette channel where if you're watching the bachelorette, we will be talking about it. A real housewife channel. They had, all the, of course a community corporate the women of the corporate, the parents of the corporate, like those kinds of HR things.

And everyone was so active, regardless of if you were editorial tech or, sales or product, and we would all be friends on the Slack channel. But the second you were like in the hallway, they didn't know you from madam and we all had like our pictures too. So there'll be so many times when I would go to someone and I was like, Oh, Hey John.

And they would look at me like. And I'm like, I'm Caroline. [00:17:00] We were talking today about how like crazy it was that like so and so didn't get the rose and he's oh my God. Yeah.

Jeff: That's hilarious. It's so funny though, how like org design and, but also physical, how you organize people in an office can drive behavior so much. I remember kind of similar to that, like not. We weren't set that way to start, but I was at a startup that was small and we grew over time from 100 to 500 people.

And we moved into a new office. We moved in, from a kind of like startup piece meal together, kind of rented a little bit more and then a little bit more and a little bit more, but we're all crammed in. And oftentimes you had to go, you want an office room and you had to go upstairs to use a meeting room with a team.

Even though you had to go through other sections, but you always knew people, you ran into everyone, you talked to everyone. Like it was a very tight knit company, even though we were kind of very, the office was not very purposefully planned. It was almost like downtown Boston, just like cow paths. We moved to the beautiful new office that we designed from scratch and really moved into on our journey to, what [00:18:00] we hope to be a very successful exit.

And I would say that was where culture almost died because now every team had room to grow into. We each had multiple conference rooms that you know, more than we needed from a standpoint of supply and demand. So, What would turned out was we went from being, sales and marketing and product all crammed together to marketing had a section and then we had buffer for growth, sales had a section and we could see them kind of, but they were like way over there down, down the other side of the building and they had buffer for growth between us.

So there was just rows and rows of dead, empty cubicles. And no one ever left your section because you didn't have to, you had enough conference rooms and it was just the funniest thing was you moved in this beautiful spot and just communication fell off a cliff because you never had to walk through these people anymore.

You never had, there was no accidental water cooler talk. And it was interesting to see just how the physical environment, we don't need a wall necessarily, [00:19:00] but just the physical split can drive such behavior like that. 

Caroline: But what's so funny was that, and I guess this makes sense when you think about writers, you think about folks who are, especially writers at Slate who are so quick witted, who are known for like their slate takes, and are very much intellectuals.

If you talk to these folks on Slack, they would type your ear off. Like they were so active on Slack. And Slack had all these different communities. They had a bachelorette channel where if you're watching the bachelorette, we will be talking about it. A real housewife channel. They had, the women of the corporate, the parents of the corporate, like those kinds of HR things.

And everyone was so active, regardless of if you were editorial tech or, sales or product, and we would all be friends on the Slack channel. But the second you were like in the hallway, they didn't know you from like. madam and we all had like our pictures too. So there'll be so many times when I would go to someone and I was like, Oh, Hey John.

And they would look at me like. And I'm like, I'm Caroline. We were talking today about how like crazy it was that like [00:20:00] so and so didn't get the rose and he's oh my God. Yeah. It's interesting because especially ever since covid I've been always kind of thinking about Working in an office versus working from home and like, how do you maintain culture and community? Because I do think especially as a product manager talking to people and just knowing people Is so much part of your job.

That's like the invisible back work And it's so funny because like you'll hear these product talks being like here's how I generated revenue Here's how we worked with engineers. Here's how we worked with design But they talk about the teams and the org but what they oftentimes don't talk about is did you go to their desk?

You Did you call them on the phone? Did you jet? Or was it all like virtual? But like when you were virtual, were your cameras on, did you ask them about their day? And that kind of, human element is so deeply embedded in being a good product manager. And when I was at Slate and when I was at Ziff, I had a big, Phone like a physical landline children.

They go into the wall. They are in a cell phone. But I had that on my desk. And what I would do is I would call in [00:21:00] some, in this case, I would call Chicago a lot or LA or, sorry, San Francisco and slate. I would call DC and I would call people's landlines. And oftentimes, especially like a new person who just joined, they'll be like, hello.

And I'm like, Oh, Hey, it's Caroline from New York. By the way, I had a question. They're like, why didn't you email me? I'm like, Oh, it's a quick thing. But just. Chatting on the phone, because then, you get them talking. Oh, okay how are you doing? How's your dog? How's your wife? You start knowing these people's voices.

You start knowing who they are outside of the input, outputs, deliveries of their job. And that becomes so valuable down the line. What I was saying before about like understanding what sales does, understanding what media planners do when you're trying to build something and you need, it takes a village sometimes and you need advocacy.

You need expertise. You need folks who have a specific set of skills sometimes to get something that may seem impossible to be actually possible.

Jeff: This has been like a big thing we've talked about internally here, because I think the way we try and look at it is there is [00:22:00] advantage to working remote. Definitely at times, right? If you are doing deep. Especially editorial staff, right at wall street journal, I'm sure is much better off not being in a big, loud, noisy, busy office.

If they're trying to write, a 3000 word article, you need to heads down that and focus, but there's other times where what you're doing calls for collaboration and planning, and you are trying to think through problems or think through a solution and how do you plan for kind of the go forward couple of quarters?

And we've had so many times where we tried to do that on zoom. And jumped off. And a second later, someone made some like throwaway comment that turned into 30 extra minutes where we actually sat down and problem solved a major issue. And that never would have happened in a more kind of regulated zoom focused or virtual focused environment.

So, firm believer that there's work that's great for solo heads down by yourself. There's work that's great physically co located and they're not all the same. So, 

Caroline: when it comes to it adaptability and like what works best for like individuals. I've worked with a couple of folks [00:23:00] who have, because one thing that virtual does offer that I always have to remind folks is the accessibility aspect. And that we have, I've worked with some incredibly brilliant people, but.

I've also worked with folks who are just as brilliant, but they have disabilities, or they had mobility problems, and they could not physically come to an office. But what they did was that they made those virtual calls, those call ins, so valuable that, we adapted to them. And I think it's not like one way or the other, but I do think, You never want to throw the baby out with the bath water with a good idea.

But I also think it's like being open to flexibility and adaptability and just always being really key on what am I trying to get out of this conversation working with these folks, like very goal oriented, regardless of the communication style. You're, you can get there. It's just being open to the fact of there may be folks who can't do certain things, and if you meet them where they are they'll find you, and you can probably get a [00:24:00] lot more done with them than if you were just, write them off.

Jeff: Exactly. Now, so this kind of brings us to when you got to Slate. And I think kind of, we started to get this and then we went down a different track, but you all had an interesting take on kind of stakeholders at Slate. Cause I think a lot of publications can get lost in either a, we want to be journalistically pure or B, we want to sell ads and optimize dollars per view per page view.

And oftentimes I've seen that there's not a great balance there. But the team at slate, you all named kind of three major stakeholders, right? You had it was a great editorial product. It was, you had to worry about your readership and it was also ad. So you had to sell ads to support the business and kind of having that tripod I think what probably helped you guys produce what ended up being a strong, enduring business.

But how did you get there? What was the basis for kind of that balance and thought? Yeah,

Caroline: at Slate, we worked really hard on Like a complete overhaul [00:25:00] of the website of how we were collecting data, how we were using that for both audience of like, how does the audience, interact with our feeds? How do things like programmatic advertising work?

How could things like custom content work? And we realized that there, everything kind of came down to those three things that you had laid out. And The biggest thing that we kind of had was this hurdle of we know that editorial is important. Like we know that without editorial, we don't have a product, but does editorial know where their paychecks come from?

Jeff: Okay.

Caroline: the input of your salaries and they, thinking of the average salary at a corporate job and we're asking They're like ads sure like frowny face, but then they're like it must mostly come from subscriptions and membership, right?

Everyone's giving us money. Everyone is like paying for us and we have this quality journalism. [00:26:00] And so I realized that while product and technology and sales understands the value of editorial, they don't understand the value of advertising not because they didn't want to but because they're thinking it's coming from somewhere else and it's not that somewhere else is more or less important.

It's that they don't understand like the actual like scale of it all because it's not their job. So what I did with them was is that I told my, okay, we have this many subscribers. These people pay X amount of money a month. If you think of it as like a pot, this is all the money we get. And they're like, oh, that's not that much.

Cause you have to think about, your salary, everyone else's salary, like the rent of the building. And I'm like, yes. But here's what one advertiser can give us for just one campaign and it's like over two million dollars over three and that's just one advertiser and we have many of these advertisers running over years willing to spend over millions of dollars just to reach just to be on the [00:27:00] journalism that you are on.

And their jaws slacked. Whoa. And I'm like, exactly! That is why you are important, because they, these, the AT& Ts of the world, the T Mobiles, the Campbell Soups, whoever was advertising with them at the time, are paying real big money to be featured alongside your content, or your articles, or your news And that's really the majority of where your salary comes from.

I mean, there's other things as well, of course, like we're running a business, but that's kind of how I broke it down for them. And they were like, no one's ever actually done that for us before. I'm like, really? They're like, yeah, I'm like, we're not business reporters. We're like reporting on this, that and the other thing.

But once I said that to them, they were so much more on board. They were so much more like excited. They understood kind of back to what we're saying before, like telling your best friends, like, how does your job work? They could then tell their colleagues did you know that every page, you, they actually just sell ads based on that.

And if we get a lot of folks like reading on it. So we're like a really like high ranked. We're [00:28:00] valued more. And it actually later on helped them in union conversations. They came to their own salaries because they were able to work with advertising down the line to say, Hey, my work has this much money associated with it.

So again, it's like that exercise at the time felt totally off the mark of what we were trying to do in the meantime, but it had such impact because it just brought people together to understand, we're on the same page.

Jeff: It's so fine because it sounds like a very kind of, publisher publication industry or focused problem, but you're running the same problem in almost any software business where it is just not writers. Maybe it's. Engineers are like, why do we need sales? Can't we just do product like growth or the product is so good?

It just sells itself. Or why do we need, marketing? If it's good enough, if we have the best product it will, people will find it and pick it. And it's interesting because we've had, we're a business that has engineers involved in our marketing quite a bit, and they've, they've Across the board, all kind of come back from doing that for a little [00:29:00] bit and gone I never realized how much went into this and how, it's not just the best product wins.

It's, you need the best product, but you also need to distribute it. You need to tell people about it in the right way that resonates with them. You need to help people understand, what it is. And everything is just contextualization. I've realized, whether you tell them how the business works .

What people care about. So you can build the right product or, in your guy's case, like how does slate make money and how does your check happen?

Caroline: Yeah. And honestly and it was a kind of question because given the environment, like of like the editorial, like they were very used to asking these the slate pitch, the controversial Hey, what are we asking the right question? So when I threw that to them I kind of met them where they were like, Ooh, where does my check come from?

Okay. Like I'll meet you there. And so it kind of allowed us to work together in a way that I was kind of speaking their language. Back to what I was saying before of kind of understanding how to work with different people, what they care about going. I mean, this has been something that I've carried on in my career to this day of who are you with?

What [00:30:00] do they need? to hear and what do you need to give them to get them to do what you need them to do? Oftentimes it could be information. It could be trust. It could be data. It could be Just like a better attitude like sometimes it's not just like physical like I gave you a cookie You give me like something else It's very much like what can I do to be of service to others so they can be of service to me?

Jeff: And then it seems like this kind of rationale of, or a tripod of the three important stakeholders of the business led to a fairly strong. revamp of how you all looked at ads, because I mean, you made some obvious choices, right? Like we're not going to have videos, audio autoplay and make a ton of noise, which is just horrible.

And I'm glad that pretty much across the board, it's gone away, but also, the obvious, we're going to have advertising notice at the top of ad units, but then you add some of that kind of Less obvious things like we're not going to have ads running down the right hand side we're going to do ad insertion logic based on Word count [00:31:00] versus paragraph count so that you don't get like weirdly spaced ads It's just either too heavy or just huge run and then tons of ads really close together but where did some of that come from?

Like what was their user research that went into that? Was there? Product research, like how'd you kind of ascertain this is how we support our business from a reader's editorial and ads standpoint,

Caroline: So at the time our product team had this analytics person, like she was just purely analytics. \ like obviously data, but she had come from the Obama campaign and like the democratic campaign she was in DC. So she was very used to using user data to literally find people where they are and meet them.

Where they are to get them to do what you want. In some cases vote, in some cases register. Like she was very much like used to that kind of thinking. And when we were doing the redesign. She actually used the the Adobe analytics, that same kind of mindset of what is the hottest part of the page?

What [00:32:00] is the most valuable word count? When do people actually, like, how many people complete articles? How many of our users get halfway through? And looking at she kind of explained it as if you think of a page piece of an article as like a heat map. What is the hottest parts?

And if I'm an advertiser, I want to be where the eyeballs are because that's probably where the most interactions happening. They're probably the most understanding and seeing things. She also implemented a lot of because we had a very like Active membership, like subscriber base that we're very much open about getting feedback.

We did a lot of just like user interviews, which is probably the first time at a publisher I've done that, which is readers and not just advertisers, which was fantastic because we had this oasis of users who were ready, willing and able to go on test pages and we would record them using software and they were just like.

Talk out loud of like, I can't find it. Whoa. What's that ad? it's like, Oh, this is advertising. And it helped [00:33:00] us question our assumptions, which is huge. And she kind of took us like, like I said, like kind of similar to how I had with journalism, like kind of taking that like writing skill and applying it to product.

She had done something with the political, like outreach work that she had done and brought it into publishing. And it was fantastic. And it really helped us, to, Think about our advertising in a different way, but also think about our users in a different way, not just thinking of them as like folks we need to pay, but folks who we are serving, and What we were able to also do is to kind of take those stories to our advertisers, like this is why you want to come to us, this is why you want to buy with us because we are doing all this so we know that when they interact with your ad, with your content, with your whatever, they know what they're getting into and they are like very likely to convert, very likely to open a bank account, do something, and it ended up being true because of course when they would leave our sites and they would then convert, it really helped those kind of lead gen products too.

So it was like [00:34:00] fantastic that we were able to really do that and to this day I think it's probably one of the coolest projects we've done and I know that other corporations have like kind of taken that with like their first party data and stuff, but at the time it felt like very new and exciting.

Jeff: and also impressive to be able to create something that readers like better and advertisers like better all at the same time. Yeah,

Caroline: like a very independent publisher, very small, very scrappy. So to be able to make such leaps in how folks were thinking of user experience and revenue and working together was really cool. And I think that really helped me when I went to Dow Jones, but it also burnt me out and I actually left Slate because I was burnt out and, I was in a meeting with I think it was the client.

Maybe it was, I can't remember, but they were going through some like revisions on something. And I just had this like real realization I can't do this anymore. [00:35:00] That's, that was the backhand of being so scrappy. Like looking back, it was like the best days were awesome, but it was draining on me.

And the same from what I was carrying from Zipf of having to wear so many hats and having to, Spread myself so thin and I was like in my mid twenties, newly married. And I was like, is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? So I left that meeting and I went to my boss at the time and I said, I'm getting my two weeks notice.

And she's it's one o'clock PM. Like what? What? And I'm like, I just,

Jeff: Just out of nowhere.

Caroline: she's, I'm like, I can't do this anymore. Like I'm giving two weeks. She's go home for the day and come back and let's see how you are. And I went home. And I came back and I'm like, no, it still stands. I'm just going to give you two more weeks and that's it.

. She's like, okay. And she let me go. I gave her, but she just said, can I just have your resume just in case something comes up. And I was like, okay. And that summer I went a completely different direction. I got back into writing. I worked, it was 2018. So like the midterms, the gubernatorial [00:36:00] election were happening in New York.

So I was going back to freelancing. I was freelancing with a whole bunch of campaigns writing a whole bunch of like policy stuff and kind of really going back into like the writing aspect. I went to grad school for a year learning like public policy and I really thought that I was going to make another career change just like I had in the beginning.

going into policy, working with stuff and getting things going. And then my old boss from sleep reached out to me and she said, Hey, I have a friend at Dow Jones at the wall street journal. I gave him your resume. He's really interested in speaking to you. I know you're out like, saving the world and hugging the trees, but do you want to meet? And because she was like a wonderful manager, like she really was. And I was feeling like, my, my cup was getting full, but also I still had doubts. Like it didn't feel, it didn't feel as right. It's no, you're doing something like I could do this, but do I want to do this? I don't know.

And I'm like, okay, well, we'll get product one more time. And that's my interview. That was my interview at Dow Jones. And I had one interview and I met with the team. And they're like, [00:37:00] do you want to work here? We're starting a brand new team. We're rethinking how we're doing advertising. We're rethinking how we're, trying to use our first party data, are you down?

And I was like, okay. And I ended up joining two months later, like once everything kind of got settled in and I ended up joining two months later. And I went back to I've been here ever since.

Jeff: I'd say six years later, you're still there. But more than that, I mean, it's been a pretty, I'd say a pretty successful six years. I mean, it just kind of, I think recently came out wall street journal is ranked number one media brand for advertising equity. You're all number one in 14 out of 15 of the categories that was put out there.

You oversee also, advertising for Barron's and market wash and IBD. It's a pretty storied portfolio there. But you guys have done some really innovative stuff to kind of take forth this, I think this mindset that you developed and you kind of honed over years, but really nailed down at slate and then.

Just brought it to, the entire world via all the Dow Jones [00:38:00] properties here. But I have some questions on it because I see there's been a lot of talking about kind of the four pieces of thematic safe suite project insight, trust direct as kind of products that underpin the ads function at Dow Jones.

And there's been some awards around best first party data and stuff like that. I understand wholly how this makes advertisers happy. Where does the reader fit into that piece of it? Like how is that kind of improving experience for the reader at the same time?

Caroline: So what we've learned here is that very much like a high tie list lifts off boats by having the paywall, right, that the paywall that was meant to help monetize editorial and being one of the first to do that with our content, it allowed us to Very much like what we had, what I actually learned at Slate was to understand our users, understand how they're behaving and to provide them with better editorial, better personalized editorial, better ad experiences, but also like just better ads, [00:39:00] because it's based on the audiences and their interests and the audiences and what they're reading.

So if you're not someone who's interested in like real estate or boats and you're getting ads for that all the time, you're like, Oh, but if you get stuff that you're actually interested in, and of course the ads are high quality. Beautiful to look at both in the paper, in the magazine, and off, that like high quality.

It actually leads to a much more premium experience across the portfolio, and I think that mindset both in print and in digital is really what Helps bring everything together and that treasure trove of data being able to use that to make decisions to make things better for both Advertisers and readers and the experience of being there together has helped the company continue to grow

Jeff: I mean, clearly the results speak for themselves that it's worked where I still remember, years back when there was, trade publication of writing about wall street journal taking the wrong path and focusing on monetizing subscriptions and people kind of laughing at the idea [00:40:00] of getting people at scale to pay for subscriptions to something like a newspaper.

And, years later now take us to present. It's been a phenomenal success. And there's like millions of subscribers to the wall street journal that pay for access. And it's, a thriving part of the business, but also just something that allows you guys to operate probably in a different way.

And, but it really shows that focus on both advertiser experience and reader experience can happen at the same time. now there's one question I do want to ask about kind of specifically is we talked kind of a little bit before we jumped on to start recording. And it seems like there's a bit of a story around an early, maybe experiment or launch over at wall street journal that maybe didn't go that way.

So it sounds like it hasn't been all, the story is always though, right? Everyone thinks. Success is an up into the left journey, a straight line up into the left. And the reality is always there's valleys As well as crests. But you brought up, there was one specific kind of launch that didn't go as expected that you can think of.

So maybe, can you take us through what happened [00:41:00] there?

Caroline: Absolutely. So this is when I came back. So again, as I said, I had that summer. I used to call it my summer of Caroline. I had that grad school. Like I felt that I was kind of like I'm coming in with a new perspective, and I got a little bit too big for my bridges and I, we had this new team and they had some extra, caps set aside for like innovative products.

And I'm like, we should do, we should have our ad Be like our ad creatives be like tailor made for the journal. And I, again, very much like boiling the ocean, being able to get ad creative from, the media planners or from like the media sites. They're like, the 300 by 600, like those stuff and putting them through some kind of like WYSIWYG tool that could be like, this is amazing.

Or this is trash. And so. I didn't realize how much goes into, of course, like understanding images, by the way, like being able to read images, being able to understand text, being able to like have like actual [00:42:00] recommendations that were, specific enough that a media planner or can go back and say, Hey, can you like make this purple?

And also how many advertisers would say no, because we spent years

Jeff: This is our campaign.

Caroline: It's made the carpable, but I had gotten so I was just so out of left field with it. And, but because I had so much like energy behind it, I ended up like accidentally creating like a reality distortion field around the project that everyone thought it was like amazing and everyone was really excited.

And then we had our first like public test. We had, it was a room of like probably 15 people and like the people who helped us made it was there, blah, blah. And I'm like, we're going to launch it. And here's our client giving us real time. I had a client on the call, like. the insanity and we're going to show it working.

And like they, we put up their ad and we show the recommendation and the client went, I would never do that in a million years, even if it costs me [00:43:00] a million dollars and the whole room went dead silent.

Jeff: That's amazing. That's, I mean, you got to take some L's here and there, I guess, to like,

Caroline: That was a

Jeff: failing once in a while.

Caroline: Yeah, so obviously that project did not move forward. And I remember talking to my manager after that Okay, I guess I'm fired. And he was cracking up.

Jeff: It was a good run, I guess, while it lasted for a short time.

Caroline: because he kind of just showed, and I think that's kind of like the, that if you were like, really into something, you need to have folks around you to check your like sanity.

And that's definitely what happened. Like we all got very high off our own supply in that situation, but it definitely taught me the power of no and the power of, wait a minute, what are we not asking? But yeah

Jeff: it just shows you can have a great, powerful idea, right? And there can be pieces that are really valuable. I'm sure you guys learned. A lot that still is in use, but you know, not everything's successful, but it's yeah, the power of having people to double check is always a strong one.

I love, I [00:44:00] mean, right. If you think about it, companies spend years understanding their, who they're marketing to, what they care about, how to message it. And I mean, as a marketer on my end if I had a publisher telling me I had to change it. I think my reaction would probably be similar. So,

Caroline: It's like, no.

Jeff: but you don't swing once in a while.

What's going, I mean, you got to take the big swings once in a while. You gotta be okay. Failing once in a while. So, well, Caroline, I don't want to steal your entire day here, but it's, has been fantastic having you on really appreciate you coming on and telling us all about, the successes and the failures and being open about the L's now and again.

From a standpoint of kind of posted, people have questions. They want to follow up with you. They want to ask you more. What's a good place to find you? Is it LinkedIn? Is there anywhere else?

Caroline: Yeah, so there's LinkedIn. You can find me at Caroline Albanese there, but also on Twitter or X, whatever they're calling themselves now, is at C Albanese. You can find me there and that's really it.

Jeff: Awesome. Well, it's been great having you on. Thank you so much for coming on and hopefully we get to chat again.

Caroline: Same. Thanks, Jeff. Bye.