The New York Times CMO Amy Weisenbach

AMY WEISENBACH: One of the pieces of advice I got from a boss that I have passed along many times, he once said to me, don't come to me and say, how do I do this? Come to me and say, here's the problem. Here's what I think I should do. What do you think? No one wants to have you take your problem and dump it on their plate.

GREG STUART: Amy Weisenbach, welcome to Building Better CMOs this morning.

AMY: Thanks, Greg. Great to be here.

GREG: Listen, I'm super excited because I have been watching the work at the New York Times and what you've been doing, particularly around brand, which is part of your background. So maybe I'm excited about all of them, but this one I was particularly excited about. Partly because I am a subscriber, so I should admit that first.

AMY: Thank you.

GREG: Yes, of course. Yes, yes, yes. No, it's absolutely essential. I don't know how you kind of get through life when you don't have it. In fact, you know what, you actually remind me. You know what I should do, and I know you would support this, I should give all of my kids a New York Times subscription for the holidays. What a great idea.

AMY: Or you could subscribe to our new family subscription that we just launched.

GREG: I saw the family ... What is a family [subscription] ? Listen, that is brand-new news. Let's take a moment. What is the family subscription? Then we're going to get the bigger topics. Go ahead. What is the family subscription plan?

AMY: It's a way to subscribe to the Times. It comes with four seats. So you can keep one for yourself and then you can share the other three seats with either your real family or your chosen family or people in your life. And it's great because then you can keep your own Wordle streak or recipe box or saved articles and not have to share it with other people who you might otherwise share.

GREG: So wait, how many other people can I give it to? Three other people?

AMY: Three. So it's four seats is our family.

GREG: Okay. Complicated in a family of five, but we'll find out which are the favorite children and which ones aren't. That's what's going to happen here, right?

AMY: Yeah. We just worked with the Mannings on an ad to support it. And the whole premise of it was Eli deciding — of the very large Manning family — which Mannings were going to make the cut. It made for a fun piece of content.

GREG: Right. And he actually went through, I think, the mother made it immediately for reasons I forget, but his ...

AMY: Yeah, did you see her? She's amazing.

GREG: Was it his grandfather that was maybe questioned? I think the grandfather was questionable.

AMY: The mom and dad both made it and his brother Cooper did not make the cut, but he made room for his former teammate.

GREG: Well, the good news is I'm sure they could afford another subscription. They'll probably be okay.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

GREG: Yeah. Okay. So Amy, listen, you've been CMO of New York Times for how long? I mean, you've been there for almost a dozen years?

AMY: Yeah. No, no. I'll be here nine years in March, so almost nine. I joined here to help build out a brand marketing practice, and then over the years have just sort of taken on bigger and bigger parts to where I've been leading the whole marketing team for about four years-ish and have carried the CMO title for the last year or so.

GREG: And we'll get to some more of your background, but you are a classic brand person. There's a lot of that in your background. I know where you came from. I knew some of the people that you would've even worked with. But New York Times, oddly enough, wasn't brand-oriented when you got there, right?

AMY: Not at all. It was really a performance marketing practice. And if you think about the business of the New York Times, it makes sense if you [think about it] , it was an advertising-driven business for most of its ... It'll be 175 years next year. And for most of that life, it was an advertising-driven business. And in 2010, 2011, the Times launched its paywall, which everyone widely panned as being crazy and wasn't going to work.

GREG: I was around for that. So Martin Nisenholtz has long been gone. Do you know who Martin was?

AMY: I've heard his name, but we didn't overlap.

GREG: Yeah. I mean, he was the one who originally set up New York Times to be digital originally. And he used to tell me that his challenge was to figure out how you take a $100 million online business, which would've been all ads — probably mostly ads, I don't know if the subscription [was] at that time — take $100 million and convert it to a $2 billion business that the New York Times really was. And this was early 2000. So I mean, that was what was on everybody's mind, right?

AMY: Yeah. And digital ads are important and they've scaled a lot and they're still a really important part. But somewhere around, probably around 2015, we had hit enough digital subscribers that everyone started to believe, okay, this could be a real business model for the business. The CEO at the time and our current CEO, who was then COO, Meredith Kopit Levien, I think looked at each other and said, "If we're going to be a subscription-first business, we better start to treat this thing like a consumer brand." And I think they looked around and were like, we don't have any consumer marketers, anyone who knows how to build a brand.

GREG: And that's so crazy for a business that storied, that longstanding. And the point is that it's so easy to miss what some of us would see as the obvious thing to do. It just is what it is.

AMY: Well, the journalism itself works so hard and carries the brand so far out into the world. The Times, we don't even measure our PR mentions because it's impossible to measure because every five seconds you hear "as reported in the New York Times" or "the New York Times said this week." And so our brand travels quite far without marketing, but it's all in service of the journalism and helping people understand the world. It's not in service of building a brand. And so it's helpful to layer brand marketing on top of that and really think about what do we want people to believe about this brand? What do we think is important for them to understand, especially if we want to be a subscription business and they need to open up their wallets and pay for a subscription.

GREG: Yeah. Okay. Well, listen, we're going to get into a bunch of the brand stuff, but let's go back over a little bit. Well, here, let's talk about the campaign. So I don't know if this is the first one you did, but it's the one that I'm most aware of, which is when you guys ended up taking on "the truth is worth it." 2018?

AMY: Yeah.

GREG: Very powerful. Talk a little bit about what it took. And was that the first real brand campaign for the New York Times or ...

AMY: There was a campaign that preceded it called "the truth is hard" that launched in early 2017 that was about how it's hard to know that ... It was right around the time when the phrase "alternative facts" was coined and the press was under a lot of pressure from the new administration at that point. And so it was about helping people see how journalism could really help you discern what was true and what was not. We followed that up with "truth is worth it," which we had this idea that if we could help people understand how journalism gets made, they would appreciate it more, they would understand our commitment to independence, and it would make them more willing to pay. We were shocked when we would do consumer research, just like how little people understood about how real originally reported journalism gets done — a lot of misunderstandings — and so we thought, how do we show that? How could we tell those stories?

GREG: And how did you actually get there in the insights of that? Is this you're talking to the family, you're talking to leadership, are you talking to the journalist? I mean, how do you actually pull all that together to come up with a brand campaign for something like the New York Times?

AMY: Well, I think like any idea, you start with a really salient consumer insight, right? Being able to ... I think literally we had video of consumers talking about the brand and clear that they didn't understand how journalism gets made. And we would show that and say, we know that when people understand these things, they're more likely to subscribe. We had that research as well. And so it was a no-brainer to try it. I think what wasn't a no-brainer and what was really hard was figuring out how to tell that story. And getting our journalists in the early days, we had not yet really earned their trust that we could do justice to telling their stories. And so some ...

GREG: We the marketers.

AMY: We the marketing team.

GREG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. Great, go ahead.

AMY: And so some of those early conversations of approaching a journalist and saying, hey, we want to make an ad about your story that you wrote. [laugh] Not all of them said yes the first time.

GREG: [laugh] I can only imagine. I can only imagine the suspicion. By the way, I don't know if you've looked at my background. I actually worked in journalism. I wasn't full-on journalism, but I worked with a bunch of journalists, part of the Tribune and they were launching a classified business, cars.com in particular. So it was my first major experience to the newspaper industry. It's challenging, I guess. I don't know, like all business.

AMY: Well, they're by nature skeptics, right?

GREG: True. And should be.

AMY: And if you looked at what the marketing at the Times looked like before this era, we weren't to be trusted. We weren't good storytellers. And so it was a little nervewracking, those first few campaigns. But now I think our journalists are really proud of our marketing.

GREG: I was going to say, yeah, what was the reaction?

AMY: Yeah. I mean, like I said, super proud. In fact, when Jodi Cantor and Megan Twohey pushed publish on the Harvey Weinstein reporting, there's this famous photo of them and in the background of the photo is Jodi's "The Truth Is Worth It" button. That was a moment where it was like, yes, this story is worth telling. One of the great things that my former boss, our first — I think he was even technically the first CMO at the Times — David Rubin said to us when I joined and when we started building the team was this really provocative but simple question, which is, what would it look like if our marketing were as ambitious and high quality as our journalism?

GREG: Wow.

AMY: And that became ... It just was like the bar we set for ourselves for storytelling, for the craft of the work.

GREG: Amy, there's almost no way that there couldn't have been tears in the eyes of the journalists when you showed them those ads, right? Yeah.

AMY: Yeah.

GREG: Because I think what struck me, I mean, one is that the truth is hard. So I remember the first set of campaign and then I remember sort of the truth is worth it. When, I mean, you really do profile just how hard it is to get to real facts as real journalists do. You can't help but to be struck by that.

GREG: And listen, you mentioned Harvey Weinstein, I think that was the beginning of the Me Too movement or had that movement existed? Is that what kicked it off? I don't know if I know the history.

AMY: No, it really started. There was a lot of reporting that year. A lot of it was our newsroom. There were some journalists at a few other publications as well that broke a couple other stories that contributed, but really that Weinstein reporting was the kind of big tipping point. And then tons of great work were done by journalists at all kinds of news organizations over the following year.

GREG: And as much as the world has sort of divided itself into some politics, you can't not ... I would hope at some level you can't not believe that that wasn't good and powerful to change the world in a positive direction.

AMY: It's always interesting. We care a lot about the impact of our journalism and we know that it has a big impact in the world, but that's not really what motivates it. It's like we have to go in ... I think the journalists think about it as like going in without an agenda, going in — or with the only agenda being to get to the truth, but then knowing that when truth comes out, when things that people would otherwise want to keep hidden from the public view come to the surface, that that's generally good for the long arc of society.

GREG: You know what's interesting about all this too is that, I'm going to say something that's going to be a little bit controversial, I'll bet, here. I almost wonder if ... And so listen, your stock price is higher than ever. The company is more valuable than it's ever been, which is kind of crazy because listen, New York Times, I mean, I remember Martin railing against Google at the time because that was sort of changing the business and the whole conversation about taking print dollars to digital dimes was a big notion and those who were in advertising. And then like you said, the controversial decision to move on to a subscriber base. I mean, you didn't close ... I mean, nobody cut off access. I mean, nobody ... I remember all those conversations with the early publishers, they all sat on my board, Forbes, all of them, all these sat on my board, Conde Nast, they were all on my board of directors when I ran the IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau] .

And so that kind of risk and transformation to see what it is today, there has to be a sense of excitement that New York Times really held true to that sort of journalistic integrity. And it pays. I mean, it's the only print publisher I think that's doing well, by the way.

AMY: Yeah. I think the real brave thing that our leadership did in that moment was choose to continue investing in the journalism first. And I think so many others saw it as we have to cut, we have to cut our newsroom, we gotta ...

And the Times sold off everything. I mean, the building, other brands, really sold it down to the bare bones so that it could continue to invest in the journalism. Because I think AG and Mark and Meredith at the time believed that that was the thing that was worth paying for. That was the thing. If we didn't have great journalism at the core in a newsroom that was big enough and strong enough to deliver that, it was just going to be a downward spiral. But those were ... I mean, when I hear the stories of those days, I am always in awe of the courage that they displayed in those moments where the brand almost wasn't.

GREG: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love stories. I think it's my favorite thing in the whole world because I think it's the thing. If I was to identify the most important thing in my life on a self basis — let me extract my family from that and some other dynamics from that — I think it's having a sense of leadership to figure out what the right thing is to do and then the courage to go do it. I think in some regards, my entire life has led up to those points. I just think that's a really powerful idea. And if you're going to put ... I mean, listen, you're really putting money at stake, you're putting a business at stake, you're putting the truth at stake because so many other newspapers obviously didn't do that, and I'm going to guess it's part of the reason why there's been such a change in that industry, right?

AMY: Yeah.

GREG: Yeah. What a great place to be. I mean, it's a real moment in time for you to have been there and to watch that turnaround, right?

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. I'm super proud to have been a part of it.

GREG: Yeah. Listen, now we're going to want to talk about some of the other brand experience. I mean, listen, you were at Axe when it was controversial, right?

AMY: It was.

GREG: So we're going to want to get ... Make sure the listener knows why I said that. What'd you guys do? Just so we have a top line, because we're going to talk probably more of that when we get to your core question here, but go ahead.

AMY: Yeah. So I worked on Axe, not at the very beginning, but probably within two years of it launching in the United States. And it was a real phenomenon and just did ... It was fascinating to be inside a company like Unilever where I got to kind of cut my teeth on a company that knows how to do big brand marketing and build billion-dollar brands and then to work on a brand that wanted to do marketing that no one had ever done before. So I constantly was —

GREG: No one. No one had ever considered.

AMY: — making legal crazy with things we wanted to try and do. And yeah, we just did really ... I think people probably would describe it as edgy, but it's funny because certainly there's things I look back on and I cringe at, but ...

GREG: Tell a listener the campaign. Tell them what happened. Because I remember, I watched it. Yeah, go ahead.

AMY: Yeah. I mean, there were so many.

GREG: It got very sexual oriented, right? Yeah.

AMY: It was. The brand essence or the core of the brand was about giving guys an edge in the mating game. And so it was about giving guys this confidence that they could attract women. And the thing that I think was misunderstood about the brand, though, is that it was just only about attraction and sexuality. And in fact, we really, really strived to make the work very clever. We tested all the work with college-age men and women, and the women we tested the work with loved it, right? it was fun, it was clever.

GREG: It worked for both, right?

AMY: It did. And it was reflecting back stuff that was happening in culture. It wasn't inherently sexist, seen through the lens of the early 2000s. I look at the work now and there's things I did that I'm not super proud of, but then there's some work that I think does kind of hold up and is fun. And in some ways, the brand has sort of moved back to its roots around attraction. There was a period in the middle where they got pretty far from that. And in fact, I teach a class at NYU and I went to pull some materials from the Axe website to share and I saw that there's like an apology on the Axe website about ... We didn't always get it right when it came to showing ... And I was like, oh my gosh, they're apologizing for the work that I did. [laugh]

GREG: Oh, there's a cultural moment, I guess, in that. And thank God you were a woman maybe who did that. I think at some level, I wonder if a man had done that if there wouldn't be a whole nother point of view. But what's funny about this too is that Unilever was doing "Real Beauty" at the same time, right?

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. "Campaign for Real Beauty" was born at almost the same time that Axe was coming on the scene. So it was really fun seeing how those two campaigns could come out of the same small group of people.

GREG: That was a very high-risk campaign then and I guess less so today. I mean, I think it's created a change or understanding of femininity, I think. Yeah. No, it was very controversial at the time. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people, if I remember right, if I kind of remember I added stuff, they were kind of reporting like, this could be really harmful to have gone down this path and not to show the usual, sexy — how do I call it? — stereotypical sexy picture of a model. Isn't that right?

AMY: Yeah. Yeah.

GREG: What was happening at Unilever that made edgy, provocative, dare I say, borderline controversial, at least sort of pushing the limits kind of advertising possible. I'm always curious how a company ... Everybody would want to do that kind of work, I think, but what's the dynamics and environment that's created in order to do that? Do you remember? Did you notice at the time?

AMY: It's fascinating. I don't know that I've ever thought too hard about this question, but I think ... I want to say two things. One, Unilever is religious about deep consumer insights, real insights, not just research and data, but really trying to find a great insight. That's how you get to work like the "Campaign for Real Beauty." And there was a real deep consumer insight behind Axe, right? Everything in the category at the time, it was a sea of sameness, everyone was competing on performance, and there was this real thing around why people want to smell good or not smell bad that has to do with human attraction and no one was playing in that territory. So it was like clear emotional white space. No one —

GREG: Do you remember what the competitors were saying at the time or how they would position it?

AMY: They were all talking about 48-hour performance, 24-hour protection, 72-hour protection, and it was all sports. So in the early days of Axe, we had like a no-sports rule. We didn't run any ads in sports because that's where all the deo brands were competing. The fact that it traded on a real consumer insight is one. And I think the other is it was a brand that was born in Europe. It was a French brand that had been around in Europe for about 20 years. That's where it got its legs and it launched into the US market. And almost all of our work in the early days was downstream of those global Axe teams. So the work would be created in the UK or in Latin America, and then we would launch the campaign here in the United States with kind of our own spin on it.

GREG: I think this is why I got into marketing, just to have some access to being on the front lines of the world or the conversation or the culture.

AMY: Yeah.

GREG: Okay. So listen, let's go to the first big question of Building Better CMOs here. So there's lessons that we've all learned through the years. There's things that have been either self-evident — I was actually telling a story this morning to somebody on my team about a mistake that I had made and what that lesson meant to me, it was a lot of years ago — but I think too, there's advice that people give us that have been, those who have been down the path maybe further than we are at the moment. So I'm always curious to ask, what is some of the best advice you've been given? And you can make it business, you can make it personal if you want. I had some of that come in. Somebody was talking about advice her father had given her, I thought was really interesting. So I don't know, as you look back now, Amy, having gotten into the at least second half of your career, I don't know, what do you think?

AMY: I love advice. I love seeking out advice. I like giving it advice. [laugh] So especially ... I know.

GREG: A little reciprocity there. If I'm going to take it, I get to give it too. Right. Okay, fair enough. Okay.

AMY: I think about collecting it.

GREG: Why do you like advice so much? Why do you like advice so much?

AMY: I just love a hot tip or a hidden gem or like a secret unlock. I can't think of one singular piece because I really do think of having across my life collected this basket of things that have stuck with me. So let me just tell you a couple little notes.

GREG: Yeah, go for a couple. Yeah. We're not limiting you to the one best one. Yeah, go ahead.

AMY: One goes all the way back to something both of my parents always said that I still say all the time today, much to the chagrin of my children, which is that it never hurts to ask. So I am a big question asker. I try whenever I feel uncomfortable about asking a question, I really try to lean into that discomfort and find a way to ask, and that has served me really well.

GREG: Learning to ask questions I think is the most important thing you can do in life and in particular in business. Absolutely.

AMY: Well, one really practical one that I often tell when people are asking me for career advice, I'd been at Unilever for about six years. I'd worked on Axe the whole time, I was really ready to do something else. And our head of the office had gone to be the CMO at Jim Beam and I got a recruiter call about a job over at Beam and it was a great fit in a lot of ways, but when I looked at it, I was like, but it's still, it's like working on one brand, it's a similar consumer chart. There weren't enough things that were different about it. And I said to this guy, Kevin George, who was the CMO at the time, I said, Kevin, I'm really excited about this role. I really want to come join you, but I'm just not sure this job is big enough. And I was like, what do you think?

And he said, that's a great question. I think you're right. And he said, Actually, I have this director role over here. I hadn't thought of you for it, but now that you say that, I think you could do this job. And so I ended up interviewing for this director role. And so I went from a brand manager role to a senior director role at Beam. I really think if I had not asked that question, that would not have happened.

GREG: Because you asked the hard question, the question that the others did want to do, you thought could have put the position at risk. Right. Amy, that's actually a sense of leadership, I think, for yourself in that case, by the way.

AMY: So I always tell people not — particularly when they're negotiating career stuff — not to be afraid to ask. Another one is, I started my career in the nonprofit world, and when I got ready to go to grad school, I was thinking about nonprofit management programs, and I was really sure I wanted to go back and work in the nonprofit sector after grad school.

GREG: Yeah. You got your undergrad in youth public policy. Is that right?

AMY: Yeah. And I worked for 4-H, which is a big youth-serving organization for about four years. And I had a fellowship that paid for part of grad school. So I could only defer it for four years. So I was like, okay, the clock's ticking. I've got to go soon if I want to go. And I had someone say to me, why don't you go get your MBA? I was like, why would I get an MBA? I don't want to work in business. And they gave me advice to think about two things. One, the impact you can have on the world from lots of different places. At that point in my life, I just thought if I want to do something important and impactful in the world, I better stick in the nonprofit sector. It's what I knew. He helped me see that people in business and people in other kinds of leadership roles have as much or arguably more impact as people who work from within the sector.

And two, he said, no one's going to balk at an MBA. You can go run a nonprofit with an MBA.

GREG: And some would respect you more for that. Yeah, go ahead.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. But you might limit your runway with a nonprofit management degree. And I mean, thank God someone said that to me because look where I am. I would never be in this job. I would never be CMO of the New York Times. And I think I have had an impact from within, but I also think about the impact I'll be able to have over the next chapters of my career. Maybe I will go back to the nonprofit world someday. I've started to teach, which has been really rewarding. So I'm just super grateful for someone not being afraid to challenge me on that.

GREG: Yeah. Amy, so I run a nonprofit. In fact, this is the second nonprofit I've run. So when the chairman, who was the CEO founder of CNET, a guy named Shelby Bonnie, had come to me and said, Greg, would you consider taking over the IAB at the time? And listen, at that point, online advertising was a $6 billion industry. That's it. He said, would you take over the IAB for just a few months because they were in the process, the exec committee, they were in the process of firing the CEO. I said, Shelby — and I was available — so I said, Shelby, I said, I'll step in. I was on the board. I said, I'll step in for three, six months, but that's it. I says, I don't want to run a nonprofit. My exact words, that would be the dumbest thing I could do. And here I am.

AMY: Here you are.

GREG: Twenty years here, two of these, turned them around. Right. Exactly.

AMY: Well, thank God you did.

GREG: Yeah. There's a sense of mission and purpose that comes with a nonprofit, which is what I think you were arguing for, but I think you probably have that within the New York Times.

AMY: Definitely.

GREG: Definitely. Definitely. You're probably one of the very few people in their career and their life where they feel like there's a real sense of purpose to what they're doing. A mission of importance, I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What's the advice you give to others because you opened the door earlier? Listen, I don't know about you. As a manager, I always have the themes I'm running in my life at the moment, right? There's always something in my head that I repeat again and again for a year, then I move on. Okay.

GREG: So what is it for you now? Can you think of what that is? What are you telling the team? Well, and also too, you're an instructor, you're teaching at NYU, so you probably are giving advice to the students too. So yeah, go ahead. Anywhere you want to go.

AMY: Because I've been teaching particularly either early-career and part-time MBAs or even I find people on my own team coming to me for advice early in their career. And one of the pieces of advice I got from a boss that I have passed along many times, he once said to me, don't come to me and say, how do I do this? Come to me and say, here's the problem. Here's what I think I should do. What do you think? And that was super helpful to me early in my career because it I really think was a big unlock in getting people to see me as being able to lead things and make decisions. But I even today as CMO find myself taking that advice when I go to speak to our CEO or go to convince stakeholders, cross-functional stakeholders, of ideas is to really go with a point of view.

And it's not that you ... An openness that you could change your mind, that you could be influenced, but no one wants to have you take your problem and dump it on their plate. So I really try to both model that, but then also give that advice often.

GREG: That's a variation too of learning to ask good questions.

AMY: It is, yeah.

GREG: How do you extract the right information? How do you set up the situation that you're getting? If you're assuming you're seeking honest answers, not all the time you are, or somebody isn't. But as long as you're seeking honest answers, how do you ask that question as you get back the feedback? And they don't just parrot back what they think you want to hear. I mean, there's a bunch of difficulties to that, right?

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

GREG: But I love this sort of art in asking questions.If there was one thing I could teach my kids, it would be that.

Some of them are pretty good. I notice they do it well now, so good for them. Okay. Let's move on to the big question. You ready? Because listen, this is Building Better CMOs. The point is here is a nonprofit association or now we call ourselves an alliance, the Market Media Alliance.

GREG: What do you think marketing either or marketers maybe don't fully understand or fully appreciate? Could you go down that path? You could go after what do you think we just don't get at all? We're just clueless about because I've had people sort of get into some of that. Or what are the areas you think that maybe ... And I don't know that you have to have the solution. I'm not going to ask you for that. Let's just stick with the question.What's the opportunity where we have the most room for improvement, that we as an industry, that we as marketers ... Because again, as the head of MMA, I'm always looking for like, well, what can we go work on?

So what do you think that is, Amy? What do you think that we as a marketing industry could be much better at if we devoted the time, energy, effort, insights, smarts, whatever?

AMY: A lot of things. And I've learned about a lot of them from this very podcast. I think the biggest miss, one of the biggest misses, is this persistent belief that brand building and performance marketing have to be a trade-off. I am of the school of thought that brands, the best brands in the world understand that everything communicates. Every single last touchpoint matters. And so we really try on my team to treat every touchpoint as an opportunity to build the brand or a missed opportunity.

GREG: So it's all a reinforcement of the messaging no matter what the purpose of the communication is.

AMY: Yes. Yeah. And when I got to the Times, back when that performance marketing was kind of all that was happening here, we were not treating our performance marketing that way. If you would've looked at the work from that time, it could have been for any brand. It almost looked like a retail brand. It was the Memorial Day sale and the President's Day sale and the July 4th sale. And the word journalism was nowhere to be found. Nowhere were we making the case for why the Times was worth paying for. And I was lucky to be preceded by David Rubin, who's now our chief brand officer, and Laura Ford, who's our creative director, our VP of creative on my team, who got this work underway when I joined to help in the effort. And now I would say ... I often refer to our team as a brand-led marketing organization.

We spend the vast majority of our paid media on what you would call performance marketing, paid acquisition, subscriber acquisition marketing, but we treat it all as carefully as we do our brand marketing. And we measure it all ... Well, we used to measure it all on brand lift. We actually just kept getting the same results, so we stopped measuring it, but we promised ourselves that if we ever got away from it, we would go back to measuring it.

GREG: So the current brand is "it's your world," but I'd love to know how it shows up in performance oriented. Listen, I think for you, that's always going to be generally subscriber. It's going to be mostly subscriber-based information, right?

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Our performance marketing, it almost all ends with a subscribe now message or an offer, a price-based offer. We're starting to do more app download messaging to get people to download our apps, but it's generally one of those two things. And even apps we think of as being kind of on the path to subscription.

GREG: But how does "it's your world" then show up when you're trying to say, hey, subscribe now for ... I don't know if you're still doing discounting or how that works, but I don't know. Comment on that a little bit. How's it working out?

AMY: Sometimes ... It's rare that we would use it exactly because that campaign sits at an altitude that's really about, it's about reflecting back to our readers and subscribers how the Times shows up in their lives. And it does end with a subscribe or an app download message. Even our brand work, we always put that at the end as a message, even though we don't really measure it or expect it to perform in a super short-term way, at least at levels of profitability. Some of our performance work, I would say, drafts off of that and we really try to pull that message or at least the spirit of the message down into the performance work. The Manning campaign I mentioned, we have a family subscription campaign with the Mannings, and the campaign that we're running on TV, for example, feels more like a brand message, but we also are putting offers at the end of those and running them in performance in a shorter form.

GREG: The Manning campaign actually is kind of funny now that I'm listening to you — not funny, but I mean it's interesting — as I reflect back on the Manning campaign, it's all about you have a greater understanding of how to either do cooking or a greater understanding of how to do Wordle, or a greater understanding ... It's all oriented towards what they learned from the New York Times from this context of who Eli's going to give the extra, the three subscriptions to. Right.

AMY: Yeah.

GREG: And that's very fun, right?

AMY: I love that work for that reason because it both sits at a brand altitude and talks about ... But it educates. And then at the end it's a subscription message. It's a perfect example of where we really blend those objectives.

GREG: How hard was that to get to, by the way? I mean, I'm trying to think here. Let me tell you the context of that question though. So I'm kind of saying, well, why wouldn't everybody do that? Why wouldn't you tie it back to your messaging? I mean, certainly you got to have your visual identity in there and so on, but is it just hard to do? Is that why people don't do it, you think? I don't know.

AMY: I mean, I think it has to do a bit with the people you hire. We have really tried —

GREG: I was just going to say, I bet you because you separate them. And so the performance people do Memorial Day sale because that's what they've done at every other business they've ever been in and the brand people don't know what that is, right. [laugh]

AMY: Yeah. And so we've really tried to hire ... I would say we've used it as a filter. [laugh] So true.

GREG: I think we just answered the question. I had to just think that through and go, oh yeah, that's probably what's going on. I could guess. I don't know there, but I would guess. Right, go ahead. Sorry.

AMY: It's funny because I've interviewed people for performance marketing roles over my time here. And I remember having one candidate say, I asked them about, I always ask about the brand. And I had a candidate who actually said to me, I don't care about the brand. I just let the numbers decide. And if the numbers say we should do it and it works and it works better than something else, then I let the numbers guide. And I was like, nope, cross their name out. This person is great, but they're not a fit for our team. And conversely, the people I would say who we've hired and who have really thrived here have been people who, even though they're hardcore performance marketers, see themselves as also brand marketers.

GREG: Listen, I think developing insights to come up with brand positioning is a very unique skill. And it is a learned skill that's hard to assess from the outside, but when you know it, you really feel it. I've got one of those people here at the MMA that's just phenomenal knowing how to position things and very few people could do that work. So they don't have to be that good, but they do have to respect it, I think, and understand it, appreciate it, and then find out ways to weave that in. And do a double-check. Don't just do the Memorial Day sale, whatever.

GREG: You did say though earlier, and I'm not here to sort of parse this too much. So I told you we wouldn't, we're trying to be a friendly podcast here, but you did say there's no trade-offs, but yet there are budgets that have to be allocated to different things.

So there are trade-offs that do have to be made at some level. How do you look at allocating the spend between subscription, between assuming subscription driven, performance oriented, get the deals done by the quarter because you're a public company versus allocating the brand messaging?

AMY: I would say generally we try to spend to a level of profitability, max out our performance spend to a certain level of profitability. And demand, we're in lots of different categories, news of course, but also in shopping advice and sports media and recipes, and those all have different dynamics. And so demand can fluctuate quite a bit from quarter to quarter based on seasonality and what's happening in the world. And so we tend to use our performance marketing as a lever that we can pull reliably to drive into demand when we see it and pull back when demand isn't as high. Brand, we really treat as, I would say we try to spend whatever we can afford to spend responsibly. In some years that's been fairly significant for us. In other years, we've had to pull that back more. It's interesting because when you think about a brand like the New York Times, we're lucky to enjoy our brand traveling quite well without marketing. If you're Axe body spray, well, maybe that's a bad example because people were talking about the brand, but most consumer brands people aren't talking about unless you —

GREG: Correct. I'm not sharing with my friends. Right, exactly.

AMY: Unless you instigate it as a marketer. And our brand is ... And our journalism really travels in a way. I mean, you think about something like the Daily podcast, which is our flagship daily podcast, and that in some ways is branded content. That is not why it's created. It's journalism, but it helps people understand how journalism gets made because every day a journalist goes on and talks about the body of reporting they're doing, and I don't have to pay a dime for that as a marketerter. That has millions of listeners and people ... It builds the brand in a way that marketing doesn't have to. So we can get away with not spending as much in brand marketing as some brands need to.

GREG: Listen, I had an automotive CMO say to me one time, he says, I spend in performance until I sell the cars that were the target and then I put everything else in the brand. That was his approach to it. Didn't feel terribly scientific to me, but what I was kind of thinking to me as I'm listening to you, there's a number of people, there's a finite number of people at some point that are going to be open to subscribing to the New York Times at this point in time. And so I guess you actually could watch, if I heard you right, like if you're watching profitability, you could watch until the cost of acquisition started to reach a point that maybe it didn't make sense financially. It wasn't as strong a case. And then you could go back to a brand message. I've never heard anybody really say that. That's very interesting.

AMY: Yeah.

GREG: Huh. It's kind of too bad too, and I mentioned this earlier, it's kind of too bad that we as an industry, what I've always been concerned about, that we as marketers don't have the answer to that question. Now, the MMA did develop the world's first methodology that actually is able to tell us the relationship between brand and performance and what brand is worth over time. And it came out of questions that, listen, every CMO I talked to about seven-eight years ago, I was doing a bunch of calls and everybody told me that that was a top three, if not maybe one of the biggest issues, long versus short. And nobody had a good answer and nobody had a methodology. So MMA built one. The challenge with that methodology, and it's great, and we've now spent $3 million and we'll be releasing the last of those studies under that, what we call brand as performance.

Brand has to be performance, but it's an over-time measure. That's what makes it hard. But we'll be releasing that last little studies this year after spending, like I said, three million bucks with AT&T would come out in 2026. But the challenge for all that is that if you think of it, this is why it's not been done, which I've now learned. It's not just a methodology. You have to be able to set up that research. Let's assume that takes six months. You've got to run the research for a year that gets long term, and then you've got to analyze the results for another six months. So it's at minimum two years, even if you say go fast, it's at minimum two years before you'd have the insight. There's very few marketers, CMOs, who are in a position to think that I want that answer two years from now.

AMY: Yeah. That's a great point.

GREG: Yeah. I don't know how we get around that because the information is so critical and everybody feels like they need it, but boy, that's a level of commitment that we as CMOs have not made.

AMY: Well, and in the case of our brand, we've tried to do some of that longer term. I mean, we have an MMM, of course. We've tried to do longer term geo testing kind of methodology to understand the lift. And what we often find is something else happens in that timeframe and it makes the research not balanced. I have not given up on it, but the last time we tried, something happened in the world and the data sort of ... We lost the fidelity of being able to tell.

GREG: So I had three brands agree to go forward with this brands performance research methodology and we were getting ready to go in April of 2020.

AMY: Ah. A tricky time.

GREG: And we ended up shutting down the whole ... No shit. We ended up shutting down the whole research initiative and just said, we don't know what near-term advertising is going to look like for the next nine, 12 months of the pandemic. We had to close all those down and we had to go back into the market and resell the entire project a year and a half, two years later, whatever it was, right? By the way, I don't think an MMM would answer the question. What we did, what we figured out that nobody else had tried to do is that you had to have two MTA studies running 12 months apart and you had to do a longitudinal across the exact system. So if you were measuring the media, brand, and sales performance of 20, 30, 40,000 people, like you had to have big numbers, then you looked at exactly those people one year later.

That was the big difference. And MTA is the only way you could do that, that level of attribution, but it's hard. It's hard, it's expensive. And to your point, I don't know if we understand sort of the influence of different dynamics that could happen in the middle of that. And then it's risk too, because you're right, because if we had started that research and the pandemic happened, it would have been kind of all bets are off, and now we just wasted all that time and money. You have to have a real commitment to go down that path, as much as I love that work. You don't do Memorial Day sales anymore?

AMY: [laugh] No. Nope. No Memorial Day sales. We do a lot of sales though. You probably, if you get our emails, you know just how much.

GREG: Oh, I don't know. New York Times is so good. I'm happy to pay full price. So is that what performance really has become? It's all around just pricing? Is that what it always is?

AMY: Pricing is part of it for us. I mean, we just have a really low introductory rate because we want to take price off the table as a reason. And we know it takes people a while of building a daily habit before they really understand viscerally why it's worth paying for and feel like it plays enough of a role in their lives to be one of the many things we all get asked to pay for on a monthly basis. So pricing is an important lever that we do use, but I would generally say we don't vary our introductory price a lot. We just sort of turn it off and on. Really, one of the biggest levers we have is urgency messaging, right? Telling people that it's for a limited time, that it's going to end soon, this sort of creating urgency around why subscribe today versus tomorrow, that tends to get people kind of off the couch and ready to pay.

GREG: One of the things we learned from these brands performance studies, which is kind of interesting you factor that in and gets to your CFO, it'd be interesting how you all decide to react to it. We had found from doing these long-term research, and any time we ever had this kind of learning, the industry's ever had this kind of learning, is that the cost of acquisition when the brand is strong, when the consumer's been made favorable to the brand, which is one way of looking at that, is 85% lower. That's crazy. That's crazy. Now, listen, the cost of converting somebody to be favorable, to be brand oriented has a price to its own right. For the cost of acquisition to go down 85%, that's nuts, right? I mean, I don't know how else you would do that. I mean, you can make the performance campaign as good as you want, it's not going to do that, right?

AMY: Yeah. That's why we really try to, even in a social ad that's really about driving subscription and that we're measuring on profitable acquisition, try to treat it like a brand moment. We'd say slightly different things in those assets because we're really trying to pick the things that we know will compel people to subscribe. So it's a little more, I would say, direct and personal-value oriented than our brand messaging, but it's not worlds apart.

GREG: Let me ask you another brand question. So one of the things the MMA has found also is that personalization of ads is monstrous when it's done right. So the performance dynamic that's induced from creating personalized versions of ads, that doesn't mean at the individual level, but then sort of finding cohort ... Usually what we've been doing is using machine learning to find cohorts and then serving up ads because everybody comes out a little bit different. What the question that we haven't answered in all that, Amy, and I wonder if you've got a viewpoint on it is that how do you maintain brand when you create a diversity of messaging to people? And let me give a little bit of color to that. So if you're trying to ... So we've kind of trained marketers to say, hey, singular insight, singular message. That's kind of where marketing sort of comes.

And there might be slight derivatives, but you're still sticking to that. But what if you're creating a different motivation for a consumer? Because listen, people are going to come to the Times for sports. They're going to come there because news, they're going to come there because they're, I don't know, maybe liberal. I'm not sure all — because of their political affiliation, I should say. They're going to come there because they like truth. There's different reasons. So it's obvious to say personalization's going to matter. And in fact, I had somebody tell me in AI that AI is all about the killer app in AI is personalization. So let's assume that's where the world's going, but how do you maintain brand in all that? That feels hard, doesn't it?

AMY: Yeah. Well, it depends on how you approach it. I mean, I certainly have had moments where someone, whether it's maybe a cross-functional stakeholder or a leader, a senior leader, has said, why don't we have the brand stand for this in this place and stand for this over here? And I really reject that. I think the core of what you stand for, the brand promise, the essence of it has to be the same, but that doesn't mean that you can't ... I don't know. For us, I can give a couple of examples of things we've done recently. So games is a great example where we know people play different games and they play at different times of day. So one of the ways we've personalized our ads is to reflect in our visual what game we think you're likely to play based on machine learning and when we think you're likely to play — morning, night, maybe lunchtime — and we've varied the ads based on that.

Similarly, for cooking, we've done stuff with weather or for the Athletic, we've done that for what team you follow, but the core of what the brand's role in that consumer's life, in all those cases, that we don't really vary or we don't want to change. So I don't know. I think there's probably a way to thread that needle, but if you're not careful, I could see how it would take you down this path of being a different brand to different people. And I think that's a mistake.

GREG: You know where this came up? This came up, we were doing a personalized campaign for an electric automotive company. And it was interesting, do you position that as good for the environment? Do you position that as fast? Do you position that as you don't have the hassle of gas? I mean, there's a lot of different reasons why you might choose to buy an electric car. It got wrapped up in politics again. There's a lot of different reasons why people would do it, but does that sort of change ... I guess you'd have to understand what the core insight is to be able to do that. I don't think that red car/blue car is personalization. I don't think that's it. It's got to get back to — although we did have somebody do that once — it's got to get back to a human motivation, I think, not just a messaging and then how you communicate that clearly. Yeah.

AMY: Yeah.

GREG: Yeah. It's crazy, isn't it, Amy? It's like all these years we've been doing marketing, we still have so many questions to answer, don't we?

AMY: I know. And it feels like a real inflection point right now.

GREG: It does. What's the biggest question you'd like to see the MMA answer? I usually don't ask that question, but I'm curious, do you know? I mean, the New York Times is a member of the MMA. I don't know. Is there a big question that you and your team still ponder or even struggle with that you go, boy, I really wish somebody knew this.

AMY: So many, Greg. [laugh]

GREG: I know.

AMY: I feel like we've all been ... Every time a new episode of your MMA podcast or your marketing and AI podcast comes out, our team shares it and we're always talking about, did you hear that last episode? What'd you think of what the person —

GREG: We should be doing some labs and experiments with the New York Times. We should have them experiment with these things. Okay, but go ahead. Yeah. So is it all around AI, do you think? I mean, that really is the kind of question that ...

AMY: I don't know. I mean, that certainly is the thing that's taking up the lion's share of my brain space these days because it just feels like there's so much that could go wrong in terms of people and maintaining a vibrant work environment where people can do the best work of their careers. What does that look like in the next 18 months, 24, I don't know, three, I don't know, for the rest of my career, and how do I ... I know how to navigate and build a culture and a brand and a place that people want to be a part of in the old world, but I really feel kind of out over my skis in this new space. And I keep trying to go back to just first principles of the things I know, but it's hard not to know.

GREG: And what doesn't just feel more accelerated? It feels like the answer is around wrapped up into more productivity all the time, which is a variation of speed and acceleration. And how much longer can we go ahead and tug at that thread before we break? I don't know. Listen, I remember, I mean, I come from the world, I was originally in advertising, I remember when we had to call the, because you could only call, the bicycle messenger to come pick up the ad creative to go back to the typehouse so that you could have the ad copy repaginated.

AMY: Yeah.

GREG: And then we adapted the fax machine so that made it a little bit faster and then now we're email. Now we just create the ads in-house.

AMY: Well, and now I can't even ... I was thinking about this the other day that Google Office — I don't even know what it's called, the Google suite — has not been with us that long in terms of how ... I probably in the last 10 years of my career have I been using Google Docs and Google slides. And Microsoft has a version of this with their suite as well, but the ability to collaborate in a document and how that changed, how we work versus —

GREG: Oh. Oh yeah. Sending files back and forth?

AMY: And which one's the latest and all the versioning and it was just a nightmare. And so I try to just ... I'm inherently an optimist. And so I try to just go with the idea that there's going to be things that are going to be like that where it was really confusing at first and hard and I was like, I don't know how to use these tools. And now it's just second nature. And when someone shares like a Word doc with me and asks me to send them back my feedback, it's like I don't even know what to do. [laugh]

GREG: My standard —

AMY: I put it in a [Google] doc and then I —

GREG: Yeah.

AMY: I add comments.

GREG: I put it in the cloud and then I send them back the link and say, there you go. Yeah, exactly. I politely and maybe not always so politely say, don't ever send me a file again, please. Don't do that. Send me a link.

AMY: Or worse, a PDF.

GREG: Oh my God.

AMY: Here's a PDF to comment on. I don't know what to do with it.

GREG: I don't even know how to write on the PDF to get that done. Although that function, maybe it's there, maybe I'm just being dopey. Okay.

GREG: Okay, Amy, listen, so the world's not going to get any easier. It's going to continue to change. The New York Times is there to explain to us what's going on, right? Feels like a funny time. Do you want to make any comment about news in today's world?

AMY: I think about it from the perspective of our audience, right? That's who I think deeply about and sort of how it's impacting our audience, where they get their information, how trustworthy is the information, how reliable is it? I've been here nine years, which is not, I don't know, it's not that long of a tenure in a life of a 175-year-old company, but long enough to have seen some things. And this last year or so has felt really different in terms of where people are getting their news.

GREG: Feels like it.

AMY: We'll adapt as a company. I'm confident of that. The Times is very resilient in the face of change. It's been a huge theme certainly of the last couple decades, but really over the whole life of the company. But I do think about from a consumer perspective, how hard it's getting to know what's reliable and what's true and what's been verified. And there's so much ... In some ways it's great for consumers because you can get things answered quickly. You can get your news or your information from personalities that you like. You can opt in to people in social that you enjoy listening to maybe more than you would've enjoyed watching the evening news back in the day. But I do worry about when you really need to know and when it really matters. And when I think then back to like, okay, this brand that I'm in the position to steward as the CMO, that part is exciting to me because I do think what the Times does is valuable and I think will become more valuable.

GREG: More valuable.

AMY: Moving forward. And so how do we tell that story and how do we show up in the places where people want to consume and in the formats they want to consume, but not lose what's core to what the Times does, which is originally reported journalism.

GREG: And what journalism with integrity looks like and what that means to us. Yeah.

AMY: Yeah. And human-reported journalism because there's going to be a lot of AI-generated journalism. "Journalism." [laugh]

GREG: I'm not so sure you get to put AI and journalism in the same sentence. I don't know. I'll have to ask somebody who —

AMY: I'm with you. I'm with you on that.

GREG: — knows more than I about that, but yeah, it's got to be human done, right? Listen, I was impressed to have you get involved with the MMA, you and Joy. So I appreciate Joy Robbins there who runs ad sales for you is your friend. And we're happy to do more. We'd love to do that, but this is a really engaging conversation. I was really looking forward to it because you are speaking to a New York Times fan, so you are part of my daily.

AMY: Oh, well thank you.

GREG: My daily being and I do think there's a sense of truth there that matters.

AMY: We've gone from two million to 12 million subscribers in my time here. And I often joke that I feel like I've counted them one by one on my fingers [laugh] because it's been very hard won, but it's been great, and every one counts. So sincerely, thank you for subscribing.

GREG: When you do something right, it does ... I do believe at the end of the day, it does pay. There's a lot of things that can come and affected that, but it does really make a difference. So congratulations on the success. It's great to see it because I remember when New York Times in 2001 was like, we're not sure what the future looks like. "That's what Martin used to say in board meetings. He'd say, I'm not really sure I know how to go from $100 million to $2 billion in revenue, which was the goal, which was, how does he make that up?

AMY: Yeah.

GREG: So you guys figured that out.

AMY: We did it.

GREG: Good for you. Good.

Thanks again to Amy Weisenbach for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Amy.

If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy my conversation with Aron North, the CMO of Mint Mobile. We talked about: Letting the best idea win; why marketers have lost sight of a key part of the process; and why your opinion of a product, as a marketer, doesn’t really matter.

You can find that episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are hearing me now.

At the Marketing + Media Alliance, we are working to make marketing matter more through conferences, research, and education. If you want to know more, visit MMAGlobal.com.

You can also email me directly: greg@mmaglobal.com.

Don’t forget, Building Better CMOs is now on YouTube! Just go to bettercmos.com/youtube to start watching.

Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from Lightning Pod.fm. Artwork is by Jason Chase. Special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting.

This is Greg Stuart, I’ll see you in two weeks.