Rob Keenan is Vice President of Product Development at Adweek, where he oversees the web development team and product design organization for a 45-year-old media brand in the marketing industry. He has a 28-year tenure in the B2B media industry and has worked at Penton Media, VerticalNet, United Business Media, and Edgell Communications. Rob has also launched his own business, Keenan LLC, to align customer experience, digital business strategy, technology, and content for media companies.
In our conversation, Rob talks about Adweek’s strategy to go after both individual subscribers as well as corporate subscribers for their media, and how the underlying heart of that strategy lies with valuable content. He discusses how when it comes to conflicting stakeholder opinions, not everybody is going to be happy but it’s important to get them to at least agree, and shares strategies to get everyone aligned. Rob also shares the importance of continuous learning and making time to take the calls — whether that be from industry connections, vendors, or new market solutions.
Adweek is a digital brand and the media industry in general is going through a dramatic change right now in the way we do things. I’ve had the opportunity to lead several initiatives to transform how we do our business, and the biggest one in the last few years was overhauling the technology supporting our subscription business. It wasn’t going to scale to where we needed it if we wanted to grow our business. We brought in new technology and gutted what we had to start all over, and since I started, we’ve grown it by roughly $1.5 million.
We’re also working very closely with our content teams on the way we deliver content — we’ve changed everything from templates to the way content gets input in our systems. We’ve also launched podcast pages for our audience. Ultimately, everything we try to do focuses on items that will generate more audience, more subscriptions, and more revenue for the company.
We are implementing an even more stringent process there. We’re a big SaaS user — we don’t have the capacity to build a ton of tech so we leverage third-party solutions. Our goal is to get requirements down pat. What do we want to achieve? My team’s job on the product side is to focus on that. Once we get that, we work very closely with the teams up front to spec out what that means to bring to life — whether that’s turning that into an RFP that goes to a third-party company or something we turn into an execution document for our own team. Then, we’ll do technical evaluations.
I’d really like to see it being a formal process because it gets everybody on the same page. It also lets your vendors know where you want to go. When you do those documents, everybody always says where you want to be, but you also have to spend time understanding where you are, what’s working for you, and what’s not. That’s where people miss the mark.
That depends on the project. Revenue is always the number one driver of success. If we’re doing things and we’re generating revenue, that’s what matters, and audience growth is another one that you measure success against. We did a lot of SEO projects over the last few years, so we continually look at ranking and metrics. The ones that are a little harder to compute are things that focus on efficiency, like increasing the efficiency of a team. How do you judge that? For example, it could be the speed of site load. That’s an SEO metric. If we’re defining questions up front, are we answering them and putting good numbers around them so we can judge success? That is ultimately the key to everything.
Subscription revenue is an interesting challenge for B2B media brands. Traditionally, most B2B brands were free publications. But, with ad revenue on the decline, it’s become more and more important to generate revenue from our audience. So there are many brands, like Adweek, turning to subscription models.
However, you just can’t put up a wall and hope the audience will pay. To succeed on the subscription front, you need to have a thoughtful approach to what you offer in front or and behind the paywall and you must ensure that the content behind the wall offers the value the audience is looking for to pay for access. The key here is to build a good business model around it and build a good reason for people to subscribe. Content, of course, lives at the heart of that.
Things like corporate subscriptions where many people in one organization want full access to a media brand like Adweek are a good method of recurring revenue. You have to attack it from both the individual subscriber front as well as the corporate front, and what lies underneath all of it is content. For example, we’re looking at the tool that we’re going to offer our registered users just to get people in the door for free registration. We look all the time at increasing that value for folks. We run a lot of events, have recordings, etc. Content is extremely valuable. In the age of fake news, people want credible sources and we provide that.
At Adweek, we don’t worry about how AI is taking our jobs. On the contrary, we’re looking for ways AI can help us do our jobs better. First of all, with search, AI can help optimize some of your content. Our marketing team is using AI to help create e-blasts for our audience. It can help create different versions of marketing copy and my developers use it to get code snippets or to be able to check their code. The question that I haven’t quite seen answered yet is how it plays with our editorial team. There are people out there who have used AI to generate whole stories without telling anybody, but we’re not talking about that — we’re looking at how AI can aid our editorial team and get down that path faster.
The other way I see AI coming in and helping us is with data crunching, like being able to naturally ask questions about our databases and get quick answers. We’ve spent a lot of time building dashboards, but it would be great to use AI tools to say, “I’m looking for this and this. Can you pull me a chart that pulls that together?”
That’s the biggest challenge. You have to engage in open conversations. It’s our job to bring people together. At the beginning of a project, we bring everybody to the table and say, “This is what we want to achieve” and then break off into individual groups. It’s always key to start top-down. If you can get the buy-in engagement from the highest levels within that project and then start pushing, that will always guide the way down.
It’s our job to make sure we look for the trends through that and you get that going. If you do get conflicting opinions, it’s important to get people together. We’re a small enough company that we should be able to do that, whether it’s on Zoom or in the office face-to-face. Get people talking, lay the issues out, and come up with answers and solutions to problems that could be in your way. That’s also where a business requirements document (BRD) comes in. Take all that feedback from all these different places and consolidate it into one place where it can be reviewed. Before you go into development work, make sure everybody agrees. Not everybody’s going to be happy, but they can at least agree. Then you’re on a path.
The other challenge in today’s environment is you get all this seepage of, “I was thinking about this” or “I was thinking about that.” If we’re going to execute, we have to put a strong timeline together and see if it’s actually feasible. I like to work in a phased launch approach. We try to get as much done as we can, but what is that MVP? After we define that, we shouldn’t be scared to say, “We’re going to do X in the next phase and Y in the phase after” and put timelines in place.
That’s where people fail. They put a product out there and come a year later and say, “Right, there’s all this stuff we didn’t do. We should do it now.” It’s good to keep going, but within reason — you have other things you have to do too.
It’s definitely not easy for a development team. We’re looking at a redesign project, but we had new management come in and there were issues with the approach that they wanted to take. The new CEO said, “I’m not comfortable with that direction. We have to go in a different direction.” So we did and we shifted focus. Today, more than ever, you have to encourage your teams, especially as a product lead and a person who leads development, to be agile and prepared to make a shift.
The business will shift or something’s going to come in that’s a priority and will delay something else because of it. Making those decisions is, to me, the key to a leader in this position. On occasion, I’ve ruffled some feathers for that, but if you’re making good business decisions, then you’re doing the right thing. You can’t be stuck on “I’m already working on this. I can’t move.” As fast as our business moves, you have to be able to move with it. If not, you’re going to lose.
We actively push our folks to continue to learn. For example, we have LinkedIn Learning and continuing education programs. Inside of Adweek, I’m always encouraging my team to continue to do that. We send them to events to buff up their skills or see what’s going on. It’s my job, however, to always keep the focus on audience to revenue. I spend a lot of time explaining to people how a project they’re working on is going to impact either audience, revenue, or efficiency during product development. Especially before we start. That way, they understand why we’re doing it, its importance, and how it fits into the bigger picture as a company. That keeps the team focused on the end goal.
We have a great content team that’s continually getting information from the market as to where it’s going, what people are thinking, and what issues are out there. You’ve got to leverage that. We have an event team that’s putting on events to help us look at where things are going as well. Going to industry events and talking to colleagues is critical.
I’m always listening to people, understanding what they’re doing, or sharing ideas. LinkedIn can be a great resource. I’m using LinkedIn for feedback on, “Hey, I’ve done this” or “I’m looking for a vendor — any recommendations?” The vendor landscape changes every day and vendors I would’ve used three or four years ago are those I wouldn’t use today. You just have to continue to be in communication with people and be out in the market looking at new solutions.
For example, with generative AI, I’m always reading about it. Right now, if you’re coming to me with an interesting GenAI thing, I’m probably going to take the call. You have to take demos of tools and I know there are a lot of people in my position who say, “I’m just too busy. I don’t have time.” Vendors reach out all the time, but you gotta know when to take the calls. Keep your ear to the ground. I’m trying to find out what’s new, what’s not, what people are using, what they’re not, and building as many connections as I can.
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