With marketing budgets becoming more compressed, Bloomberg Media is tasked with the challenge of doing more with less when it comes to connecting with audiences, according to Mirabella El Baze, global head of client growth.
El Baze and Christine Cook, global chief revenue officer, discussed new avenues Bloomberg and its clients can take to provide meaning and utility to their audiences in the Variety Studio, presented by Canva, at Advertising Week. An early suggestion to help cut costs, integrate AI, which Bloomberg is attempting to leverage across three dimensions.
“One is how we cover it and making sure we’re at least covering the story,” El Baze said. ‘We have the largest technology newsroom, so really leveraging that as a resource. The second is how we integrate it into our product. I think we’ve been doing so in our digital products since 2016 … learning to really optimize the user experience. And then thirdly, making sure we’re doing everything we can to support our partners, who are marketers, who are advertising leaders, who are media leaders, in terms of arming them with the intelligence they need to start that journey on their own.”
While data can be a crucial tool to reaching and analyzing audiences, it is not enough to fully understand the needs of audiences. For this reason, Cook said it is crucial to acquire insights — not just data. She added that a multi-channel approach to marketing is critical, as well as smarter alignments that include intersectionality.
“For example, in Q1, we’re launching another one of Bloomberg Originals’ ‘An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet’ with Nikolai Coster Waldau. He is not only a successful actor from ‘Game of Thrones,’ his passion is sustainability and [he has] an alliance with the United Nations. So we’ve done a show, more of an infotainment show, and allowed our clients to come in and partner,” Cook said.
El Baze added that finding these priorities allows them to reach new audiences: “Creating moments in time that break through the clutter and really stand out as moments on their own, I think is something that we’re going to continue to see and has been really effective.”
As for connecting with younger audiences, the two said Bloomberg has been able to introduce the concept of influencing into journalism. “What we have been investing in and doing is pinpointing key journalists or editorial talent that we have around key topics that can kind of start to influence on their own,” El Baze said.
While they will continue implementing those strategies in the near future, the two said that it will be difficult to predict consumer consumption, especially with 2024 looking to be a complex year.
“With elections in the U.S. and in a lot of major markets, with a lot of geopolitical challenges, with COVID, with the racial reckoning that we saw — we saw a lot of brands and a lot of our partners lean in in a really big way, and others that didn’t. I think we’re entering another year where we’re going to see a similar bifurcation super,” El Baze said.
