‘If we keep doing this in five years, we will have run ourselves into the ground’: News Corp’s Pippa Leary urges publishers to shift focus
With changing consumer media habits comes a need for publishers to change the way they measure success – and that means understanding the importance of engagement over reach, according to News Corp Australia’s MD and publisher of free news & lifestyle, Pippa Leary.
Appearing on a panel at the IAB Australia Leadership Summit last week, Leary conceded that News Corp Australia has, in the past, been guilty of chasing “empty reach”, but since stepping into her new role as publisher, she has worked to change that mindset.
“We detected very quickly an underlying issue that is going on in the local market, and that is the local market is very hooked on what I would call a legacy metric of reach,” she said.
“When you dig into that traffic, you can find they’re actually not engaging with your content, and if they’re not engaging with your content, then you are not delivering any client outcomes.”
When looking at reach only, Leary stressed that publishers are placing unnecessary KPIs on their journalists and marketers, and not getting any value from any party involved.
“I’ll put my hand up, we’ve been one of the worst on just chasing empty reach, but I think the entire Australian commercial publishing industry needs to go ‘uh oh’.
Pippa Leary at last week’s summit
“If we keep doing this in five years, we will have run ourselves into the ground,” Leary warned.
Spearheading all of News Corp Australia’s free, client-funded sites, Leary said she very quickly learnt the value of direct traffic over anything else.
“Our direct traffic is ten times more valuable than anything coming from social, and five times more valuable than anything coming from search,” she explained.
For years, teams were chasing social, or what Leary described as “one and nones”, that weren’t giving News Corp or its clients any outcomes. So now, the KPIs have changed for journalists and marketers to chase “engaged reach”.
“They’ve become very focused on engagement because they now know their job is to turn audience engagement into client outcomes,” she said. “It’s really important that we step back and think about the metrics – I mean that’s not just good for marketers or your business, presumably its good for consumers and the type of content too.
“Journalists, editorial staff, suddenly get very focused on what stories, what headlines, how do we write them to drive the most engagement? Scroll depth, page impressions, time on site, all these metrics have now become incredibly important inside News Corp, and you’ll see the way we’re doing stories will become different.”
She concluded by calling on the industry to come together to shift away from vanity metrics.
“As an industry, we all have to agree that this continuing chase of empty reach is going to kill us,” she said.
“Let’s put our heads together and think, ‘okay what are some publicly available engagement metrics at scale’ – ones that will work industry-wide so the client can look at a number of different media options and go ‘oh this is where I’m most likely to get an outcome’, and just move away from vanity metrics.”
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the creative and PR beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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