Shipping industry news title Lloyds List last September returned to print with the launch of a new magazine, The Intelligence, published ten times a year. The move, two years after the former daily newspaper for the shipping industry went digital-only in 2013, may have surprised some. But it is just one in a line of recent developments designed to re-ignite growth in organic revenue at the 279 year-old title’s publisher Informa Business Intelligence, since the arrival in autumn 2014 of its CEO Patrick Martell.
Martell joined Business Intelligence from St Ives plc which he joined in 1980 and where, as group CEO from 2009 to 2014, he oversaw a major repositioning away from the company’s core business – book, magazine and commercial printing - following diversification with a new focus on selling wider marketing services.
Impressed by Stephen Carter, the former head of media regulator Ofcom who replaced Peter Rigby as Informa’s chief executive in 2013, Martell says the nature and the global scope of the Business Intelligence division were an immediate draw. The legacy he inherited came with a number of immediate challenges, however.
A small business mindset
“What I saw from the outset was a collection of niche businesses with strong products operating in a market that was growing and so attractive,” he recalls. “The businesses had been under-performing. It was suffering from organic revenue decline. So the challenge was to reverse that.”
Structural changes in the market with the move from print to digital and shift in advertising, accordingly; the financial crisis; and the movement of news to become freely available – requiring the business to respond by placing a greater emphasis on intelligence, had all taken their toll.
Internal structure, however, had also been an issue, he explains: “As a collection of independent businesses, it wasn’t structured to build scale or drive efficiency.” With the majority – some 87% - of the division’s revenue generated by subscriptions, he adds, another priority was to address “relatively poor” subscription renewal rates.
New structures
An early step was to create a new operating model that grouped what was previously “a collection of islands” into five, new market verticals each overseen by new management while HR, finance, marketing and sales become horizontal functions running across each.
“The verticals created new market focus while we were able to build scale, efficiency and effectiveness in the shared areas common to any business,” Martell explains.
Earlier this year, Business Intelligence unveiled new brand identities and a further re-grouping of its products and services to better reflect and convey its sector specialisms across agribusiness, finance, maritime, pharma and telecoms and mobile technology. The re-branding, rolling out across 2016, will cover more than 100 different product brands.
Around the time that the new operating model was put in place in 2014, Informa launched a three year investment programme called The Growth Acceleration Plan. Applied across all of Informa’s operating divisions, which also include Global Exhibitions, Academic Publishing and Knowledge & Networking, it provided Business intelligence with funding to upgrade its IT function and develop a strategic approach to investment in product development.
The IT “re-plumbing”, as Martell calls it, is complex and still underway – in effect, heralding a move away from multiple data centres to single hosting, and cloud solutions. However, the first fruits from the product development strategy went live last year.
“Business Intelligence had not previously had product development as a specific function so we appointed a significant team dedicated to those five new verticals whose focus is to understand what customers need and feed that insight into product development – both to support and develop existing products and new ones,” Martell explains.
To begin with, the focus was on process and customer engagement, he says – embedding a formal approach for engaging with all customers, then opening dialogue with them about future plans to come on line once product development ideas had come to fruition.
Insight vs Intelligence
Internally, a distinction was drawn between insight products – those essentially providing news, more of a commodity buy – and intelligence products, a premium proposition providing in-depth analysis. Both remain important categories for the business. But Martell insists it is important to understand the different roles each play to focus investment on where it will deliver the best return.
“With news, it’s about scale, efficiency and getting the product out there quickly and efficiently. With intelligence, it’s all about creating a cutting edge around data and ability to share data sets across platforms and combining that data with intelligence. Each has different requirements in terms of customers, staffing and IT,” he explains.
“To create intelligence products, in addition to getting people to collaborate, you’ve also got to get data to collaborate and the business as it was previously structured did not encourage that.”
The IT upgrade has also needed to accommodate end users’ changing behaviours and expectations.
The battle for the desktop
“Embedding services in clients’ desktops is a growth area – automating API feeds to integrate data into customers’ workplaces, and ensuring services are also available on mobile, and so on,” Martell adds.
“It’s interesting to see that for the first time ever, how people live outside work is how they want to work, as well – not being tied to a desk, or a desk-top computer, with access to information via a lap-top or mobile 24 hours a day. Everything is much less siloed now, but with that comes expectations of certain levels of usability and workflows.”
Embedded content alone, however, is no guarantee of success.
“Yes, you get to integrate your content into a client’s desktop, but must-have content is what makes any service sticky,” he says. “It should never be the right strategy to make it difficult for a customer to leave – if anything, perversely, you should make it easy to leave and focus on making your product the very best that it can be.”
To that effect, Business Intelligence last year brought to market a number of product enhancements and new products, including Lloyds List print spin-off The Intelligence – a direct response to customer demand for a specific print component to be added to the Lloyds List product.
“It serves a different need,” Martell explains. “If you do content you want to do it in whatever medium the customer chooses to use it. And The Intelligence is meeting our expectations. It’s something our customers wanted. We’ve put a lot of effort into asking them for feedback and having got it, it would have been silly not to use it.”
Other recent enhancements to Lloyds List include a 40% expansion of its global editorial team to increase its depth of coverage; new forecasting tools from Lloyds List’s consultancy and forecasting arm, Maritime-Insight; and more long-form stories and analysis, delivered digitally-first.
Datamonitor Healthcare, part of Business Intelligence’s rapidly-growing Pharma Intelligence portfolio, has also undergone recent expansion with global analyst resources, sales forecasting and client support increased by 200%. A new proprietary forecasting tool was recently introduced along with a DMHC Live Support system to answer client queries more quickly; and to facilitate the breadth and depth of changes at Business Intelligence so far made, Martell has also introduced internal changes to foster closer working relations between staff – an incentive scheme designed to foster collaboration, more training, and increased internal communication. However, across the board, cultural change must be, has been and still is led from the top, he is quick to point out.
Strong early results
Without doubt, Martell has overseen a busy eighteen months and the investment of time and effort quickly paid off.
In the group’s end of year 2015 results, Business Intelligence reported the number of customers renewing pre-contract expiry was up 85% - an achievement that helped the division finally reverse its organic revenue decline by the fourth quarter. And Martell is quietly confident about his division’s prospects for the year ahead.
“Getting the business back into organic growth happened much earlier than we were expecting, and that was a significant achievement. So one clear focus moving forward will be on maintaining that momentum and maintaining the discipline we now have around renewals,” he says.
“The second half of 2016 and into 2017 will see a significant number of further product enhancements and new products launched across all verticals. We are stepping up our investment in marketing, and we have significant recruitment already underway which will increase across the business and, in particular, in North America and Asia.”
He adds with some understatement: “We are also investing in local language products. So there is a lot going on.”
A decade or more of change in publishing has been profound and irreversible, what with everything moving online, the move from insight to intelligence and the advertising model changing fundamentally, he points out. Then there’s the level of reliability and availability expected of IT infrastructures and the need to invest in the best workflow solutions.
Which is why Martell is in no doubt that broader management skills and proven ability to effectively manage and implement organisational change are now what’s needed to run a content business successfully. “Content is still at the heart of it,” he observes. “But in today’s marketplace, I’m not sure just being a good publisher is enough.”
