Sara Fischer, AXIOS media reporter, calls in from DC

Alexa Kristen. Welcome back to episode I don't even know what we're on two, and we have some special announcements. We're taking this show on the road, on the road and I R l yes. So we will be opening up the I A b S Annual Leadership Meeting in

February out in Palm Desert, California. Big focus on direct to consumer brands and how incumbent brands can learn from new startups and direct to consumer brands, and how the whole ecosystem of supply chain and um reaching audiences has changed, and why direct to consumer brands are coming into their own at this point. It's really going to be an

interesting conversation. So we're excited to be there and big thanks to I a b for having us come out totally, and we're also excited to announce that we'll be doing two of our favorite things, talking and eating, yeah, talking any with a bunch of friends. We're going to be launching an inaugural dinner series starting at the on air fest with our friends at Work by Work. We're excited to be doing that in Brooklyn at the White Hotel

in February as well. And stay tuned because they're going to be more at Landia Dinners and you may have a chance to come and join us. So today we have a special caller, probably the hottest media trends reporter in the industry right now, wouldn't you say, I would say hottest and still not known about enough. Right So we're going to get on the phone with Sarah Fisher from Axios Media Trends newsletter. I love her background, So she's going to tell you about how she actually got

to Axios and what she was doing before. And I think there's actually a signal in the noise here. Um And so when you list and you hear her talk about her background and add sales and on the business side, I think it actually gives so many people on the business side, something to hold onto and say, wait a second, I can have a perspective beyond what I'm selling, right, like walking in with just a proposal and selling to a brand or a publisher or a client or whoever.

Right that everyone in this space should and can have a perspective on the business And I love that, right. I think what was interesting about her point of viewer. What is interesting about her point of view is the perspective around how to fish for information. Right. If you're thinking about how you're selling, you're asking for client objectives, trying to figure out where you can slot in. You know, your unique point of view is what you just said

to get something sold. But I think that there's something interesting about how you know, when you think about the seller buy a relationship and you think about that dynamic at the table of what they need to pull from you to get to, you know, to the point of how we make this deal happen. It's interesting to see her translate that over to the journalism front. And it comes down to ask the right questions, asking the right questions.

And yes, it doesn't mean it's more work sometimes absolutely, but it also means that you have a more meaningful relationship with the people that you're talking to and selling to totally what I appreciate it, and I think, you know, having chatted with her quite a bit, it's interesting to see sort of where at Landia has sprung up in the market, where Axios Media has sprung up in the market, and the different unique point of view you get from people who are in it right, the people who are

grinding it out, the people that have expertise and have practiced um and how they're able to take points from brands or points from publishers and able to shape it into a conversation that actually extracts value because you know, you get it. So I think that's really interesting. So next, let's call Sarah cam dialer up. Hi, this is Sarah Fisher. Sarah Fisher. Hey, Sarah, it's the ladies from Atlantia are Hey,

thanks for having me. Good morning, Good morning. So you have the hottest media newsletter in the industry right now, Axio says Media Trends. Can you tell us, Sarah, how you got started and why you made the jump over to Axios two put this out into the world. Yeah, absolutely, and thank you so much for the kind words. I mean, It's kind of serendipitous how it happened. I was in

ad sales for the majority of my career. I sold advertising at Politico, and when the founders of Politico jumped to create Axius, they wanted to create a product that looked at the business and technology sides of media, and they wanted a reporter who they wouldn't have to explain what a CPM was, or they wouldn't have to explain how how tor bidding worked, and that can be kind of challenging to find, especially because we're headquartered here in Washington.

And so they figured, let's see if Sarah would be interested. Even though she comes from the business side, she's not really a writer, we know she gets those important topics, and it just sort of worked out really well. I started before the company launched last November. We launched the newsletter in June, and it's sort of taken off from there. Wait, so you went from ad sales to journalism. You had not been a journalist before. No. I spent a few

years during my sales career. It took some time off and went to CNN, and I learned some of the editorial concepts that you need for report to be a reporter, you know, how do you initiate something off the record on the record. But for the most part, I've never been a writer, and then when they brought me on to do this, I kind of had to wing it. But luckily for us Axios, our format is, you know, really short writing. It's not using a lot of words,

it's just sort of leading on expertise. So it turned out to be a good fit. So how are you sourcing stories? Because obviously there's a ton of media trade organizations that are out there reporting on very similar issues, but you seem to have found an angle in a bend in that was able to cut through very quickly.

How are you sourcing those stories? And what are you looking for in the market to really find your point of differentiation and Axios Yes, So I'd say that every time you read the newsletter you'll probably find that between the five to seven items that I include, there's three

to four people that are on the record. But what you don't see are the you know, thirty or forty people I talked to that week, whether it was on the phone, on background, off the work record, in an interview, at a conference, in a conversation just to be able to better form an opinion or a perspective that could help me shed light on some of these really nuanced topics to readers. And so when it comes to sourcing,

it runs the gamut. This is like the most important skill that I took from sales and I brought to reporting. It doesn't matter who you are, where you are. Everyone has an interesting perspective when it comes to media. So sometimes I'll talk to the folks that I used to

sell ads to, some of the adviers. Sometimes I talk to regulators because I'm here in Washington about what do you know about how this industry is transforming that maybe some many times the industry parties don't even know about because they aren't looking at it from such a high level. Or I'll talk to brands. You know, it really runs the gamut, but there's no sort of equation like I

call this person every day. I call that person every day because I'm covering such a wide scope of things, everything from media trends in publishing, telecom technology, business deals that you can't allow yourself to you know, only talk to the same like ten people. You just got to

talk to everyone. Well, I think it's really impressive is that there's so much noise out there and you distill your newsletter into really smart, really pointed topics, and um they is that people need to be paying attention to and when you're talking everybody, how do you do that? How do you Lauren, I talked about spotting the signal in the noise? How do you spot the signals and

the noise? It's a great question. One of the things that I did have to do when I was at scene, and which was hard, was they put me in this thing called the feeds from and you'd have to listen to like hours and hours of White House briefings, Pentagon briefing, Stage department briefings, and then you have to send a note to the network of like the top five things, like what were the biggest things after five hours of listening to people? What are the five minutes that matter?

And so it really helps hone your editorial judgment. And I like to sort of apply that same thought process when I write the newsletter. It's like, Okay, I have lists that I've made all week of things I've heard, things that are interesting. But if I'm a business executive and I need to get smarter about my media business, What are the five things that I have to know? And so, honestly, it just comes down to ranking. It becomes it comes down to just having good news judgment,

going with your gut and ranking things. And sometimes I'll identify something that no one else is talking about, and I wonder, oh, my gosh, am I missing? Am I missing the mark? Like? Am I the one that's just going totally off the cliff here? And then people will respond and be like, thank god you wrote that. I've been thinking about that, or I hadn't thought about it

this way. I'd say, like, the best example is when I talked about some of the issues that we're facing with like Chinese investments in media, or you know, I'm going to have something tomorrow on you know, Comcast and NBC their merger sort of remedies expired this past weekend,

Like what does that mean for a T? T? Time Warner And what does that mean for you if you're looking to advertise with a T and T. So a lot of it is just me kind of going with my gut, and sometimes I guess I could be off, but it seems so far that people have liked my gut, you know, It's interesting when you talk about being able

to distill it down in five points. I think there's a side hustle in there for you, because if I read one more sales deck that goes fifty pages instead of five points and four pages, I think there's something there where you could uh kind of consult with folks on how to get straight to the point. So you've been obviously on you know, some of the hot tips coming through, and you you dropped a very special edition UM in the middle of CS last week around the

news relative to Facebook. Yes, can you give us the background on what you see being the most important facets UM for our listeners around the news of Facebook changing their algorithm to focus on engagement with posts, which obviously are going to have negative applications on brands and publishers. Yeah.

So I'd say the most important thing is that if you take a look at traffic patterns, any sophisticated publisher that's eyeing or analytics, And by publisher, I'm referring to brands too, because they published on Facebook, they should have seen this coming. I mean, the amount of referred traffic from Facebook and comparison to Google and others has just been waning for months, and so you shouldn't be surprised

by what you're seeing. However, you should expect for it to continue to ramp up, meaning that less and less of your posts will have visibility, will have exposure. I think here's the sneaky to ways where it's going to creep up on publishers and brands that they might not realize. One is so many people who do long form natives rely on Facebook to distribute traffic to those native pieces,

and that will become much harder. Did you day just wrote a piece on this If you had bought, you know, a one hundred thousand dollar native execution with a publisher, but on your media plan there was like a eighty thousand dollars social distribution Like most of those clicks you were banking on from Facebook, You're probably not going to get in half as much as those. So that's one big side effect that I'd say is going to have

on brands and publishers. The other is there have been analytics to support this, and we've run a purse on this throughout the year, but short form video for the sake of short form video is just not going to be an option for developing an audience anymore. And we've written about this extensively, particularly as we mentioned actually a few editions ago, how it will help other sort of

technology advancements like voice or et cetera, become bigger. But you can't just create Facebook is to try to go viral anymore and get more people to like your page and maybe sign up for your newsletter subscription. You're gonna have to rely on much more strategic, much more well crafted types of editorial or content. Is. You can't just make spami videos anymore. Hasn't it been that way actually

for a long time. Now it's officially that way now with Facebook going down this direction, it's definitely going to be a marked difference. But I would say if Brand's thought for the last three years that they were getting real virility out of Facebook without giving them significant spend,

they're wrong. Well it's interesting, right, Like one of my favorite tweets that I read that came in the feed right afterwards was, you know, we talked about it all this time, the difference between delivering traffic versus delivering engagement and true audience, and people are going to start finding out to your point, Al said that you know, this whole time. It was volumes and volumes and volumes and

scale and scale and scale. But the reality of the the situation was how many of those folks that were coming across your post or watching your video or actually qualified audience that was going to stick around and engage with the brand or were they getting real morality? I think the question for me is was anyone getting real virility at this in the last few years with Facebook anyway? I don't think so. Yeah, I completely agree with that.

I think there was a lot of inflated virality and inflated engagement through paid Now we've heart you know, we've quoted analysts saying that it's you know, organic reach is basically going to be dead on Facebook and you're gonna have to buy a lot of your reach. I think that's one thing publisher should be really wary of is if you're not creating incredibly culturally timely relevant content, Like if you feel like you have to pay to elevate

your organic stuff, your organic stuff could be stronger. And so I think brands are going to have to think about, how do I create more like culturally relevant moments, How do I create more authentic content that breaks through the noise without me having to pay for it to break through the noise. And so you're right, it's been happening for a long time. But I think this is the way of Facebook putting me icing on the cake. We keep talking about Facebook. Let's talk about everything but Facebook.

So like, where's the opportunity. I was reading an article recently where the CEO of Fatherly was saying that a lot of his traffic is coming direct from pinterest. Is this an opportunity for other tech players like a Pinterest to come in and create a whole new environment for brands and publishers. It is, And we talked about this a lot of accius and we get a ton of our traffic from Flipboard. It depends on what type of

publisher you are. If you're a lifestyle publisher, if you do, you know, sell home decre or something like that, then yes, Pinterest would be phenomenal for you. If you're a news publisher, something like Flipboard or Google News or Apple would be great for you. The thing that publishers are going to have to think about, though, is that we got into this situation where we were signing deals with the devil.

We were signing away our I P and are content to these different platforms, and we weren't getting enough of a revenue share in return. We're at the point now where if you want to develop strategic relationships with your audience, if you want to be able to make you know, sound financial investments, you can't just rely on traffic from these platforms. You have to rely on a strategic relationship,

a strategic investment where you're getting revenue in return. And so this is one of the problems that some publishers crist out with Apple News. It's that where's the revenue share? Is it good enough? Are we making enough money from that partnership. I know Snapchat has been really vocal that they're trying to make this better. They're announcing a publisher summit where they can focus on AD rev share agreements,

I mean the most important thing. There are different distributors that are going to rise as Facebook falls, like Apple News, Flipboards, Snapchat, Twitter, etcetera. But publishers are going to have to be pretty picky about the ones they choose to really invest in unless they're getting a big return on that investment, either through an AD revenue share or content license. Agreement. They need to be really picky about where they just hand over their I P because then they're just going to fall

into the same trap as Facebook. How do they vet that? Like, Yeah, you gotta have a smart audience development team that's in constant communication with the partner. I mean, I don't know if you remember seeing there was a CNBC article about how Amazon reps can be really hard to get in touch with and to sort of work with. I mean,

Amazon has a relatively nascent advertising business. It's growing faster than everybody else's, but some of that institutional infrastructure of how do you create sales partnerships, how do you create smart revenue partnerships and content are just newer to them. That's not what they focused on. They were an e commerce platform forever, and so you need to choose your partners that have experience and that are committed to getting

that sort of publisher relationship right. And that means having a lot of uptrunk conversations with their sales teams about what does the revenue share look like? Am I going to be contract? And how long does this contract expire? Where are the flexibilities in this So that if we have a huge enormous bumping traffic that we can get earned for it because we're bringing elevation to your platforms.

All of these things are conversations that brand's got to have with the distributors, and unfortunately, not all distributors are at the level where they're sophisticated enough and developing these types of contracts. If you take a look at what cable has done with some of the networks or cable satellite companies, that those partnerships have been solidified over a long period of time, starting to get a little bit

rustled now with redistribution agreements, but they've been solidified. We're still at the point where we have not created a really solid distribution ecosystem for digital Regulation is going to have some stuff parts to do with it, but I also just think time and experience are going to help to you know, it's interesting, UM, what you were just talking about in terms of content I P and not

necessarily just giving away the milk for free. I think it's something we've talked about at Nausea and probably on this show, is that publishers UM and media companies in particular. Um, it's almost like you need to turn the mirror inward and start taking a deeper look at what you are bringing to the table um and some of the content um that has been you know, chasing the lowest comments dominate. You're looking for scale and finding these partners just to

put it out wherever anybody wants to view it. I think as an industry we need to reevaluate that distribution strategy because at the end of the day, if you have an asset or you have content um that people are willing to pay for, um that people can't get anywhere else, I think people are willing to come and look for it, and I don't necessarily think that that has to be in the Facebook feed UM. So would be curious to get your thoughts on that. I mean,

I couldn't agree more. This is the lens that I would approach to the people's way of thinking about this. For so long we measured success in media by reach Nielsen ratings. How many people listened consecutively for one minute? What was that reach? Radio? Same thing, what was that reach over a fifteen minute measurement period? Even in digital when we first started out, we were measuring things by

unique visitors. Over the past really I'd say two years because reach has become democratized through smartphones, you can reach anyone at a time. What has become the shift is how engaged how much of someone's time can you capture. And so when we're thinking about i P and we're thinking about just making our content free and accessible, you don't need to reach everybody any more. That's not the

metric of success. You're hand pumping. We're hand pumping. The metricup success should be how much does your content engage someone so that they can have an positive brand lift and help get you to a point of sale if you're trying to sell product, or how much does your product give you a positive brand lift so that if you're a publisher, you can develop that direct to consumer relationship to monetize it in other ways. And so if you're thinking about I just need to get my i

P out there, I need to scale my audience. I need growth. I need growth. I mean, stop trying to grow so fast and start trying to grow smart. Where can I put my IP in a place that I'm going to get value from it and my consumers are gonna get value from it. Because one of the other issues is you totally dilute your brand. When you just try to kind of push all of your content everywhere without being strategic, a half of it doesn't become viewable, right.

Impressions aren't viewable in the US anyway, So why are you spanning it on crappy programmatic channels and b when it does get viewed, if it's not contextually relat in like what we're saying before, the impact is so much less. So this is going to force everyone in the ecosystem at Atlantia. Soul sister, what you said about um, you know, stop growing so fast, start growing smart, I think is like Mike drops, I actually think it's a new episode that I would love for you. We would love for

you to come in on. Because one of the things that we talk a lot about is in this economy of companies and brands that are being driven by short termism, right, and by the market that says you have to grow, you have to grow, you have to grow at this exponential right. And then what's going to happen is we're gonna see brands, including media brands and companies have these meteoric rises and falls just as fast. And so what happens, I think to the whole landscape when that when that

starts happening. I mean, the rise and fault thing that you just hit on is so crucial in understanding how all of the new age digital publishers are failing. Because if you're VC backed, which like excuses the EC backed business Insider Refiner twenty nine, the list goes on. If you're backed by venture capitalists. This is why vcs typically,

by the way, don't get into media. They want to see a tend time return in their investment, meaning that if you bring in you know, one million dollars one year, the second year, you gotta double it. Bring into the third year, you've gotta double it, bring in four. By the time some of these companies get into really it's like the fourth and fifth year, the pressure to continue to double revenue it swallows them, and so they just start to grow as fast as they possibly can to

accommodate it. They don't have the flexibility of longevity and time to build and develop a smart audience, and that's where you're seeing a lot of them start to rely on platforms just to scale big meet those DC expectations, and then once those platforms pulled the plug, they're screwed. And so I think a lot of publishers are going

to have to think strategically about their funding. If you want to get into this game, where are you gonna get funding that your expectations allow for long term growth? And I recognize that that seems a little bit contradictory because Axis is VC back. It's a challenge we're going to have to face to leave and open about that. But people should think really strategically about that because we're watching people that have those very steep growth curves ahead

of them just flounder in this environment. I also think that to just to put a cherry on that and then they commoditize their experience. So not only have they lost any kind of funding, they've lost audience. They've completely lost audience. Some of the people that came to them initially now see that the content has totally derived from where their brand or what that publisher stood for to begin with, and they suddenly don't find any resonance with it.

I kind of think about Huffington's Post in a way. The post was built as almost an open platform for people that have left the center, you know, uh viewpoints during the Bush administration, and then once media had to commoditize, where a lot of left leaning words you know, daily costs and others popped up there. You know, value add

for being sort of this open platform suddenly decreased. And what you saw was that loyal havington post readers, they could just get this completely commoditized stuff and other left of center sites, and it became more difficult for them. I'm not saying that there isn't intrinsic value, because they

do do amazing reporting. It's just they're a good example of a publisher I think that has sort of had to figure out how to navigate these waters because they grew really fast at a time when the Facebook was just starting, and now they have to redefine themselves well not so to just bring a full circle. That's where we talked about the value of content. I p if you have something that is truly differentiated, think twice before

you start distributing it all over the place. I do believe we can get back to this push versus poll, leaning more heavily on the poll because if you know, I've got something that nobody else in the market has, well ship, I'm gonna gone exactly So, Sarah, it's time, I know when I saw you in Vegas at c E S, you said, oh my god, killed by d I Y. How come nobody's ever prepared for it? So let's see if you are, we'll see, We'll see how it goes. I don't know, So what would you kill? Um?

I would kill This might be a little bit of a specific one, but this is going back to my sales days. I would start to really think if I'm a brand, about killing offline items and media plans that are off platform for the brand that I'm running with. So if I'm trying to buy I don't know whatever, someone's audience, why would I ever want to target this publisher's audience through audience extension on another platform. It never

really made sense to me. It always felt like you're getting the right people, but you're not getting the right experience. So I would kill off just like generally speaking, the concept of audience extension. If you're going to run with the publisher, you're doing it because you want to get that audience amid your content that I p next to the right people at the right time. I think this splicing and dicing, well, I'll get this audience, but I'm

gonna put it in front of the competitor's content. Because it's cheaper, You cheapen the experience. It's not worth your time. Kill it. From that line, I don't interesting I like it. What would you buy, bling, Bling? I would buy a measurement company in podcasts, whoever they are, wherever they are. We need it so bad. Apple Analytics is not enough. It's a really quickly growing industry. There's no reason it

shouldn't be taking off. The only reason it isn't is because we don't have a way for advertisers to measure the success of it and equate it in a way that could make it easy to buy and show return on investments. So I would buy whoever can measure podcasts in a really meaningful way. Maybe you should come talk to the Panoply folks because they have to make a phone platform. Or maybe we should shift a d I Y and let's just build it ourselves. So what would

you do yourself, Sarah? You know this is something that we hope to write about at one point. UM. I work with a lot of comms departments, either in brands or UM publishers. I think I would start to reimagine what the reporter and brand relationship looks like you see so many people that just kind of spam you with press releases, is opposed to taking the time to strategically walk you through their goals, their mission, and their product.

And if they were to do that, we would have a much easier time actually giving them some of that or media that they're craving. But when you just sort of spam us with press releases, it becomes really difficult for us to develop a smart relationship with your product and your brand. So I think I would reimagine that the you know, reporter brand relationship. I love that. I think something that Laura and I talked to folks about in the industry a lot is don't just put a

press release out in the wire yep. That's the old school. It doesn't do anything. So these relationships um and bringing uh you know, reporters into the fold on what's really driving the business and why this came about so smart so right, yeah, And I would say that if I was a VC, Sarah, that's why my money's on you, because you're asking the right questions. So with that, thank you so much, Sarah. If people need you, get in touch with you, drop you a tip, Go on background.

How do they find you? Sarah s A r a at Axos dot com. And if you haven't before, subscribe to Sarah's Axios Media newsletter. It is awesome. It's something that now I get so many newsletters in my inbox. I always make sure I'm reading that every Tuesday morning. Sarah, thank you so much for calling in. It was great to chat with you. We hope you see you in New York City soon. Yes, thanks guys, talk soon by So how smart is Sarah Fisher? I love her. She

could be like the third leg of the stool. She might be the third leg, and she might be the fourth leg. I'm not really true she counts for two legs. Yeah, she was great. So definitely subscribe to Axios Media Trends newsletter if you haven't already. Um, but that said, we have our thank you's. Thanks Cameron Drew's, Andy Bowers, Matt Turk and all of our friends and family and Panoply and our fabulous listeners who have been sending us I don't even know. I mean, like Twitter is blown up.

Twitter is blown up with the emails that we're getting. Oh my god, they're like phenomenal hair raising make me spits and tear up like, thank you, thank you for everyone reaching out and saying how much you're enjoying the show and giving us ideas on things that you're interested in. Um, we are forever grateful and keep them coming. So with that island yet, we'll be back in two weeks. Mm hmm. Full disclosure. Our opinions are our own.