Show, Don’t Tell Ad Tactic Drives Boston Globe Media Subscriptions
Good writing is showing and not telling. Apparently, it also works for marketing and advertising.
Boston Globe Media, which owns The Boston Globe, Boston.com, Boston Magazine, STAT and more, started showcasing its editorial coverage in ads starting about 18 months ago. The results were surprisingly excellent. Globe Media’s vice president of platforms and research and development, Matt Karolian, told AMO:
“In many instances, we’ve found that editorial content outperforms traditional marketing creative. For example, this past fall, promoted editorial content related to the election drove new subscription starts at a rate 10 times more efficiently than traditional marketing creative. This highlights the power of connecting excellent editorial content with the right audiences.”
Instead of running ads telling readers that they have the best political coverage, they show the political coverage. “The great thing about our industry is that our journalists are telling the most compelling stories around and so just helping connect that journalism with an audience that we think is right and has a propensity to subscribe and is highly qualified, is a winning combination. And again, almost without exception, we’ve seen showing and not telling to be vastly more successful,” Karolian said.
Boston Globe Media’s bet on its quality coverage shows that investing in journalism and journalists and producing high-quality and original reporting can drive revenue and returns. It’s a mission accomplished in part by getting the right people in the marketing department—not pure marketers, nor pure journalists, but someone who has been on both sides of the company and has a deep understanding of a publication’s audience.
That should help the company reach 400,000 digital subscribers across the company, minus Stat, by the end of 2027. As of March, that number currently stood at more than 268,000.
“The number of people in our industry who have had deep, organic experience, like, ‘I’ve worked in a newsroom and have worked on the business side and understand how to wield these tools really effectively,’ is a small pool of people, and it’s going to be a skill set that’s going to become increasingly important,” Karolian said.
Those who are able to knit together cohesive strategies and execute will have a “little bit of a superpower.”
After all, questions like how can one effectively translate long-form journalism into different formats across the internet—from TikTok to LinkedIn and YouTube to Spotify—aren’t the easiest and most obvious to answer. They also have to be directed towards the correct audience, not necessarily the largest one.
Karolian said:
“We want to meet the right people in the right place at the right time, with the right content or products to ultimately achieve growth for our publications and having a team truly focused on that and practitioners that can look at that from all angles is a huge key to success as we move forward, because you can’t just do one of those individual things well. You have to do it all well in concert.”
And while digital platforms are not what they used to be (thank you to AI overviews, Google Search algorithmic changes), the Googles and Metas of the world are still “massively important” because their reach continues to be mammoth, Karolian said. Similarly, SEO isn’t by any means dead yet. That said, Boston Globe Media is highly focused on becoming a destination, engaging readers and bringing them back over and over again.
“The organic reach across platforms continues to shrink. You’re going to need to increase your investment and level of sophistication around paid acquisition and paid awareness, and then increase your ability to develop sticky, well defined, highly engaging destination, worthy products and that’s a shift. That’s what we’re thinking a lot about, and we’re trying to build for that future.”
It’s also about giving readers what they want. Notably, the newsroom has made a huge investment in high school sports. And the company has found its audience by buying ads on Google search terms related to all the towns that they cover. They get right to the top on a search about “Swampscott baseball” or Swampscott high school basketball.”
“A parent’s going to be like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that existed, but totally relevant to my search query,’ and click on it and go and consume,” Karolian said. “We’re finding that to be one of the best conversion tactics that we’ve had.”
