AJ+: Creating Customer Value Through Active Audience Engagement

Engagement is in our DNA.

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Raja Sharief, AJ+ Strategy Implementation Manager

The Reflective Mindset: Changing Trends in the News Media Industry

Al Jazeera, along with other traditional news broadcasters, is currently navigating through an industry being disrupted and redefined. Pew Research suggested that by 2018, the preferred medium for interfacing with news will be overwhelming digital in nature through social media, mobile, and web-­‐based interaction with increased content personalization with TV-­‐based consumption fadingi. Additionally, like its sister-­‐industry, the Print News Media, Broadcast news is being challenged by non-­‐traditional players in this space, what are being termed “digital natives”, including digital entrepreneurs such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Ebay’s Pierre Omidyar and more traditional digital native news organizations such as Vice News, Huffington post, Vox, Buzzfeed and the like.

The conclusion the industry in general, and Al Jazeera Media Network in particular, has arrived at, is that it must seriously reflect upon the shift in consumption patterns of its target audience and understand how best to address this trend. As Michael Dell has stated, “The only constant thing about our business is that everything is changing”. This statement encompasses the new philosophy of Al Jazeera Media Network in its approach to reaching its audience.

Jigar Mehta, AJ+’s Engagement Lead, states that, “there is a very experimental tone to what we do”ii. How AJ+ delivers or engages with its audience today may not be how it delivers or engages several months down the road.

The aim of this paper is to analyze Al Jazeera Media Network’s Digital-­‐first News Media organization, AJ+, understand its approach to strategic marketing in an effort to address this industry trend and finally to provide insights for shaping marketing strategy going forward.

Background – Al Jazeera Media Network and AJ+

Al Jazeera Media Network is the parent company of various media entities providing International and Regional News and Current Affairs, in-­‐depth Investigative reporting and documentaries. Additionally, it provides children’s programming through its Al Jazeera Children’s Channel brand and previously provided over 14 channels of Sports programming through Al Jazeera Sports, currently BeInSport. It provides its programming in multiple languages to various regions including English, Arabic, Bosnian, and Turkish.

Al Jazeera has recently made its way into 60 Million American homes via Cable distribution through its acquisition in 2013 of Al Gore’s Current TV. It has rebranded it as “Al Jazeera America” and provides primarily U.S.-­‐based news and current affairs reporting with some mix of international news.

As of the Launch of Al Jazeera English in 2006, Al Jazeera Media Network incubated the “New Media” team, who mandate was to deliver Al Jazeera’s existing content to the web, mobile and social media spaces. While this was a success, Al Jazeera winning Webby Awards multiple times for its online presence, there has always been a limitation in that online delivery was always an after-­‐thought after producing content for on-­‐air. With this arrangement, there was limited capability to produce and shape content and storytelling techniques appropriate for New Media platforms.

In 2013, in an effort to build upon it’s success in the New Media space, including its online presence, mobile and social media focus and to make itself more relevant to the Millennial audience, Al Jazeera hired a staff of digital-­‐natives, primarily made up of Millennials, in its San Francisco offices, to experiment and build-­‐out a separate organization, untethered by the constraints of a traditional media organization, that engages and speaks to the needs and wants of this demographic.

AJ+’s initial offering has been nothing short of a success. According to Journalism.co.uk, AJ+ has reached an engagement level 635% of its page likes, indicating the level of interaction the audience has had with the AJ+ News content. In comparison, a close competitor in this space, Buzzfeed, has a modest engagement level of 39.6% of its total page likes.iii

But reflecting upon the Commodity -­‐ Speciality framework, we can ascertain that AJ+ and similar digital-­‐first news organizations, are still in the Speciality stage, and that as the new model begins to mature, more firms will enter the market and eventually drive the new form towards commodity.

Figure 1 – Speciality-­‐Commodity Framework

Source: (Slide Deck 2: Dr. Kunal Basu)

The challenge for Al Jazeera Media Network for its new startup AJ+ is to leverage its first-­‐mover advantage to understand its competitive advantage in this new market and begin building this into the organizational DNA.

Building Engagement into its DNA

As a result of lessons-­‐learned from its parent traditional news media organization’s approach to marketing, AJ+ has made customer-­‐engagement the foundation of its organization. Raja Sharief, AJ+’s strategy implementation manager, reflects that “Engagement is what’s in our DNA”. (Quote)

From the Reflective Mindset perspective, AJ+ has intentionally avoided the “centralized marketing management” approach in favor of a dispersed marketing competency throughout the organization. To this end, roles at AJ+ look nothing like roles at its more traditional news media counterpart, Al Jazeera’s broadcast news.

Roles such as the “Engagement Manager” are embedded with the story and topics as they are developing. It is this role that ensures each story is tailored to its target audience and tailored for each platform its audience engages the story on. For example, with Facebook’s new Autoplay feature, AJ+ has the opportunity to utilize five seconds of video content to grab the attention of the viewer to create further engagement. While the same content on YouTube would have several seconds of AJ+ splash screen for branding purposes, which works well for audiences coming through YouTube, this does not work for audiences on Facebook. Engagement Managers, through observing behaviors, actually decided to remov the branded splash screen in favor of news content presented in a way to grab the viewer’s attention within the first three seconds.

Another role, the Data Analyst, is also critical to developing each story and in real-­‐time providing active feedback to the team to improve the reach of its content. The Data Analyst, as a story is evolving, will be actively analyzing customer engagement with the story, through ‘likes’, shares via twitter, facebook and other platforms and comments from viewers. It will then feed this back to the engagement managers, content producers, editors and journalists to ensure the next set of content produced around the same story is tweaked to more effectively engage its target audience.

From the Responsive Mindset perspective, in this new model, the audience themselves become “Users as Innovators”iv. “Research shows that many commercially important innovations are developed by product users rather than by the manufacturers that were first to bring them to market.”v It is to this end that AJ+ structures the organization to put the user at the center of the marketing organization with Engagement leads acting as coordinators.

Figure 2 – “Everywhere” Marketing Organization

AJ+ community

Data Specialists

Engagement Lead

News Content Developers

Journalists

And while this “everywhere” approach to the marketing organization allows for better innovation, flexibility as the needs of the target audience evolves or changes, there is a challenge for AJ+ as it scales and must begin to make trade-­‐ offs between effectiveness and efficiency.vi Additionally, given the nature of the digital world in general and digital news in particular, as AJ+ scales it must understand how it can leverage advantages of a central marketing “center of excellence” in order to ensure lessons-­‐learned and market competency are maintained throughout the organization as its grows while retaining its flexibility and innovation that comes from a dispersed marketing organization.

The Analytical Mindset: Building Brand Equity for AJ+

As the new digital-­‐first news industry matures and moves from speciality to commodity, it will become ever more important for AJ+ to have built up its brand equity. “A strong brand is as important as an excellent product.”vii So while AJ+ is currently attracting is audience primarily through its engaging product, as the AJ+ brand is still relatively unknown and the Brand equity of its parent organization, Al Jazeera, has had limited transferability, as the new industry matures, having a valued brand will serve as an immune systemviii as competitors emerge, catch up and during periods of troughs of creativity and innovation.

Given the medium and platforms in which AJ+ delivers its content, it has two primary methods in which it can grow its brand equity. It can leverage “the share” and it can leverage the “network” and “community” it is building and that naturally builds around social networks.

“The share” refers to the act of sharing a piece of content with one’s network, or “friends”, and is considered one of the most effective channels for content and brand promotion. This converts audience into brand activists. If the audience is

sufficiently engaged they become a partner is developing the news content, through building their own personal branding or “getting in on the conversation and debate” through the AJ+ community, “the share” becomes a powerful mechanism in AJ+’s toolbox of its promotional mix.

Additionally, building out “the AJ+ community” leverages a “network-­‐effect”, which in-­‐turn encourages brand-­‐loyalty. When the audience builds relationships with both the content and the network of friends that is built up around conversations around the content, they begin to identify with the brand and thus move from brand-­‐consumers to brand-­‐promoters.

It is therefore critical for AJ+ to focus its efforts in these two areas to build its brand equity and potentially, build competitive advantage use this as a means to build barriers to entry for potential market entrants.

At the same time, as AJ+ becomes more brand-­‐sensitive it must remain vigilant about potential for brand damage. For example, AJ+ has intentionally shied away from having direct association with its parent organization, Al Jazeera Media Network, for various reasons. In addition to perceived negative political associations, the parent organization is a traditional broadcast news organization that is in many ways in stark contrast to the values of AJ+ as an engaged, cool and relevant news organization. Too much association could potentially have a negative impact upon its street-­‐credibility with its target audience, Millennials.

As an additional example, recently Al Jazeera Media Network’s Al Jazeera America product has experienced a bout of negative news related to the ouster of its former CEO. Such incidents could have brand perception spill over to AJ+ if there is too much connection in the minds of its audience between the two brands. It has been stated that, “brand damage will become more difficult and expensive to recover as customers turn more brand sensitive.”ix Al Jazeera Media Network, and Al Jazeera America in particular, has already experienced this firsthand and AJ+ should take note.

As a lesson learned for AJ+, the parent organization, which has the honor of being ranked as the fifth most influential brand in the world in 2005x, behind global icons such as Apple and Google by brandchannel.com, had at one time battled with a negative perception, primarily in the US and had to work hard to recover from this. Both through the launch of its Al Jazeera English-­‐language channel and the inadvertent promotion of it by Hillary Clinton allowed Al Jazeera to regain its credibility and recover from much of the negative brand perception it once had. Hillary Clinton stated before congress:

Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because its real news… you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and arguments between talking heads.

Therefore, AJ+ must carefully manage its brand and have a clear brand strategy going forward.

The Responsive Mindset: Engagement and Building of Customer Value

Brand Management is key but not sufficient for building relationships with and growing its audience-­‐base. AJ+ must understand the characteristics and behavior of its target audience, the value it creates for them and how to communicate that value.

Defining the market segmentation for AJ+, Jigar Mehta states:

We are very deliberate in who we create content for. We really think about this young global millennial audience. That’s a huge massive audience and we are still trying to figure out what segment of that we resonate with.xi

It is therefore clear that for the current stage of AJ+, Millenials are the target market that is being focused on. It can be inferred that this group is being subsegmented across two other variables – platform of consumption and levels of engagement, although this subsegmentation may not be so neatly defined.

Further elaboration is provided below.

Millenials are characterized as those born between the years 1982 and 2004 (Strauss and Howe).xii They are infamously known as “the lost generation” described as being pessimists, self-­‐absorbed, distrustful and rule breakers.xiii

Strauss and Howe, however, disagree based on research that indicates they are in fact “found” instead of “lost”. Research indicates that they are in fact “optimists” instead of “pessimists” as nine in ten describe themselves as “happy”, “confident” and “positive”.

They are in fact cooperative team players as opposed to being self-­‐absorbed as indicated in a Roper survey. Millennials accept authority and follow rules as opposed to being distrustful and rule breakers.xiv

This data provides useful insight for the AJ+ “marketing organization” to better reach and grow its audience.

With regards to behavior with news media, Pew Research indicates that Millenials “rely on Facebook for their news far more than any other source.

About six-­‐in-­‐ten online Millennials (61%) report getting political news on Facebook in a given week.”

Figure 3xv

Millennials are “less familiar than Gen Xers or Baby Boomers with 18 of the 36 news sources asked about.” They are “more familiar than Gen Xers and Boomers with just two of the sources asked about: Buzzfeed and Google News, both Digital sources.”xvi

Figure 4 xvii

Millennials are “less interested in politics than older generations. Roughly a quarter of Millennials (26%) select politics and government as one of the three topics they are most interested in.” xviii

AJ+ also hit the street to ask Millennials their opinion and found similar traits and from this AJ+ constructs its profile of its target audience in terms of personal characteristics, benefits sought from News Media, and Behavioral attributes with its content.

From this, AJ+ can derive Customer Value through analyzing the 4 As – Acceptability, Affordability, Accessibility and Awareness.

With respect to Acceptability, AJ+ must consider a number of factors when analyzing the perceived value-­‐add to the audience. It must consider the type of news it is providing and whether it is speaking to the audiences needs and concerns. It must also consider the editorial angle such as terminology used, left-­‐ leaning or right leaning. This also may subsegment its audience and it must be careful as this defines the brand and audience and should be consistent so as not to dilute the brand and maintain authenticity.

With respect to Accessibility, it must provide its news on platforms frequently used by Millennials. Some prefer the News App, while others prefer YouTube and still others may prefer Facebook or Snapchat. AJ+ has tailored its content for each of these platforms in order to maximize the engagement level based on the unique features of each platform. For example, AJ+ Data Analysts have determined that those frequenting its content on YouTube are willing to sit through 15 minutes of video content, while those on Facebook generally prefer

less than 5 minutes. Additionally, Facebook has a feature, Autoplay, that provides AJ+ producers the opportunity to maximize the value of the first three seconds of the video autoplaying to grab the attention of the user, a feature not provided by YouTube.

With respect to Awareness, AJ+ primarily relies upon “the like” and “the share” and by extension, the quality of its content to promote its brand and product.

Therefore, its “awareness” can be considered organic, authentic, and similar to “word-­‐of-­‐mouth” in the digital world. It can leverage this to push its brand, AJ+, such that brand equity is built on solid foundation. Such an approach, and the ability to assess and adjust the “value” real-­‐time, allows AJ+ the ability to actively build its brand equity.

With respect to Affordability, AJ+, being funded by the State of Qatar, does not charge, nor does it rely upon advertising as a revenue source. As such, the only “price” customers must consider is the opportunity cost of leaving some other activity for time spent with AJ+ content.

Recommendations

AJ+, and the digital news industry as a whole, is still in the early adopter stage, even amongst its target audience, Millennials, and as such, there is much growth potential to be had. AJ+ can take multiple steps to better position itself to capitalize on this and increase its audience based.

Firstly, AJ+ should consider how it will retain the flexibility and innovation that comes with it current decentralized marketing competency model as its scales and the organization grows. It should consider maintaining an empowered “marketing center of excellence”, that is focused on maintaining the competencies already developed and ensure consistency across all functions of the organization.

Secondly, it must begin to actively shape its brand and build brand equity through leveraging the “community” it has built around its content and the emotion of association that users develop as they become active “contributors” of AJ+ news content through their active online discussions and “shares”. Focus on this now will help remain immune to competitive forces and weather unexpected industry trends.

And finally, AJ+ should build on its current model of engagement by consistently assessing the value perceived by the audience and adjusting to drive engagement metrics. It can also take steps to subsegment its Millenial audience by behavior characteristics and begin to provide unique offerings that addresses each segment. It should be careful to understand when multiple subsegments can be reached through the same product and when products must be decoupled to avoid dilution.

Appendices

Appendix I – Al Jazeera Media Network Products

Product Description Al Jazeera English

International News, Current Affairs, Investigative Reporting & Programs – English Language Al Jazeera Arabic International News, Current Affairs, Investigative Reporting & Programs – Arabic Language Al Jazeera America US Domestic News, Current Affairs, Investigative Reporting & Programs – English Language Al Jazeera Balkan International News, Current Affairs, Investigative Reporting & Programs – Bosnian Language Al Jazeera Turk International News, Current Affairs, Investigative Reporting & Programs – Turkish Language Al Jazeera Children’s Children’s Programming – Arabic Channel Language Al Jazeera Documentary In-­‐depth Documentaries – Arabic Channel Language Al Jazeera Center for Studies Academic Research and Though & Research Leadership – Arabic Language AJ+ -­‐ English US Domestic & International News, Current Affairs, Investigative Reporting – English Language AJ+ -­‐ Arabic US Domestic & International News, Current Affairs, Investigative Reporting – Arabic Language

Distribution Platforms Satellite, Direct-­‐to-­‐Home, Web, Mobile, Social, On-­‐
Demand

Satellite, Direct-­‐to-­‐Home, Web, Mobile, Social, On-­‐
Demand

Cable, Direct-­‐to-­‐Home, Web, Mobile, Social, On-­‐
Demand

Satellite, Direct-­‐to-­‐Home, Web, Mobile, Social, On-­‐
Demand

Web, Mobile, Social, On-­‐
Demand

Satellite , Web, Mobile, Social, On-­‐Demand Satellite , Web, Mobile, Social, On-­‐Demand Web Web, Social Platforms, Mobile Web, Social Platforms, Mobile

Appendix II – Al Jazeera Media Network Marketing Organization

Director General (CEO) Channels (Business Units) AJ English

Shared Services

Marketing & Distribution

Technology & Operations

Strategy & Development

AJ+

AJ Arabic

AJ Documentary AJ Mubashir (Live) Center for Studies Children's Channel

AJ Balkan

AJ Turk

Al Jazeera America

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Al Jazeera America, AJ Turk and AJ Balkans are treated as separate and independent legal entities. AJ+ is a project managed under the Strategy & Development division, but with the appointment of Dima Khatib as the new Managing Director, it is likely to be moved to the “Channels” Division and thus promoted from project to distinct business unit. Marketing activities for the parent organization are distributed across the Marketing & Distribution, Strategy & Development and the individual Channels.

i Pew Research, accessed 5 October 2015,

ii YouTube: AJ+ Engagement Lead Jigar Mehta on Journalism, accessed 5 October 2015,

iii https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-­‐aj-­‐reaches-­‐600-­‐of-­‐its-­‐audience-­‐on-­‐ facebook/s2/a566014/> iv Von Hippal, Thomke, Sonnack, 1999. Creating Breakthroughs at 3M, p.4. v Von Hippal, Thomke, Sonnack, 1999. Creating Breakthroughs at 3M, p.4. vi Basu, 2015. Strategic Marketing: The Reflective Mindset, p. 12. vii Basu, 2015. Strategic Marketing: The Analytical Mindset, p. 2. viii Basu, 2015. Strategic Marketing: The Analytical Mindset, p. 2. ix Basu, 2015. Strategic Marketing: The Analytical Mindset, p. 13.

x The Guardian, accessed 5 October 2015,

xi YouTube: AJ+ Engagement Lead Jigar Mehta on Journalism, accessed 5 October 2015,

xii Wikipedia: Millenials, accessed 5 October 2015,

xiii Howe, Strauss, 2000. Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, p. 7-­‐9. xiv Howe, Strauss, 2000. Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, p. 7-­‐9. xv Pew Research, accessed 5 October 2015,

xvi Pew Research, accessed 5 October 2015,

xvii Pew Research, accessed 5 October 2015,

xviii Pew Research, accessed 5 October 2015,