Incisive Media is a B2B publisher that has ridden out the highs and lows of several economic cycles alongside the professional readers and the commercial partners on which it relies. In its 20-year history, it has gone from a single-title start-up to being listed on the stock exchange; through rapid expansion, sizeable debt, private equity investment and a return to private ownership.
These have been tumultuous times, during which the business has expanded across three continents and has adapted to tremendous changes in reader demands and the opportunities afforded by digital delivery.
At Incisive, they talk about communities rather than publications, websites, apps or events. In a sense, that’s the one thing that hasn’t changed. Nor has the man at the helm, Tim Weller, who launched the business and its first title, Investment Week, and remains its CEO.
“The original business model when I started the company was really pretty simple; we connected people who sold things with people who bought things,” he says. “And the way that we created our franchise was by making sure that we delivered the very, very best content environment through which people could put either advertising or sponsorship messages around. So, from day one, we’ve always been agnostic about our delivery channels.”
This is, of course, particularly important now. Incisive says 90 per cent of media interactions take place on screens of all sizes, with 65% of all web journeys starting on smartphones. The company focuses on fourteen markets or communities, including business technology, pensions, legal, foreign exchange, energy and private equity. Publications are a part of the service, but the objective is to provide people with information, events and services that make them more effective in their jobs, on whatever medium fits the individual and the moment.
“We ensure we deliver the content in the form and format in which our customers – our readers and visitors – want it, whether that’s on mobile, desktop, tablet or in person,” says Weller. “We need to make sure we’re fully responsive to customers … and that doesn’t just mean single-source distribution. Our strategy has evolved to include social as a distribution outlet, and using search effectively.”
Digital evolution
The result of this shift to be where business consumers are is a shift away from print, and higher investment in live events and digital content. In 2006, roughly 60 per cent of Incisive’s revenue came from print; that’s now just 15 per cent. Events have gone from about 35 per cent of the business to about 45 per cent now, and digital has shot up from about 5 per cent to 40 per cent.
“We’ve been very focused over the last few years in our digital distribution,” says Weller. “And where we’ve really succeeded is news and insight apps that people can then download and read on the move. We’ve got a pretty sophisticated email personalisation strategy, so we’re very focused on making sure that the content we deliver is personalised to the recipient.”
Weller says the future of print will depend purely on where the revenue comes from; he has little appetite for preserving something that’s not earning its keep. “The irony is we’ve currently got some assets that are growing in print. We’ve got some that are clearly declining as we see that structural shift, but we’ve got certain titles in the group that have had a pretty good year in print, and as long as they’re still profitable, we’ll still publish them. If they’re not economically viable, we won’t. If we can make more money by turning off a print tap and just distributing the content digitally, then we would look to do that at some stage.”
As a business-focused publisher, Incisive says digital distribution allows more people within a subscribing enterprise to benefit from their content; in turn, Incisive can charge for that breadth and depth of access. “We’re able to get more engagement and more penetration within an organisation than we used to with some of the subscription-led magazines and newsletters we had,” Weller says. “We might have one subscriber with a list of people stapled to it and it would get handed round. That’s the old model. The new model is to make it efficient and everyone can get access either through the mobile or their inbox or the desktop.”
Incisive events include conferences, industry awards, training sessions and exhibitions, while content includes webinars and video programmes. Hedge Funds Review, for instance, has produced a six-programme series of videos called ‘Hedge Funds Lion’s Den’, in which new hedge fund managers pitch their ideas to a panel of big-time investors, with US$75m at stake.
Crunching the numbers
Digital content is protected by paywalls or registration walls, which deliver not just revenue but all-important user information. “We’re collecting significant quantities of data on our customers and their habits so we can match those habits with more like-minded content or advertising propositions that are tailored,” Weller says.
First-party data is used in conjunction with bought data. Incisive can understand its users better by monitoring not just which Incisive content they consume, but also where readers come from and, often, where they go next. “It goes back to the basics of B2B publishing,” Weller says. “In the old days, we used to ask people to fill in a registration form if they wanted to get our magazines and actually, we lost sight of that for a few years; most B2B publishers just had free-to-air assets and didn’t collect any data on their users or visitors. What we’ve done is put walls around pretty much all of our assets and we’re making sure we collect that data.”
Data is, of course, fundamental to generating digital advertising revenue, and Incisive is a strong advocate of programmatic advertising. It works with Google Doubleclick to manage advertising campaigns across Incisive’s digital properties, using behavioural tracking and audience data to better reach communities of professionals.
Weller is dismissive of fears in some parts of the industry that programmatic trading is a threat to advertising rates and is just a way of selling excess inventory. “We’re a business that doesn’t have a huge amount of remnant, and I think it’s a mistake just to assume that programmatic is for remnant,” he says. In fact, he says, the opposite can be true, and demand for inventory sold programmatically can actually drive up rates, and it allows advertisers to extend campaigns beyond Incisive’s own inventory.
That said, advertising is not what Weller describes as the “premium piece” of the business. “The main focus of our business is our user-centric subscription business; that’s the real engine of growth for the company. We’ve moved our subscription model from selling individuals an annual subscription, whether it’s to a magazine or a newsletter, to giving access to our series of digital distribution assets, our data assets, and the enterprise pays us that subscription. So we’ve been able to move the model from one-to-one to one-to-many. We’re selling enterprise licence subscriptions to some big institutions for in excess of £200,000 a go, so that’s the real engine of growth for us.”
New structure, new outlook
Incisive listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2000 valued at about £73 million and grew rapidly, making multiple acquisitions and launching new web-based services. When the business was taken private again in 2006, it was valued at £275 million. Further large-scale acquisitions followed, but its debt levels became unsustainable at the time of the global financial crisis and ALM (formerly American Lawyer Media) was split from the group in a debt-for-equity deal. In January this year, private equity investors Alchemy Partners took majority ownership of the business, further reducing Incisive’s debts.
The company reorganised into two groups: Incisive Insight and Incisive Business. The former’s primary revenue stream is subscriptions and delegate revenue – income from readers or consumers – while the latter has a more traditional B2B model in that income comes mainly from advertising and sponsorship. John Barnes heads Insight, and Jonathon Whiteley leads Business.
Incisive sold its Interactive Marketing business this year, something that was “non-core” to Incisive as it was the only asset that was not linked to financial services. “At the end of the day, if any asset is worth more to someone else than it is to us, we’d consider it,” Weller says. The money generated by the sale helped fund the purchase in mid-2015 of Chartis, a London-based technology specialist business that publishes content based on its own analysis of the global risk technology market. “It’s a fabulous business which fits beautifully within our risk and trading technology business, and brings an insight and research capability to us that we didn’t have and which would be pretty tricky to grow organically,” Weller says. The integration of Chartis with Incisive’s Risk.net, Waterstechnology.com and RiskTech-Forum.com communities gives it the ability to offer tailored and integrated marketing solutions to clients and to leverage both companies’ distribution, expertise and routes to market.
Weller says the new structure gives Incisive the agility it needs to grow in the year ahead after “some pretty tricky years where we couldn’t invest back into the company”.
“We’ve had a few tough years I have to say, both dealing with the structural shifts but also the end markets we serve, which haven’t been in the greatest shape. But I would say now we’re seeing quite decent growth coming through the business, particularly our subscription business, where our cash growth on our subscriptions has grown 20 per cent in the first half of this year; it’s an area we’re investing in.”
Company launched in: 1994
Founder and CEO: Tim Weller
Publications include: Risk.net, Legal Week, Insurance Age, BusinessGreen.com, Investment Week
Number of staff: 700 (in London, New York and Hong Kong)
Annual revenues: £65m
