For B2B trade publishers whose clients pay to reach their readers
Know who is actually on your list, and prove it to the client before the renewal, without hiring a data team.
The client paid. The campaign ran. The numbers underneath it were not the numbers on the media pack.
Nobody argued. They just did not come back.
You have the traffic and you have the list. What you cannot do is say who is on it. Not the sector, the people. Job, company, seniority, whether they have ever opened anything.
And your clients stopped asking for stats a while ago, which felt like relief at the time.
Here is the part that usually gets missed. Your numbers are probably better than you think.
The problem is not that your audience is weak. It is that you cannot prove what it is, so you sell the big number instead, and the big number is the one that gets tested.
You can say who is on the list. Job title, company, seniority, what they actually read.
The number on your media pack is a number you would be happy to have tested.
When a client sends over their ICP, employee size, department, director level and up, you can say yes or no before you sell it, instead of finding out afterwards.
And the renewal conversation is about what to do next, not about what happened.
There is one question in here that nobody outside your business can answer, including me. That is the point of doing it properly rather than guessing from the outside.
What you publish. Everything that went out, sorted by topic and by where it came from: your own reporting, supplier material, wire copy. Not how much. What kind.
Who is actually reading each of those. Job, company, seniority, by category. Not "the sector". The people.
What your media pack says you are selling. The verticals and the numbers on the sales material, and what you charge for each.
The gap between two and three. Where the audience you have and the audience you sell are the same, your pitch is honest and you can defend it. Where they are not, that is the finding. This is the one only your own data can answer.
What you already own that could be sold more than once. Events, verticals, back catalogue, the research nobody reused. Most of it gets published and left to expire.
Where all of this lives, and whether anyone can get at it. Is it on SharePoint? Is it in your emails? Is it in one person's head?
A publisher put this to me better than I could: when you become a slave to a number, you are instantly commodifying the offer. How do you put a number on trust?
He is right, and he answered it himself in the same conversation. A number has to be an opening to a conversation, not the end of one.
The point of knowing who is on your list is not to price yourself by the head. It is to stop being priced by somebody else's number, on a cost-per-click basis, by a client who ran the comparison without telling you.
Twelve years inside B2B publishing. Six of them at Texere, running a 200,000+ contact database across four brands, five newsletters and six annual events, and building the commercial systems behind a portfolio acquisition by BroadcastMed. Salesforce Marketing Cloud certified.
"I relied heavily on Brice's audience insight and his ability to break down complex data and technology in a way that was easy to understand and immediately useful."
James Strachan, Editor, The Analytical Scientist
Agamemnon Bros. Brice runs client work and strategy, his co-founder handles technical builds and system integrations. You work with Brice directly on every engagement. Two to three publishers at a time.
Every engagement is scoped after a first conversation, because it depends how many titles and platforms are involved and what state the data is in. I'll give you the number on the call, before you commit to anything.
I work with publishers internationally. I'm based in Toronto and the company is UK-registered, so North American and European publishers are both a natural fit.
Send me your media pack, or a link to your advertise page if you do not have one, and I will tell you where it sits against the 104 I have benchmarked. Free, and yours whether we work together or not.
What it cannot tell either of us is whether the content you publish is actually building the audience that media pack is selling. That needs your own numbers, and that is the conversation after.
Or email brice@agamemnon.biz