How Publisher-focused Customer Data Platforms Drive Better Audience Engagement

“All publishing companies are different, of course, but there is a common pattern that is more recognizable in publishing now than ever: tech decisions made for perfectly good historical reasons, which over time have become unfit for purpose, and any initiatives to improve them are being held back by the complexity of change. 

Change is hard! Even plans to fix something clearly broken often get the go-ahead only after the pain becomes impossible to ignore. It’s like running on a cold wintery day: it’s good for you, but no one looks forward to it.

Publishing today is a lot like sport: you need to improve just to keep pace, because everyone else is improving too. And if you stand still while agonising over change, you fall even further behind, and it’s harder to catch up.

In the CMS world, we saw this for so long with the “build it yourself” approach, which now everyone knows ends up with expensive Frankenstein’s monsters that kill innovation and weigh the business down, or generic tools that are pitched as all things to all tasks. You are expected to try to bend them into shape. I’d say this is the next worst thing after building it from scratch.

So, between bespoke at one end and super generic at the other, you see lots of businesses with really complex enterprise architectures that cost too much and took too long to piece together, and a lot of pressured leadership teams who obviously want to start seeing some ROI. 

At this stage, it’s really easy to be trapped in the sunk cost fallacy and throw good money after bad to keep it all running. Unfortunately, this often saddles the business with tools that “sort of” work but actually introduce lots of problems across the bigger picture, and publishing today is all about the bigger picture. Then you are dealing not just with rising costs but also the cost of missed opportunities.

So, solving all that is what drives what we do. We scrupulously follow the changing needs of media and entertainment – publishing and sports specifically – and audiences more generally, to ensure we’re giving customers what they need, and innovate at speed on their behalf.”

“Balancing innovation is really tough, especially with a patchwork of various generic solutions, as Denis described. We all know how core to everything Identity & Access is now, so getting in a muddle on that can be very damaging.

So, for example, your IDAM service may not manage subscriptions. Your CRM can’t really be used as a customer-facing platform. You have multiple systems that deal with the customer, but don’t have a user preference store. Or you can’t programmatically do progressive data capture. Maybe your newsletter service can do sign-ups OK, but not comment or reply. And so on. This keeps adding to a disjointed experience for the user, making you spend more time managing platforms rather than innovating.

There are some good specialist solutions that we work with at various publishers, which handle the complex audience things, so you can get on with product and content stuff to keep that audience engaged.

As good as they can be, some are simply out of reach financially for many publishers due to integration or ongoing cost, or because they can’t commit the necessary staff to run them to get the best from them. Under-utilisation is a real problem.

It all means that you have many inexpensive generic starter platforms at one end of the market that get people going. On the other hand, you have incredible enterprise solutions that require a lot of resources and big budgets to get the best from. 

It’s the classic Goldilocks problem, and both hit your innovation prospects pretty hard and your budget.”

“Listening to your customers and closely examining their respective markets will answer most of this! 

You can have all the features you need “somewhere” across all your systems, but you’re in trouble if they are in the wrong places. Our job is to ensure the right features are in the right places so you’re not just moving problems around.

Our approach to Glide Nexa was borne from seeing everything from our customer view point, their hassles trying to consolidate lots of tools and systems, and giving them that sweet spot of powerful but not unnecessarily complex, enough capability for most media and entertainment businesses, at the correct cost which pays for itself quickly and scales beneficially when you start succeeding. 

At that sweet spot, with the cost savings and more straightforward product development, it frees them up to plug in and unplug things as they need and be their unifier for more specialised services.

A great example is Poker.org, which highly emphasises providing a fantastic experience for its audience and has integrated both newsletter and commenting platforms via Glide Nexa. As an added bonus, no one would know if they change the newsletter provider. 

We are obviously super proud of working with a publisher who places so much value on UX alongside brilliant content – no wonder they have become the second-most visited poker media site very rapidly.

We had built a series of features within Glide CMS which were specifically there to make easier the integration of 3rd party systems like paywalls and audience tools – not to do the jobs of those systems, but to make life easier for people using those systems, all of which we knew might be updated or removed as time went on. 

We apply the same thinking internally. This is why Glide Nexa is a standalone product and not part of Glide CMS: it can connect to any CMS or API-driven platform.

We saw that when it came to the overall question of how to manage audiences and content together, literally no two publishers were identical, and almost everyone was connecting different shapes and kinds of systems to try and achieve the thing.

That’s never going to change, because publishers are of varying shapes and sizes and need to change things, and they will need to add new things as their businesses and audiences change, but what we wanted is to make the pain of those changes go away.”

“I see AI as having a massive place in audience management eventually, but it will take a while for the industry to be comfortable with it for all sorts of reasons. To disambiguate it, machine learning is already being used by many companies. Rolling out LLMs in some fashion, which a lot of people see as “AI”, is a different proposition, and that will move more slowly.

As we know, publishing is wary of AI tools for content because of the need to keep humans in the loop and retain audience trust. Looking at audience management, people are being told to avoid putting their identity information into AIs, and the role of AIs in managing personal information will come under greater regulation for sure..

While AI has a role to play, the strength of your content and brand shifts the dial.”

“Our strength is knowing what content businesses and publishers need, seeing what problems they commonly deal with, and making sure Glide Nexa does precisely what’s required, cost-effectively.

For publishers with those house of cards solutions, Glide Nexa removes many problems and lets them tidy up the tech estate and focus on what works for the audience.

As Rich has said, it is very much a Goldilocks solution – it is broad enough, by offering Social and Single Sign On, integrations with commenting and newsletter platforms, providing entitlements and subscription tools, and allowing for a really flexible first-party data modelling and management.

Coupled with the right kind of CMS, it provides phenomenal capabilities for most publishers and sports organisations. The real beauty of it is that it goes far enough for most, and if you get to the stage where you need to plug in even more specialised tools in any of those broad areas, we make that easy.

To put it the other way, it means unifying a lot of those things where they are using “a bit” of all those other systems, in a single place – identity and access, audience management tasks, sign-ups, profiling, entitlements, user group modelling, content gating and more – all the things advanced publishers want to do, and crucially doing it extremely cost efficiently.

As with our CMS, our philosophy for Nexa is that it is a proper SaaS driven by our very engaged customers, evolving in line with actual customer needs as opposed to what we think looks good.”

“With Glide Nexa! Blatant plugs aside, newsletters are a great place to start and easy for anyone in the content business to do well. If there is some utility element, people have a good reason to sign up and share some information with you.

From there, there are many quick wins to offer audiences, start to build a picture of users – let them create read lists or favourites, follow topics or authors and direct that content to them proactively. I speak from the Glide CMS and Glide Nexa perspective, but this is pretty trivial for our products. 

Reader and User Commenting – something you also integrate via Glide Nexa – is another really good way to build engagement, and we have some great partners in this space.

If you can do those things, you will have better engagement and better data to make decisions. With that, you can start to build user profiles, better products, and better revenue opportunities, and you’re in a good spot to think about paid content if that is a goal.

All those things are why we are looking to add a bunch of new capabilities to help you raise engagement and make it easier to get the right data to make decisions.

When you have a closer relationship with your audience, it’s much easier to raise engagement and lessen the rollercoaster of referral traffic, which has been wildly variable for all publishers. 

Long-term sustainability is about having and owning the audience relationship in addition to great content.”