Why the Durable B2B Media Moat Starts With Following the Reader

So Life Science Connect has operated for t- three decades on follow your reader philosophy, um, which is actually unusual in B2B.

[laughs] It's normally follow the advertiser.

Um, so how do you protect that editorial discipline, uh, one, when you're absorbing outside teams at this pace, and two, when, like there's been tremendous pressure, uh, you know, and especially if you're a private equity-owned company, to continue to, on like the content side, reduce, reduce, reduce, thinking you're somehow gonna get the same output?

Yeah, you know, your, your point there about, um, you know, in B2B, the tendency to serve the advertiser, um, because they're the ones paying the bills in, in most cases.

Um, but we've always taken an approach that, you know, if we can attract the right people, the readers to the party, it's easy to get the, the advertisers to want to join because that's who they're trying to, to reach.

Um, and if we start catering not to their needs, but to the, the client's needs, uh, too much, then the readers will go somewhere else for their information.

So then there's nothing left for the, the clients-

Right

... uh, to reach.

So it's, I mean, for us, it, it, it was the only thing that ever made sense.

Um, but then when, you know, when we bring on different team members, uh, and, and this will happen through acquisitions, you know, they're gonna have, they have their way of doing things.

Um, and a l- and a lot of times they come up with their own opinions on what to write about if they're, they're an editor.

When we encourage them to, "Hey, go have some conversations with your, your readers, your, your target readers, and really understand them and, and what they are, are trying to solve for," it totally changes their outlook.

Uh, and there's so much value in, in, um, you know, having those conversations with the readers, uh, to the point where, you know, along the way, everybody on our team, even if you're on the sales side, had to have conversations with readers just to understand how we can better serve them.

Well, this is gonna become even more and more important.

I, um, uh, at our Red Dove twenty twenty-five event, uh, we had John Roberts, who is the chief strategy officer.

He, he's, you know, he's an AI, artificial intelligence PhD scientist at People Inc. Um, and one of the things he said was that AI is going to have a renaissance for content.

It's gonna be a content renaissance.

And I actually think that is-- I, I always thought that, um, from the beginning when I heard about what I was doing, but I think it actually impacts it on a couple of, of, of, of ways.

It's one is being that trusted source that goes super deep, like AI can't do that, and you can, you-- the, the depth of the knowledge you have in the industry is, is, is one layer.

Two is now content starts becoming actually, um, you know, above and beyond selling subscriptions like a revenue engine, i.e., you've got something very valuable there.

And then the third leads me in my next question is, without amazing content that the audience gets to, you can't do what Don Hawk, who is also on your board, wants you to do.

You know, y- original founder of Tech Target, which is the data and purchase intent data that, uh, the, your purchase intent information-

Yeah

... which is you don't get that from, you know, just an, an advertiser side.