B2B Media Needs to Pay Attention to the Tech Behind the Informa/TechTarget Deal

There is a disruption going on in b2b media right now, whether operators are aware of it or not. And I suspect it’s going to have a seismic impact on how ad businesses, in particular, are run over the coming years. And we can see it playing it out with the Informa/TechTarget deal.

If you missed Tuesday’s newsletter, Informa and TechTarget have done a deal—pending regulatory approval—that results in a very powerful pure-play digital business. According to the press release:

Informa PLC will contribute its Informa Tech digital businesses and $350 million of cash in exchange for a 57% stake in the combined company. The $350 million of cash, or approximately $11.79 per outstanding TechTarget share, will be paid to existing TechTarget shareholders upon completion of the transaction. Existing TechTarget shareholders will also retain a 43% equity stake in New TechTarget, allowing them to participate in the long-term value creation of the combined company.

While the entire deal is very interesting, there are two parts that are worth exploring in more depth. I believe that, with this deal, New TechTarget becomes a must spend for any b2b marketer. When planning a year’s spend, there will automatically be an allocation to TechTarget, similar to how there is automatically an allocation to sources like Facebook and Google. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, TechTarget will have scale. The team is talking a lot about the fact that it’ll have 50 million known users with 1st-party data. While 50 million is only a fraction of the size of a platform like LinkedIn, the big difference here is that TechTarget will have an immense amount of behavioral data that helps it prove buyer intent. In other words, it can anticipate which of its users are more likely to want a specific product or service based on their content consumption behavior. LinkedIn can’t do that.

Second, it can work across many more industries than it used to thanks to the addition of Industry Dive, which means its big advertisers can become even bigger. Think about a company like Oracle. If you look at the industries it serves, it’s wide in scope: education, food & beverage, healthcare, industrial manufacturing, retail, etc. These are all industries that Industry Dive already serves and so Oracle can push more spend across the TechTarget ecosystem.

But the third reason is the real powerful one. When this deal is done, b2b marketers will be able to reach scale across a wide breadth of industries and do it self-serve with real-time reporting. In other words, a marketer won’t have to sign an insertion order or anything like that to get a campaign running and they won’t have to wait until it ends to know how things worked.

In the AMO Pro Slack, H2K Labs Founder, Heather Holst-Knudsen, said:

Any traditional media player who has not upped its game in first party data, recurring revenue outside subscriptions and self serve customer portals and APIs that enable real time lead retrieval but also ability to purchase more marketing programs will suffer on the valuation and acquirer appetite side. This is huge. Very huge.

Heather is 100% correct. This is the future of b2b monetization. Many marketers are already used to this because it’s how campaigns work on Facebook and Google.

If I wanted to run a Facebook ad campaign today, I could have it up and running in about twenty minutes. Probably quick, but I’m rusty. And in those twenty minutes, I could set the parameters for who I wanted to target, upload my creative, set my daily budget, and off the campaign would go.

Equally as important, tomorrow I could log in to the platform and get a real time update on how the campaign was performing. I’d be able to toggle specific assets off if they were underperforming. And then, which Facebook and Google love, I’d be able to add more budget to the campaigns that are over-performing, ensuring I maximize my return on ad spend. All of this can be done without needing to talk to a sales rep.

What’s particularly important to understand here is that this can be done up and down the funnel. So, if a marketer is looking to start a brand campaign, they would be able to target banner ads to the right people without asking for help. And, at the same time, if they want to do a targeted lead gen campaign to people who have proven intent around a specific offering, they could get a white paper uploaded and into action without asking for help.

Now before we all go off and try to build all of these tools to keep pace with TechTarget, let me point out a major caveat. TechTarget is a billion dollar company. They have teams of software engineers on staff who can build this functionality. And so, of course it is in the position to be able to offer real time performance and campaign expansion all without talking to someone. That means we need to pick and choose where to play.

My recommendation? Start with the reporting. Think about a traditional campaign right now. Maybe it’s a one-month white paper promotion with a guarantee of 250 leads. That campaign runs, collecting the targeted number of leads, and at the end of it, you provide the partner with a spreadsheet of the contact information. There’s a problem with this, though. The best time for a sales person to talk to a lead is soon after they engage with a piece of content. Yet, if someone downloaded the white paper on the 7th day, the client wouldn’t get that information until the 30th day (at best). That’s too much wasted time.

That means publishers should be building systems to automatically drive the leads to partners as they come in. That’s what Heather refers to as “real time lead retrieval.” Imagine how integral your media company would become to a partner if you were driving leads directly into their sales CRM.

But it isn’t only with lead gen campaigns. If you have collected an abundance of 1st-party data, you can start to report on who is engaging with a partner’s ads up and down the funnel. Let’s say, for example, they buy a newsletter ad. In relative real-time, you could deliver a report that lays out who actually clicked on the ad. You don’t need to include contact information, but something as simple as “Director of Marketing at Coca Cola” would tell a very interesting story to the advertiser.

Ultimately, what this means is you want to provide partners a place to log in and see how things are going as they are happening. And you also want to use this as an opportunity to get the partner spending more money with you. Perhaps you put a CTA in the reporting tool that says, “Want to target these people who clicked the newsletter ad?” If they say yes, it can shoot an email to a sales rep who can send over a proposal for a down-funnel activation. It’s slower than letting the partner buy self-serve, but it increases the speed from waiting until the end of the campaign.

I will say, this doesn’t mean that the sales team is gone. On the contrary, you’re still going to want them to help with larger partners that are thinking about fully integrated campaigns. For example, once you start moving into custom content, multiple assets, various campaigns running across longer time-frames, or always-on work, it helps to have someone who is working with the client.

But I increasingly believe that to do basic things—upload a white paper with a set promotion budget or upload a banner ad—allowing partners to do that self-service is going to become the norm. It’ll take time, but that’s where we’re headed. The TechTarget/Informa deal shows that this is what they are building. And I don’t think this is going to slow down. In the earnings call where they talked about this deal, Informa CEO, Stephen A. Carter, said:

There is an opportunity to really build a scale reference player in a market where there is unquestioned customer demand, but what you’ve really seen in the last 5-6 years, is a group of very interesting companies create themselves and they’re all trying to get to scale. Who gets to scale first, there’s a real market to take, and we are very focused on being the person and company that does that.

New TechTarget is at scale. Others will also reach scale. Each of them will command large percentages of b2b marketer’s budgets. If publishers don’t just want the scraps, they’ll need to catch up. Start with great reporting. That’ll give you a big leg up against most of your competitors.

Thanks for reading today’s piece. If you have thoughts, hit reply or join the AMO Slack to discuss this further. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.