Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau on The Digital Transformation of MIT Technology Review

Jacob Cohen Donnelly: While I was looking at your LinkedIn preparing for this episode, I noticed that you started as an associate in equity research covering the energy space. How does someone working at a Wall Street brokerage firm find their way to being the CEO and publisher of MIT Technology Review?

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau: That’s a charming question, Jacob. Because I certainly have drawn those lines before, but I haven’t necessarily done that for another person, so I’ll do my best. When I went into working in equity research, it was the mid-1990s, and I knew that I wanted to be in an industry of researching a field and trying to use that knowledge in some way that, I don’t know, I guess professionally expand. I very quickly understood that that was not a good fit for me, that working in equity research and an investment bank in New York City on Wall Street wasn’t my life. I didn’t see anybody there I wanted to be. I didn’t think it was a particularly good work environment.

I went off to grad school for the first time, and decided I was going to focus more on doing some deeper dives into certain topic areas. At the time, I was really interested in governance in European countries and what was happening with unification of Europe, and all of that, which is quite ironic because now here we are on the other side of a sense of the value of Europe. Anyway, so I went off to graduate school and did that. Then went into a consulting role where I was giving business advice as a consultant in technology. That company that I worked for was a small, niche boutique consulting company in technology that had been acquired about a year before I joined by The Economist Group.

At that point, I realized that actually I was way more interested in being a product and a business leader than I was being the content creator or the person that wrote the articles or drew the pictures or did the things that go behind the presentation. I really enjoyed thinking about how to monetize that knowledge that the company key employees were collecting and gaining and building upon. Anyway, I went into this consulting role, and it had been acquired by The Economist. It was then sold by The Economist, and bought by private equity, and that was where I really understood all the things that you had to do to actually make money off of content.

Because this private equity company, these buyers who had purchased it from out of a distress sale from The Economist really helped me to understand, you guys have to figure out how to make it work or else we’re going to shut you guys down. That sense of urgency and recognizing that you can’t just expect somebody else to worry about the problem. Actually, we ourselves had to worry about the problem as leaders of that small company. It was incredibly transformative in terms of my own career path.

Then went various places, had a couple kids, and after a few different international moves ended up in London, and hooked up again with The Economist people that I had known previously. At that time, The Economist was again trying to figure out how to expand into industry-related content and consulting, having failed that previous time. We’re trying to do it again, and so I joined as part of that. I said, “Look, I know what you guys did wrong last time. I’d had all that experience in that after you sold us off, and now I know how to help you get it done again.” That’s where I got into media.

I had always been a voracious media consumer, always, and had been really interested in journalism and media when I was in college, but I think I understood I wasn’t set out to be a journalist myself, but I didn’t really have the sophistication or the knowledge to say, actually, I think what I want to do is be on the business side of media. I don’t think I understood that. I don’t think I even knew that there were different sides. Anyway, so it came to find out that I sorted that out in the last decade or so.

Then I was at The Economist for a bunch of years. We moved back to the US and ended up at MIT Tech Review. I’m not a young person anymore. It is a little bit of a longer story than it might seem at first stroke.

Jacob: It’s still very fascinating how every person finds their way to working in media, and I love those—[crosstalk]

Elizabeth: For better or for worse.

Jacob: Yes, for better or for worse.

Elizabeth: What’s great about it is that if you had said to me, it’s any point in the past design your ideal role, your ideal professional destination, I would have described something like this without knowing such a thing really existed. I’m incredibly fortunate.

Jacob: I was looking at one of your recent events, and in this speaker bio it said, “Since Elizabeth took the helm of MIT Technology Review in mid-2017, the business has undergone a massive transformation from its previous position as a respected but niche print magazine to a widely read, multi-platform, media brand with a global audience and sustainable business.” Can you talk about what transformation has looked like since becoming CEO?

Elizabeth: Oh my gosh. It has been all encompassing, Jacob. Let’s start with the first part of that. MIT Tech Review has been around since 1899, the first ever tech magazine, set up by MIT that point in time to communicate with the outside world, non-MIT individuals, what was going on in MIT’s laboratories and classrooms, and to say, hey, there’s this cool stuff that’s going on. This is “technology”.

We have copies of that first issue, and it’s a remarkable thing to go back and look at what was being discussed in 1899 as technological developments. This publication has been around for all these years, and I think that there was some efforts over the last 30 years to modernize it and make it a more commercially viable entity.

I think there wasn’t full buy-in by the owners of the publication, which is the MIT. It’s independent from MIT, but were owned by MIT. I don’t think there was really full buy-in until maybe the last eight or nine years about what was possible. I think it’s because they had other priorities, and different individuals were not in conversations. I think perhaps that would’ve revealed that.

I think about five years ago, before I had joined, they went through a decision process and said, there ought to be more here. There’s potential. There’s something here that we’re not leveraging to the greatest advantage both for ourselves, MIT’s reputational burnishing and sharing of our message of our brand value with a broader group of people, broader audience. There may be dollars and cents here that we could do a better job of what we’re spending and earning money off of how we’re allocating our budget.

Anyway, so about five years ago, I believe, the stakeholders of MIT said let’s do something more with this thing. I joined about five years ago, and I had moved back from the US and had left The Economist. We had moved back from my husband’s job but also our kids and family and all that stuff. It was just time. Then we went through a process of trying to figure out what does digital transformation actually look like for us, because we were a print magazine that if 175,000 people open the magazine, you’d get 175,000 people who would read that story. That’s not nearly what you can get if you put it up on the web and make sure you promote it and put it in places that it will encounter an audience.

There wasn’t a real clear understanding of how to do that. For example, when I joined, there wasn’t anyone doing social media. They had just had an intern. They were trying to figure out what to do and make her into a full-time employee. Was it a good idea to have someone running social media for a technology magazine or not?

There was a long way to go. I think there was a lot of desire but not a lot of know-how. We had to do a major change out of who was on the team, and bring in people who had more knowledge and savvy, and I think passion to see the publication and the business succeed, and we’re a little more I guess up-to-date on what was happening in media, and so that meant bringing in folks who weren’t previously living in the Boston area. It also meant thinking a little bit more aggressively about the tech platforms we were using both for the site and the content management, but also for our techs, our entire stack associated with marketing. I really can’t think of a single thing that we didn’t have to shake and disrupt.

We are now really on the other side of that, spent three solid years of– I was talking to somebody about this, I feel like it took us a good two and a half to three years to get to the starting blocks, and we’re now finally there. There were things like if you have salespeople, you really need to make sure they hit their targets, and in order to hit their targets, they have to pick up the phone and call clients. Things that were rather basic, 101 kinds of stuff.

Two, more complicated things like, what is the best CMS for us to be using and what do we do, and what’s the path to taking the one that we’ve had and that we’ve put a lot of investment into, and moving into something else, and what’s the easiest way to do that without disrupting everything and thinking about design. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that had to go in. There were some easy things, there were some really quick wins, and then there have been some more painful longer processes.

As I say, I think we’re pretty much on the other side of it. It’s not perfect, nothing’s ever perfect, but we are now finally at a place where we’re firing on all cylinders instead of having a couple really, really strong engines to mix up the metaphor a little bit, and a couple that don’t work at all. Now, I can actually say that all of our business lines have been rebuilt and reconsidered, and are able to do what they need to do so that we can continue to drive forward. It’s just been quite a journey.

Sometimes I look back at it, and it’s like you don’t realize how big your kids have gotten until Facebook reminds you of what they look like four years ago sort of thing. It’s a little bit of that. Sometimes I can’t even believe the things that we needed to address three years ago.

Jacob: I want to talk a little bit more about that, because change is hard and people are resistant to change. You become CEO, and for three years now, you have pushed through this transformation to become much more of a digital business. What are some of the big things to look for from a business and cultural perspective when making those sorts of major systemic changes?

Elizabeth: I guess, what I would say, Jacob, is that I had done many versions of this in previous roles, I had done smaller turn around a team, turn around a product, but turning around the whole company is quite different. We’re not a huge company, I’m not suggesting that, but it really did encompass pretty much everything.

I guess, what I would first say is that I’m pretty sure I made loads of mistakes, and I know I made loads of mistakes, but I think that the thing that I kept trying to focus on was the potential. I know and knew in my bones that MIT Technology Review might just take it in that name and those three letters, that there was nothing in our way of being the most dominant tech media platform except dysfunction. The market was willing to hear it from us. The market buys into it, the proposition.

We had the funding and the backing in order to build what we need, and the support from our board, that the “only thing we had to do” was get the right people on the team. I focused on that first and foremost, also because I need other people to tell me what– I can’t be an expert on everything, that’s not kind of leader I am. I focused first and foremost in making sure I could get the best team in place as possible at the executive team, leadership team level.

There were certain roles that fell into place pretty fast, then there were others that, frankly, a little bit of trial and error before I got to where I am now, and I feel really great about the team I have today, but that was first. In terms of culture, that is also a part of it, too, right? Having the team leaders who then had to do the same process for their own teams and say, all right, who do I have at my top table in editorial? Who do I have in my top table in marketing? Do they buy into the proposition? Are they enthusiastic? Are they driven in the same way? Do they have the same set of values around what kind of company we want to be and build, and what’s important to us?

Again, I think there’s been their own. They had their own trial and errors. They’ve made mistakes. They’ve had lots of successes but a few mistakes too. Again, it hasn’t been able to happen right away, but I think in general by focusing on, “Do you have the right people?” That has gone a mile to setting the expectation and the imperative, and the culture around transforming the business, and trying to live up to that aspiration of being the world’s leading technology media platform. Why not? Why can’t we do that? There’s really nothing that stands in our way. That’s what we’re driving to.

Jacob: Thinking about the audience for a moment, how has your classification of the audience evolved since joining the company? Or is it the same audience, just more digital now?

Elizabeth: It’s a complicated question, and it’s an even more complicated answer. It’s probably similar to what other traditionally print media companies have encountered and are experiencing, but for technology review, largely a print magazine, meaning that there’s only so much data that you have about the person or the individuals who are looking at your publication when they’re in print. Certainly, you know their address, and maybe ideally, their email, but you don’t know what kind of reading patterns that they follow. You can do surveys or whatever, but that is what it is.

Complicating that is that a large part our traditional print readership is and was MIT alumnus. One of the things that we have from back in the founding is that MIT alumni receive a copy of MIT Tech Review, and that is paid for by the MIT Alumni Association. That means that we get a nice audience segment that we can talk to advertisers about, and that’s it. That’s great, that’s fantastic, and advertisers are happy to hear that, but we don’t have a lot of ability to get inside the alumni audience and understand more about them because of certain restraints that we are placed under by the Alumni Association. They don’t want us for probably lots of good reasons to be sending lots of surveys to their alumni because they have other intentions for how they want to communicate with alumni from MIT.

That means that it made it very difficult for us to understand a large part of our audience at all, really. Just the people who subscribe to MIT Tech Review in print, who weren’t alumnus, which is a nice number, and that’s where the growth is, but made awfully difficult for us to really do much.

I think digital was important for lots and lots of reasons, and that certainly needed to happen so that we could begin to develop a picture of who they are and who they were changing to become as various measures that had took effect. As we did more social promotion in certain platforms, we began to see the composition of our audience reflect that. What we can say today is that we certainly know that our audience is obviously passionate about technology.

Our print audience is skews on the older side, sort of the 60 and older age group. Our digital audience is right in the sweet spot, in the 20s and early 30s, the preponderance, I mean, and there’s lots of different things that I can tell you about what kinds of stories that they like, and where they discover us. We happen to have a very, very large amount of our traffic that comes to our site direct probably because of the value of the MIT brand, but we obviously do a good bit of social promotion too, and so we have a nice chunk of readership or audience traffic that comes from social promotion, but we are less subjected to the vagaries of the algorithms because that is a minority of our traffic acquisition. Again, as you say, more of it comes from direct sources.

Anyway, we know more and more about them, and we’ve got some personas that we’ve been building up and trying to better understand. We certainly know that there is somebody who looks a little bit more like me age-wise and professional level wise, with a bunch of years of experience, holds a budget, has some very strong interest in commitment to technology for professional and interest reasons, but there is a more and more a larger audience that we are very interested in for reasons that are probably clear, that is a more of a striver or an up-and-comer.

In their late 20s to early 30s, they hadn’t really figured out her path professionally, but is deeply interested in the way technology’s changing her life and her profession, and will continue to do so and looks to places like MIT Tech Review increasingly for insights about what’s coming and what it’s all going to mean. We have those personas that we populate and try to drive better understanding to, so that we can do more targeted promotional efforts depending on which of those different persona types we’re trying to attract at a given moment or for a certain kind of story or set of stories.

Jacob: Before we jump into discussing the various aspects of the business, I want to talk about the team structure. How large is MIT Technology Review today, and what is the breakdown at the department level?

Elizabeth: I can tell you we are 75 people worldwide. I’m going to take what I think is an educated guess in terms of the breakdown. I think we’re about 50% editorial, and that’s a combination of editors, writers, social media promotion. We’ve got some producers doing some work on their podcasts and things like that, but largely content creators within that 50%.

Then the other 50% probably breaks out to be about a quarter of that 50% as marketing, a quarter is events, and there’s about an eighth of that 50% that’s sellers. How much I got here, I’ve got about two-eights, three-eights. I’ve got about five-eights left. Then we’ve got we’ve got a team that does our international licensing because MIT Tech Review has partnerships internationally with companies.

We have them in China, we have them in in Korea, we have them in the Middle East, in parts of Europe and Latin America, where they take the content that we produce, and then they translate it into local language, and then they publish it through MIT Technology Review Brazil, MIT Technology Review Korea, whatever, and then we get paid based upon how successfully they are able to build their businesses.

We have a small team doing that, and we have a development team, a technology, the engineers and the developers and the designers on the digital side. About another quarter of that team. That’s probably about how it breaks down. I’m probably forgetting somebody who I’m going to regret forgetting, but that’s generally the way it works.

Jacob: As you’re thinking about as you said that you’ve spent three years getting the business to the starting line, so as you’re thinking about now starting the race, where do you see yourself making investments in the company going forward of looking at those various teams?

Elizabeth: It’s the question of many moments. I can tell you that in terms of where we’re seeing the most growth over the last two years because of the impact of the coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic economic fallout from that. It’s a little difficult to talk about the last one year because it’s such an aberrant year, but if I look back in the last couple of years, I would have said to you pre-pandemic that events was a major area of investment for us. I’m not saying that it isn’t today. I’m saying that it’s going to be a in a different way because we’ve seen the entire events business turned on its head as a result of not being able to be in person.

We’ve pivoted immediately to virtual, and those are great to do to keep the relationships with the audience and sponsorships are coming, and people pay for tickets, but the overall revenue that drives for really almost a similar amount of manpower to put the thing on, squeezes the margins pretty tight for events.

You don’t have to pay for a ballroom, but you still have to pay all the people to plan out the program, and the program can’t be slapdash. It’s just as thoughtful as it would have been if you were in a ballroom occupying an entire room for a week. You still have to put together that thoughtful content. It’s been more challenging, I think, than we could have anticipated. We haven’t we had a pretty aggressive growth plan pre-pandemic that we pumped the brakes on. We’re continuing to build out our events, but we are being a little bit more careful about how we do it in terms of staff increasing.

Where we are seeing quite a lot of growth is in our advertising, and that’s particularly in custom advertising. Although we are seeing it across the board. We’re even seeing a lot more print for that matter and digital display than we did two years ago. Generally speaking, where we see the real boom in our advertising is in custom content, and that’s a really great place for the MIT brand to have its impact because brands are very interested in being connected. When telling their story, they’re interested in being connected with the MIT name. As long as we do that in accordance with various industry guidelines, we think we’ve got something good there.

Part of getting in the right people meant getting in the right head of sales, and having in this case him hire a team full of people who are really good at telling the story that we have to tell and connecting with the right brands and helping them understand the benefits that we can bring to their efforts.

The growth is, I won’t say it’s not about the future, but a lot of it is about the past. It’s about fixing what didn’t work previously, so when I look out at the future, I know we continue to see growth in advertising, but I’m aware that the ceiling on advertising isn’t growing as fast as it is in other parts of the business.

We have put a lot of investment. I would say the bulk of our investment in the last three years has been in rebuilding our marketing technology stack so that we can do a much better job of understanding who’s come to the site, and when they’ve come to the site, what have they done, how have they responded to the different ways that we’ve paywalled our content, and then how well do we do and actually getting them to hit subscribe and then complete the subscription process, and then, of course, once they have, how do we connect with them and have them make us part of their daily habits.

We weren’t really anywhere. We were nowhere with that three or four years ago, and we then built some things in maybe the beginning of my taking this role, and we needed to really go back, and once we understood better from the the first bill that we did about three years ago, we actually realized that we got to do this again because it turns out this has got to be a bigger part of our foundation for the future.

We have just really finished building the tech stack that we need for monetizing our audience through subscription, which is incredibly exciting, and so we’re seeing some nice growth there, but it’s like only been about three or four months before we’ve been able to say, okay, there’s a certain set of content that no matter how many stories you’ve read on tech review that month, you can’t see it unless you’re a subscriber. It’s subscriber-only content, and then there’s certain content that you can see but only up until you’ve read a certain number of stories, and then you have to become a subscriber. Then there’s a third set of content that’s generally it’s been coronavirus content that’s available to anyone no matter how many times they’ve been to the site that month or that period of time.

Being able to look at those different funnels and see what happens, we didn’t have any of that built previously, but it’s very exciting so we’re like this really exciting moment when we’re like, oh man, look at it. Look at, look at the numbers. When I look at the future, I certainly think the advertising will continue to do what it hadn’t done previously. Again, I’m aware that the ceiling in that “room is dropping ever” so ever so slightly each year, each month. There’s only so much that we’re going to be able to do.

I certainly see that the subscriber side of our business will continue to grow. The revenue from subscriptions. I think that the events business will get back to the world as it once was. Whatever that looks like, we will benefit. I think primarily because we have kept the lights on. This whole period of time we haven’t just gone dark with events. We are continuing to put on events. We’ve continued to do paid events.

We’re also doing certain kinds of smaller evening chat-free events just to keep people thinking of us, so that when we are back in the world of being in a room with other people, I think we are going to see a lot of pent-up demand there. In the longer term, it’s like, okay, so that is all very exciting. All is well and good, but what’s the bigger play?

There’s a couple of different options that we are examining. We’re trying to figure out, do we go much broader? We’re not going to run out of technologies to look at. Do we add a whole bunch of different technologies coverage areas, and/or do we think about maybe a B2B play? Those are questions that we’re asking ourselves, and I probably won’t answer them in the hypothetical at this point.

Jacob: I do want to jump into the business models though, and go a little deeper on some of the things you talked about because MIT Technology Review has many different modes of generating revenue. To start, you’re obviously a magazine, and magazines are advertising and subscriptions, but you also have a digital subscription. How do you think about those two subscriptions working together or in competition as you are making this transformation towards a more digital business?

Elizabeth: I’m not good with exactly when these things happen, but as of I’m going to say about six months ago, Jacob, you can only get the print magazine if you also have a digital subscription. We are no longer doing print-only as a subscription. That means that anyone who has been in print-only– There has been traditionally some direct mail acquisition techniques that we were using, which is, of course, entirely or had been entirely digital. Anybody who was traditionally a print-only subscriber, when they go to renew will be faced with a price that’s higher than what they had paid for print-only and includes digital too. That will result, and we already are seeing it in a spike and churn.

It will mean that we will bleed out as we’re already seeing print-only subscribers in favor of framing our entire business proposition around the digital experience. It’s not that we don’t care about prints, but it’s that we really care about digital, and the way we have done our print magazine, and I’m not sure how aware you are of this, but our print magazine publishes six times a year, and it’s thematic. Again, when I first joined, the print magazine was– Well, it was a little bit of like the print magazine, they would take the stories off the print magazine and put them up on the web, but we don’t even do that in reverse. What we’re saying is a lot of print magazines will just take the latest stories off the web and print them.

We’re not doing that. What we’ll say is look, each of these issues is focused on a particular theme, and we’re going to explore that theme from a whole bunch of different angles. We just did one on the food issue. It was all about food, and how technology is changing food from the supply chain to engineering of food, from engineering of various things associated with farming. Lots of elements of understanding what the future of our food supply looks like.

Now, our thinking is that a thematic issue because when you are reading a print issue, you are probably in a little bit more of a reclined, lean-back mode, more of an immersive experience in the print, in the images, in the paper format. We want our readers to be able to really dig in in that way. Then in the constant change of the cycle of the news, and this or that discovery, or this or that announcement, or whatever it may be is what we’ve capture in digital.

You get us at our best when you get the two together. You get the fast twitch and the slow twitch, if you will, of the two different media. If you don’t want us in both formats, you can only go digital-only. You can’t go print-only anymore.

Jacob: I spent some time on the website in preparation for this, and I was impressed that the site wasn’t cluttered with banner ads, and there was not a single chumbox to be found anywhere. Can you talk about your ad strategy on the site?

Elizabeth: Yes, so it’s nice to hear you say that. It depends on who you ask. Certainly, in our company slack, there are various situations where people like this ad, I hate this ad, what is this ad. Maybe it depends on the day or it depends on the point of view. Generally speaking, we feel quite strongly that we are trying to build the business on the foundation of reader revenue. We are very happy to take advertiser revenue, don’t get me wrong, but we recognize that the business future really rests on the experience that the reader has being as good as possible. We’ve got lots of experience any number of us in going onto a site and just being assaulted by crap.

I guess if you talk to my head of sales, he might come across as a little more bullied or beat up because he knows so well what his peers don’t want him to put us through. We put a lot of thought into the kinds of banner ads that we will and will not do. We recently did a little bit more of a high-impact digital ad for a car company. We had a good chat about it. Several of us weighed in on whether that was going to be okay. We decided it was because it didn’t automatically open. As the visitor to the site, I had many places where I needed to take the choice to look at the ad and listen to the ad rather than having it be forced upon me.

I think our general feeling is that the business is going to be built upon the reader’s experience. I think another thing to probably to bear in mind is that we carry these three letters, the MIT letters at the start of our name. I think that there’s no question it is a blessing. It is a tremendous advantage, and in this context, it is something we have to be a little bit careful about or conscious of. There’s something about MIT Technology Review as a website with a ton of ads on it that I think would optically be a little bit hard for our audience to reckon with.

Jacob: You’ve mentioned that events were a big part of the business before COVID, but even through COVID you continued to do virtual events. I have a few quick questions on this. The first is, can you talk through your strategy for these virtual events, and how you were able to actually charge for them? Because most event producers have not found success charging for virtual events.

Elizabeth: I almost hate to have you say that out loud, Jacob. [laughs] You’re right. Okay, let’s talk pre-pandemic. Pre-pandemic, the game we played in events. What we realized about three or four years ago was that we were selling out every one of our events, and we were selling out with like four weeks to go. One of the first things I did was raise prices, not just on ticket attendance but also for sponsorship. We were not charging nearly enough for sponsorship. It just didn’t make a lot of sense to me, I guess. I don’t mind selling out, but boy, it doesn’t break my heart to sell out, because that means there’s people out there whose money I can’t take for an event that I’m already doing.

We began to look really carefully about what to do in order to maximize audience, and what some options were, and we were interested in virtual for all these reasons. Also if you want to go to an event, you have to get on an airplane, or you have to get into a taxi or whatever, and take a bunch of time away. Was there a better way?

When the pandemic hit, we had our biggest event of the year, EmTech Digital event, which has always been held in San Francisco. It’s the AI-focused event. I think it’s like the 22nd or something of March. You can imagine that we were watching the news, starting as early as mid-February. What we were going to do? What was going to happen? Because we certainly had seen things that were taking place in our international market, business areas like our China team, for instance, it was like, wow, this is a problem.

We were paying very close attention and worried about what was going to happen in San Francisco, and realized, right around the 9th or the 10th that we couldn’t hold the show in person, and I said, “Look, this is the time for us to pivot to virtual.” We’ve known for a while that there was something we needed to explore in virtual as a means of reaching a broader audience, and now we have an opportunity and we’re forced into it, and never will our audience be more understanding of our screw ups and hiccups with the platform or problems with making it all flow properly than right at this moment when all of us as a society are pulled together to try and get through this time.

Very quickly, with like two weeks to go, the team pivoted, and the way that we dealt with people who had already bought tickets, is we said, we knew we had to anchor them at a price of like, I don’t know, it was like $2,500 for a ticket to attend the event. We knew that they were anchored there. We went back and said, “All right, we’ll charge you $1,000 for a ticket, so you can either take that extra $1,500 that you paid for these tickets, but we’re not going to hold the event in San Francisco anymore.” We’ll give that money back to you. That’s one option. We’ll keep the money and use it as a credit for a future event. That’s another option. Or you can invite three of your colleagues, and we’ll keep the money, and instead of just you going, a total of four of you can go for that same $2,500 investment.

That enabled us to hold on to a bunch of revenue. We needed to go through a certain song and dance with the sponsors as well. It enabled us to hold on to a certain amount of the revenue, and enabled us to actually do pretty well in that show, but by the time June came around, when we had another big event, which was scheduled before COVID, we knew that $1,000 wasn’t going to work, because so much had occurred in those intervening two months or three months, where all these people were doing free events. As you remember, it’s still happening, but these early days, especially, everybody was inviting– all of us were getting invited to tons of virtual events, and for free. We knew that $1,000 wasn’t going to hold. We ended up pricing that event at $600. It did hold. We did really well with that.

We’ve been watching very carefully and trying to figure out like, what price will hold in this environment, because there’s such a large number of free events. I think a couple things have happened. In the summer, a lot of event players folded or went into hibernation. Realizing that this crisis wasn’t going to end soon, they thought, okay, we’re going to go back to normal in the fall. Once they realized the fall, it wasn’t going to happen, we’re going to go back to normal in the fall of 2020, they started canceling instead of postponing events. That got rid of a lot of competition for us. Then we just kept thinking, what do we do in a virtual event to make it really worth it? How do we make the the experience better than it would have been if you were sitting in the room, in the auditorium space?

We did some cool stuff, like for example, we did these lab tours. You could go into the NanoLab at MIT. The NanoLab is where they’re making all kinds of astonishingly small things, for exploring the human body, for a whole number of applications, went into that lab, went into the computer science lab. They did a tour, which I attended of the COVID testing laboratory that had been put together in a few weeks’ time.

Those kinds of tours, if we were doing an event in person, we might be able to take 10 people on a tour of that, but we had hundreds able to go and experience what the lab actually look like and talk to the scientists who are running it. That’s a really great example of something that we can uniquely do, and enable us to give people a feeling that there was a continued to be a value to an MIT Technology Review event that I think has stood us apart from other event companies. I mean, long may at last, it may not last. It may not always be so, but thus far, our team has been really savvy about how to think about the events experience.

Jacob: Looking forward, when do you, as the CEO of MIT Technology Review, feel comfortable planning physical events? Even when you do go physical, do you think that you will have a hybrid virtual component along with it?

Elizabeth: At the moment, we are not planning any in-person events before 2022, which is to say not for the rest of this calendar year. That is, from my reckoning, a simple case of looking at the rollout of vaccine. It’s hard to imagine. I think things are starting to get a little bit like some of the bottlenecks are getting unclogged, kind of as we speak, but even so, it’s still hard to imagine that there’s going to be a lot of the population fully vaccinated until we’re talking about sort of the fall.

Maybe we could do it in the fall, but then we’ve been talking about it and like, do you go ahead and do it in the fall. I tried to do it in the fall, and then know that you’re going to have to possibly have to pivot to virtual, and let’s stop chasing this thing. Let’s just say, okay, we’re not going to do it in 2021. That’s where we are at the moment. We’re not planning on doing any in person events in 2021.

In 2022, we hope in the sort of late, right around this time in 2022, a little over a year from now, we hope to be able to hold our usual events in San Francisco EmTech Digital. I do think there’s going to the elements of it that will continue to do some streaming around so that people who either can’t attend, because they have no plans to be in San Francisco, or decide not to, because they just don’t feel at ease doing so for whatever reason, can continue to get access to the experience of what that event is. It probably will require two separate programming approaches brought together into a single event. It’s going to be a more complicated event in order to do a hybrid event, but I do think that that’s probably where we’ll go.

Jacob: Can you talk through your strategy for licensing the brand versus launching owned and operated local versions of the publication?

Elizabeth: The strategy around licensing, it predates me, which is to say there have been a bunch of companies who had licenses for MIT Tech Review for a bunch of years, maybe 10 years or more. I’m not exactly sure. It was like most things, it was a bit scattershot, not particularly strategic. We have rationalized a number of those licensing arrangements, which is to say, we’ve shut some down. We’ve changed the parameters.

It’s a better part of our business than it was previously. There were more individuals in the world with licenses to technology review, than money to pay for those licenses in certain cases. We pulled back on a lot of this, and then did a really a kind of a ranking of the different markets, and said, which of these markets does it make sense for us to be in on our own? Which of these markets does it not make sense for us to be on our own, because it’s onerous to enter, because there’s massive cultural and language challenges, because there might be some legal obstacles, or whatever? Which ones can we probably never enter on our own, which ones can and should we enter on our own, and what’s in the middle? Where do each of the markets in the world fit?

I think we went round and around on China, as to whether China was a market that we should because of its vital importance which I think you know quite well in the future of technology because of its massive significance. Does it make sense for us to be in China as as our own company? Or should we work through a partner in a license? I think that China is such a complicated market, and in the last two to three years has gotten even more complicated because of the challenges between the US government and the Chinese government has made it really hard to do business in China well.

That plus lots of culture and language differences and disconnects made us feel pretty much, and we had a good partner, and we felt good about the partner that we were working with, made us feel like at least for the foreseeable future, China is a market that we will be in partnership in. We don’t feel that way about a lot of other markets, particularly markets in Western Europe, for instance. We made some changes to our partnerships in Europe and pulled back on some of those, and with designs to build out our team and build out our commercial team in Europe ourselves.

Then there’s a bunch of markets in which we are happy to have a partner and happy to have that licensing relationship, but don’t see it as a permanent. We see it as a great way to make the business grow and the brand grow, but ask me again in five years, and we may well have gone on a different direction.

Jacob: Because you’re on the board of IMAG, which is part of the Association of Magazine Media, I am curious your thoughts on the state of magazines as a whole. How do you see the industry evolving, and do you see it expanding or will there be consistent contraction?

Elizabeth: Oh, that’s a really good question. I think that the number of publishers is going to continue to contract. I’m not sure how consistently it will. I certainly do not think that people are going to read less and consume less media content in the future. I think that there are going to be more and more bigger publishers who capture more and more types of content within their umbrellas.

Example, New York Times and the Washington Post, I think will continue to expand their tech coverage, will continue to expand their lifestyle coverage, so that when you are making a decision about what your own subscription stack should look like, their position, the New York Times is positioned really solidly and firmly at the bottom of one’s stack is even more secured.

Then the challenge is, how do you offer something that’s different and interesting and enhancing to the different layers on top of that stack? If you say as a person who cares about what’s going on in the world and really digs media and is very online, I’m going to be a New York Times subscriber and I’m also going to get the Washington Post. That takes care of my general news, my Washington coverage, probably a good bit of what’s going on in the world, and what I don’t get there, I’ll get from The Economist. The Economist will tell me much more about what’s going on in Europe and in Asia, but I really care about tech as well. What we want to do is be that tech subscription in your stack.

At the moment. I would argue that nobody really owns that spot in the market, and we’d like to be the ones to own that, and then maybe you like to cook, or maybe you like, I don’t know, whatever, you like bicycling or whatever, and that’s what builds the rest of one’s own particular media stack. What I think will occur is that folks like the New York Times or the Washington Post are going to continue to build out their teams to take up more and more parts of that stack. I don’t think that the market is going to shrink. I think the number of players in the market will shrink.

Jacob: I want to close with the same two questions that I ask every operator I have on the show. First, looking at your career, what is a mistake that you made, and what did you learn from it that made you better professionally?

Elizabeth: I think I’ve made some mistakes when I’ve realized that I had somebody on my team who wasn’t a good fit, and I didn’t take the decision fast enough to send them on to their next destination, because I thought it was going to get better, because I was so glad to have the role filled, because I just thought I’m just not going to deal with it right now, because it’s hard, and it really forces you to look at yourself as well as the individual.

Sometimes you might need to really check your assumptions about how clear have I been, how articulately was that need? Was I too rushed in these communications, and is he or she really to blame for this? All that. What’s it going to mean to other people if I let this person go? How are they going to respond? I think the biggest mistakes I can point to in the last four or five years have been of that sort. It’s just sitting on it too long and thinking maybe it’ll get better. It never does.

Jacob: Then if you could offer current or prospective media operators some advice to succeed in media, what would that advice be?

Elizabeth: Keep it simple. That’s part of what I enjoy about reading you, Jacob, is you’re an exceedingly clear and simple communicator. I mean that to be complimentary, which is to say you tackle one topic, and you break it apart very clearly and logically, and it just feels like, okay, I get it. I get where he is coming from. I think that there is a temptation that I have suffered from to figure out all the different ways you can make money, and let’s do this, let’s do that. I know I have sent my team like, ideas, oh my God, did you guys see that these guys are doing that? What do you think? Should we do that? I have learned– I’m still trying, I suspect. I haven’t totally mastered it, to cut the nonsense and just focus on executing really, really well on what we’re doing rather than complicating it with other ideas and having inherited a business that had been around for so long and had a lot of mess to clean up, and realizing as a lot of these messes got cleaned up, how much easier it was to run the business. My feeling is keep it simple. If you’re starting something new, just figure out what’s the, going to be the two or three things I want to do in a given year, not 20 or 30. I know that’s probably overly simplistic and easier said than done, but find one’s own version. The critical thing is to find one’s own version of that.