Bloomberg Media CEO: We’re clicking on all cylinders

Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith sent the following to the global media staff on Wednesday:

Dear Colleagues,

Congratulations to many teams across Media, including Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Digital, Bloomberg LIVE, Bloomberg West, and Bloomberg Radio on collaboration across “What Is Code?”. What we built together around Code clearly demonstrated our multi-platform power and potential–taking a smart, bold editorial approach and combining it with powerful and surprising design across platforms. As one prominent technology journalist noted, Paul Ford’s essay was “one of the best things I’ve ever read about tech.”

“What Is Code?” is the #1 article in terms of total page views, unique visitors, and the average number of minutes spent per visitor since the launch of Bloomberg Business. The print edition of The Code Issue is the best-selling Businessweek issue of 2015 on newsstands. The essay continues to draw praise and social engagement. Bill Gates recently shared the story with his 23.1M followers on Twitter, noting the piece “skillfully captures how code runs our lives.”

We also made news at the first annual Bloomberg Technology Conference on the theme “Code and the Corner Office” in San Francisco, where our LIVE team attracted a sold-out crowd of C-level execs, founders, board members, and tech leaders and prominent speakers. Outgoing Twitter CEO Dick Costolo made his first public appearance since announcing his departure and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer moved the company’s stock with her statements affirming the tax-free status of Yahoo’s planned Alibaba spinoff.

The next day, Bloomberg LIVE hosted its first event in EMEA: the Bloomberg Technology Conference: Smarter Cities. A flagship event in the London Technology Week program, the conference attracted 200 business leaders and policy makers from the likes of IBM, Uber, CityMapper and the Greater London Authority to discuss how technology is transforming cities. In a crowded week, the event’s hashtag was trending on Twitter by lunchtime.

This is our first cross-platform franchise since re-launching Bloomberg LIVE in January and a great example of the news, excitement, and commercial value we can create with close collaboration and exceptional planning and execution.

Other important milestones from the past month:

-Bloomberg Media is for the first time #1 in global business video, recording our best video month ever in May and jumping two spots ahead of Yahoo! Finance and IBT Media to become #1 in comScore’s Business and Finance category. With 16.9 million unique viewers worldwide, our video audiences grew 337 percent year-over-year and 20 percent month-over-month. Capping a record month in U.S. traffic in April, Bloomberg Business reached 22.5 million unique visitors in May, surpassing CNNMoney.com and remaining larger than WSJ.com. In June, we also saw our best week ever for social traffic. Thanks to the work of Kari Hodes and the audience development team, more than 4 million people visited us through social media in the last week of June–a 90 percent increase year-over-year.

-Bloomberg Television’s new U.S. markets show, “What’d You Miss?”, featuring co-hosts Joe Weisenthal and Alix Steel, is off to a strong start after soft launching on June 29. They couldn’t have launched at a better time: Joe, Alix and team broke into programming (unexpected show launch!) on the evening of Friday the 26th for a live update on breaking news about Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras calling for a referendum while our competitors were in re-airs.

-The annual Ipsos Affluent Survey Europe 2015–the industry benchmark for measuring audience and influence among Europe’s media brands–was published last month. Bloomberg Media has reinforced its position as the number one business media brand in Europe with our audience evaluated to be 43 percent more influential than the average survey respondent beating out the likes of the Financial Times, CNBC, and the Wall Street Journal Europe. Bloomberg Media has the highest reach of high-net-worth individuals, C-suite officers, business decision makers, and financial professionals in the competitive set.

-Asia TV secured an exclusive interview with Singapore Airlines, marking the first time in four years that CEO Goh Choon Phong has spoken with an international network. Asia TV also had a presence at two of the region’s biggest tech events–China’s version of CES in Shanghai and TechNet in Hong Kong–producing strong packages and interviews including JD.com’s CTO Leslie Liu, Micromax’s co-founder Vikas Jain, Flipkart’s CFO Sanjay Baweja and Beenos founder Teru Sato.

-Our Bloomberg TV India partners announced that the channel is the leader in English business news in India, surpassing CNBC’s India channel. India is an important market for the Terminal as well as a huge market for global business news, and this type of success helps extend Bloomberg LP’s reach and influence in the broader region.

-In Bloomberg Politics, ‘With All Due Respect’ interviewed eight 2016 U.S. presidential contenders in June, including Scott Walker, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Rick Santorum, Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Bernie Sanders, as well as political heavyweights Susan Rice and Mitt Romney. Bloomberg Politics and Bloomberg News collaborations in Washington resulted in big wins including Supreme Court decisions, campaign finance tracking, Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, and Jeb Bush’s financial disclosure. In May, Bloomberg Politics reported its best traffic month since launch, growing 26 percent month-over-month to reach 3 million unique visitors in the U.S. Bloomberg Politics also grew to #4 in video unique viewers in comScore’s News/Politics category.

-Bloomberg Media’s leadership and brand made a splash at this year’s industry-moving Cannes Lions Festival. Jacki Kelley moderated a standing-room-only panel on “The Age of Un-marketing,” and she was interviewed separately on stage by McCann Erickson art director Bergendi Hatch. Paul Caine moderated a panel for IPG and presented on “5 things you need to know about data and creativity.” Adam Freeman joined a Campaign magazine panel on the future of video. Bloomberg Business even had some great branding on billboards around town. This was a key moment for our business and overall brand as we continue to build an aggressive presence in the industry.

-Earlier this month, Bloomberg Pursuits magazine unveiled its new look with the release of our Summer 2015 issue. Editor Emma Rosenblum led a major redesign and new editorial focus that complements the digital home of Pursuits on Bloomberg Business. On the commercial side, we announced Ali Salama as the new publisher of Pursuits. Ali succeeds Emma Winchurch-Beale, who has been promoted to client lead overseeing all advertising sales categories in EMEA. Congrats to the Pursuits team!

-Bloomberg Content Service closed 21 deals across 12 countries in June, including 10 new clients. These deals expand our reach, influence and revenue with important business audiences in the U.S., UK, Mexico, Norway, Turkey, Malaysia and Japan. Nine of the deals included video licenses.

-At the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced Bloomberg Business as a launch partner of its new News app. Bloomberg was included in a wave of positive coverage following WWDC. The developments we are making on mobile and connected devices and continuing to partner with industry leaders like Apple are a major component of our media strategy. Kudos to Paul Maya, Gregg Fenton and team for securing and managing this important partnership.

-We’re excited to have Linda Douglass joining in September to lead Bloomberg Media’s global communications team. Working directly with Linda will be Amanda Cowie, who will lead communications on business and strategy initiatives, and Rachel Nagler, who will lead content promotion across all of our platforms.

Thank you to all for your commitment to producing the best work. Let’s keep it going.

Justin