Justin B. Smith, CEO of Bloomberg Media, sent the following memo to employees:
Over the last few years, we’ve put a significant focus on building the Bloomberg Media brand through the global growth of our digital platforms. In the past five years, we have increased our monthly average users by 78% on our owned and operated platforms, reaching nearly 90 million unique visitors. We’ve also made significant strides in digital video, with 53 million average viewers and 131 monthly views across platforms operated by Bloomberg QuickTake. We currently have content partnerships spanning 130 countries and media ventures in more than 15 foreign languages, and in total, our digital business accounts for nearly half of our total revenue.
Bloomberg Media’s global digital footprint is not only our largest audience and revenue platform, but is also our most significant channel for advancing Bloomberg’s brand and influence in key markets.
We owe much of this growth to the quality and reach of our trusted, data-driven journalism, and the value our news products provide to decision-makers and rising leaders all around the world. Scale, superior technology, and continuous innovation are key to Bloomberg Media’s model, but our talent is the central driver of our success. Today, I’m happy to announce several promotions effective immediately, as we prepare for the next phase of growth for our digital business.
Julia Beizer has been named Chief Product Officer and Global Head of Digital, expanding her role to include oversight of our consumer digital initiatives across web, app, OTT and distributed digital ecosystem, with a deeper focus on strategy and business development. She’ll continue to oversee digital and BMD product, as well as our ad ops and ad product teams, while working closely with editorial, commercial and subscriptions to grow our audience, advertising and consumer revenue.
In the two years since Julia joined Bloomberg Media, she has rebuilt our product team to deliver value-first experiences for our audience, and pushed our business to embrace the “test and learn” approach, leveraging data to inform all of our decisions. She has forged strong relationships with sales, editorial and engineering, and improved our cross-functional collaboration. She has repeatedly increased her responsibilities in the last two years and excelled at every challenge.
Our subscription business has consistently exceeded our goals and has quickly become Bloomberg Media’s strongest area of revenue growth. As we continue on this trajectory, Lindsay Horrigan will formally expand her role to oversee our subscription business as Global Head of Consumer Marketing & General Manager of Consumer Subscriptions. Lindsay will continue to lead the consumer marketing team, while also increasing our global footprint of subscribers, and evaluating new lines of consumer revenue. The results speak for themselves and Lindsay and her team should be very proud of the work completed so far.
Scott Havens, who has been instrumental to Bloomberg Media’s digital transformation and the growth of our distribution business over the last several years, will now oversee our critical business growth efforts as Chief Growth Officer and Global Head of Strategic Partnerships. While many of our competitors remain beholden to their legacy models, our commitment to building new disruptive business lines is stronger than ever. We have made two large bets on reader revenue (subscriptions) and digital video / OTT (QuickTake) and Scott’s primary responsibility will be to ensure their continued success. He will also continue to oversee strategic partnerships which will be a key pillar in the next phase of of our growth.
Julia and Lindsay will continue to report to Scott, and he will continue to oversee QuickTake and our Media Distribution teams. Scott will also partner closely with Stephen Colvin, who will formally serve as Bloomberg Media’s Chief Commercial Officer, to successfully expand revenue across all of our platforms. For the past nine months, Stephen has been leading an aggressive transformation of our biggest revenue area while architecting our future post-pandemic ad model to best compete with the tech platforms and our traditional business media adversaries.
Please join me in congratulating Julia, Lindsay, Scott and Stephen.
Best,Justin
