Bloomberg’s search for new audiences

Michael Shane

Shan Wang of the Nieman Lab interviewed Michael Shane, Bloomberg Media’s newly appointed global head of digital innovation, about its search for new audiences.

Here is an excerpt:

SHAN WANG: Your title has a lot of big new words in it. Can you give me an overview of the main areas you’re concerned with at Bloomberg?
MICHAEL SHANE: The first thing to say is that this is a new role for us at Bloomberg. But it doesn’t appear out of thin air. As a team, broadly across Bloomberg Media, Bloomberg editorial, we all sort of grew into. At this point, in partnership with Scott [Havens] and other leaders, right now, the five pillars I’m looking at in my work, is the following.Experimenting with and prototyping new products: That includes, do we have the right posture and culture to do rapid prototyping within product and editorial, and how do we approach it.
The next bucket is our internal tools and technologies. As a team both in editorial and in product, across every team until we have the right tools and technologies to help us be competitive.
The third bucket: What are the interesting partners that we might want to work with that are maybe a little surprising, that you wouldn’t necessarily think of right away if you were putting together your yearly business plan as a media company.
The next bucket is innovation around ads, working in close partnership with our ad products team, with our sales team. What kind of advertising can we sell as a collaboration with advertisers that is better for our users, better for the clients, and lead to more better experiences? What kind of new ad products can we make together that will make the Internet a better place?
The last bucket I’m focused on sketching out is looking for new revenue streams, new business lines, things outside the realm of advertising that are a good fit for Bloomberg, a good fit for our storytelling, our product team and our culture. What are some unexpected sources of revenue growth for the company as we head towards an anecdotally difficult media environment? It behooves everybody to be looking at, what are some more creative ways to run a profitable business?
A typical month for me might include: We could have a hackathon with the product team, I’m participating in a lot of user testing, user research, interviews with potential users with our product design UX group. I’m working on new ad products with sales and the ad team. I’m met with a few potential outside partners for Bloomberg. I want to see us develop the capability and culture to do rapid prototyping, so that we can experiment with things on small scale, learn as much as we can, and then if warranted, go bigger, if necessary, build a business case, get the buy-in and support that we need.