WSJ makes hires for digital experience and strategy group

Jason Jedlinski, head of audience touchpoints at The Wall Street Journal, send out the following announcement on Friday:

Colleagues,

I’m writing to outline next steps for the Audience Touchpoints team within WSJ’s Digital Experience and Strategy group.

It’s an exciting time to welcome both new and familiar talent. We have ambitious goals to continue growing our digital audience, expand engagement (repeat visits, measured as ‘active days’), and evolve our subscriber journey and advertising products.

Anthony Moor joins us as Product Director, Audience Development. For 20 years, he’s focused on leveraging content to expand reach. First, as the online editor of large newspapers in Dallas, Orlando and Rochester, and then in product roles at Yahoo, Realtor.com and NerdWallet. Anthony spent six years on the board of the Online News Association, including running the association’s annual awards process, and began his career as a local television news reporter. Anthony’s remit will be widening the top of our funnel: working with a focus on non-subscribers, partnering with Membership to define new “less for less” products that will grow WSJ’s reach and consumer revenue.

Nicole Bales joins us as Product Director, Digital Advertising. She’s transferring from our Hong Kong office, where she spent the last four years as Group Head, Marketing & Creative Operations for APAC. Nicole has extensive ad agency experience and is passionate about innovation and technology. In her new role, she will become DXS’ primary liaison with Dow Jones’ sales, adops, marketing partnership and advertising technology teams. Nicole will help these groups better-integrate with our consumer-facing news products and ensure that what we build together delivers both client value and a respectful user experience.

Pete Gray joins us as VP, Audience Touchpoints Experimentation. Over the last five years, Pete created and evolved a rigorous testing program to optimize the end to end customer journey of our subscription brands and products. Working with House of Kaizen and Optimizely, Pete and his team started with the acquisition journey and then expanded their scope to include experimentation across audience engagement touchpoints such as onboarding and “What To Read Next” module. Pete will guide product testing across the broader Audience Touchpoints portfolio, helping folks adopt best practices and refine hypotheses — ultimately accelerating our speed to actionable insights. He’ll also continue guiding product experimentation at Barron’s Group.

We’re also excited to welcome Pete’s team, whose work spans what we’re defining as our Subscriber Journey program, including acquisition, WSJ’s digital storefront, onboarding, retention and account management.

• Ian Tucker, Sr. Product Manager

• Shreeya Shekar, Product Manager

• Charlen Weng, Product Manager

• Jake Marchman, Assoc. Product Manager

• Jason Zhen, Assoc. Product Manager

The Membership organization has been a critical partner to DXS and we will continue working closely with Karl Wells and his team to achieve the Wall Street Journal’s goals.

By pairing these new leaders and the Subscriber Journey team with Annemarie Dooling (Engagement Experiences), Delia Casa (Web Platform) and Mani Miri (Mobile App Platform), we’re confident we will increase both our velocity and our impact on WSJ’s digital growth.

Together, this expanded Audience Touchpoints team will leverage WSJ’s broadly-respected journalism, best-in-breed market data and evolving technology platforms to help get more people the facts they need, when and how they want them.

Please reach out to me if you have questions on who to go to for what. We’ll keep you posted on our progress through the Monday morning DXS newsletter.