For Publishers Clearing House CMO Jason John, It’s Game On!
PCH’s head of marketing explains how the company best known for magazine subscriptions and sweepstakes became “a free-to-play, chance-to-win brand.”
Publishers Clearing House has been around for more than 60 years. Its original model was to replace door-to-door magazine subscription sales by acting as a single vendor offering multiple subscriptions by mail. It introduced the sweepstakes concept in 1967, and this is what it has been known for ever since. Today, however, according to its CMO, Jason John, PCH is “a free-to-play, chance-to-win brand.”
John, recently of Gilt and before that Martha Stewart, has been leading the old-line company further into digital for a few years now. “We’re growing on the offline channels, we’re growing on the online channels, we’re growing on the mobile channels, and I think we do a good job coming together as a team and saying, ‘How do we do this from a PCH perspective?’”
Read the full interview, below, to find out what else is going on there, as well as what’s happening with the famous “Prize Patrol.”
CMO.com: Prior to joining Publisher’s Clearing House, you were with Gilt, a pure-play online shopping destination. Can you give me an idea of how you got from Gilt to here and tell us a little about what some of the differences are?
Gilt also took it a step further and said, “OK, from a gaming mentality, how do I bring in some of the game mechanics to retail?” I think that really propelled Gilt quite a bit in the early days. People in our focus groups would say, “We love that winning feeling when we check out and buy something.” What a tremendous accomplishment to have customers feel like they won when they bought something from your brand. That really inspired me to start looking at the game mechanism a little bit more closely.
Then, when I started speaking to and looking under the covers at PCH, I realized that it has content, commerce, and gaming all rolled into one. As the industry itself is starting to merge on these three pillars, PCH has already done that for years, which is great. They’re so far ahead of the curve that it really intrigued me to make the jump over to Publishers.
CMO.com: Can you describe what PCH does, in general? I think some people might not be aware of what its model is. Then, what you have done there in terms of digital transformation?
John: The way I see PCH is a media and entertainment company. How that specifically applies to the digital world—let’s take the entertainment piece of that. We’re a free-to-play, chance-to-win brand. That’s our value proposition, and that’s what consumers know us for.
Whether that’s in just a sweepstakes setting—historically, that’s how people view the company—or in areas like casual gaming or commerce opportunities, or magazine sales, there are a variety of different elements that go under the entertainment heading.
For instance, on the casual gaming side, we’re now the fifth largest mobile game publisher. Most people don’t necessarily know that about the brand, but, from an entertainment standpoint, that’s what we bring to the table. We want to get users engaged with our brand and have entertaining experiences no matter what device they’re using or how they interact with us.
From a media standpoint, we have a huge treasure trove of first-party data. We are able to develop audiences. Being able to provide personalized advertising to those audiences based on all the first-party data that we have is just a big asset for us. So what we do is we help advertisers target audiences effectively with the right advertising to the right group of people.
For me, seeing both sides of the business—media and entertainment—has been an amazing experience.
CMO.com: There are two parts of the PCH business, the traditional side and a digital side, correct?
John: Yes. Ultimately, the free-to-play, chance-to-win umbrella is where we play, and then the channel is basically agnostic, depending on whether the channel is offline, through direct mail, online, during TV, on tablets—whatever. I’d like to unify that feeling that consumers get—that chance-to-win opportunity across all those touch points—no matter how they’re interacting with our brand.
CMO.com: Do you get involved much in the brand story and how the brand is perceived, or is your role more focused on digital transactions?
John: It’s a combination. If we started looking at just siloed channels and how our brand is perceived on a channel basis, I don’t think that’s the right approach. It is really looking more holistically at what the brand represents and then understanding what the channel strategies are to reflect that branding. It’s definitely a combination of both.
CMO.com: Just as a pure consumer and viewer of advertising, what I see doesn’t look all that digital—it looks very analog, like your TV advertising, for one. I’m wondering if that’s deliberate.
John: Yes, we tend to target advertising in these channels to certain segments that we feel are going to respond the best. So, from my point of view, how advertising has evolved and where digital has helped us to evolve is to be more personalized and targeted with our offering or with any brand’s offering to the consumer that it’s targeting. If I have an in-app advertisement and download the PCH app, that is certainly going to be very digital in feel and obviously very mobile-friendly and very app-friendly.
But if I am targeting a demographic that historically interacts with us in the direct mail channel, then a postcard or some sort of offline package campaign would work more effectively than making our brand look too digital to an offline consumer.
CMO.com: So that’s what you mean by being agnostic. You want to go wherever the right message is for that audience, and you bring them into the fold that way.
John: Exactly. The PCH app is a perfect example, where it keeps all the free-to-play, chance-to-win elements, but when we natively build that in the app space, we have to keep all the key mobile best practices in mind. It has to be fun. It has to be fast. It has to be responsive to the consumer. The consumer is going to interact with us in an app world in a much faster and different way than the person would on a desktop and certainly different from an offline mailer.
CMO.com: And in terms of content, do you consider the games the content you produce?
John: Certainly, the games are most of the content. We do have Front Page. We have different franchises, and Front Page is an aggregator of actual content. Think of it as a version of a Flipboard or another place to get news, weather, sports, horoscopes, that kind of thing.
CMO.com: PCH began its digital journey before you got there. What has the digital transformation been like at a company that’s rooted in a very analog world? What are some of the challenges or things that surprise you?
John: The speed at which our consumers went mobile was definitely eye-opening for me. The shift to mobile is prevalent in the industry, but the speed with which they were switching to mobile was very shocking to us. I saw very similar growth rates at Gilt as I do here, from a mobile-shift perspective. We’ve launched multiple apps in the past year. We’ve built up our mobile web experience. We’ve launched tablet-only experiences.
So our ability to shift and retool to support that speed to mobile has been a huge benefit to us. And translating our free-to-play, chance-to-win value proposition into those channels and devices has been great.
CMO.com: How about within the company itself? Did you have some issues with becoming a digital company as opposed to just having a digital department?
John: I have not felt that at all here. From the beginning, when I was hired, we looked at this as part of the PCH brand, and these channels are just another place where we can take advantage of having good messaging and understanding where the consumer’s patterns of behavior are different on these channels and how we translate our business to fit that channel. I don’t even look at it as the direct mail team or the offline team or the TV team.
I feel like we do a really good job of looking at it as, “We’re PCH, and how do we grow on all channels across the board?” So we’re growing on the offline channels, we’re growing on the online channels, we’re growing on the mobile channels, and I think we do a good job coming together as a team and saying, “How do we do this from a PCH perspective?”
CMO.com: Interesting. And is PCH—rather than Publishers Clearing House—the brand name now?
John: You know, we do use PCH, and I probably use it more than I should. It is Publishers Clearing House. Especially when you talk about mobile advertising and digital advertising, you got a much smaller space, so we tend to use PCH as a branding element, sort of co-branding with the longer Publishers Clearing House. From a consumer’s point of view, it’s been well-received. And from our point of view, from a space standpoint, it certainly helps.
CMO.com:Going back to mobile for a second: You have demographics on your people, of course. Is it a younger audience coming in via mobile, or is it the older kind of traditional customers going into mobile?
John: We definitely see our traditional customer shifting heavily into mobile. Obviously, as you scale down in age demographic, you do see faster shifts, but across the board we’ve seen the big increase to the mobile channel—young and old and new and repeat.
CMO.com: Tell me about Liquid, how you got involved, and what part it plays in the PCH story.
John: It’s the PCH media arm. Basically, the way you think about the media arm of our business is, you know we have the ability to do amazing audience targeting based on the data that we have. And most advertisers use third-party information to develop audience targeting for brands.
Where we have first-party information, we understand what people are doing on our site. So what we’re able to do for advertisers is make better, more accurate audience lists available for us to target with their advertising. It is digital, but it is cross-channel. Our ability to target cross-device is hard to beat in the industry because we know from our first-party data if this person is on a mobile device, on a tablet, or on a desktop.
CMO.com: At PCH, how is the customer experience journey different than what it might be at, say, Gilt or Martha Stewart?
John: We have such a diverse portfolio of entertainment opportunities. The interesting thing for me is that there are so many ways to engage with us. There isn’t a set path.
At a retail company like Gilt, ultimately you need to buy a product for my marketing spend to be efficient. You can do 10 things with us, that’s great, but if one of those 10 things is not make a purchase, that’s not good. At Martha Stewart, we didn’t really have much of a commerce business. They had Kmart, but that was different. For our digital property specifically, you had to keep reading magazine articles, and advertising is really what drove the revenue from Martha Stewart’s perspective. So if you weren’t ultimately reading and engaging on the site, that was a problem.
But at PCH, you can play games, you can read content, you can make purchases, you can look at magazines. We have so many things that you can do that, for me, it’s a challenge of figuring out: OK, what is the best, most optimal experience that the customer will want to receive on any given day, on any given platform, on any given channel? And it’s really trying to make sure that the customer is satisfied and happy with that experience.
CMO.com: A lot of CMOs have had issues going into this new digital transformation age with finding people who are digitally savvy and also savvy in the ways of marketing. What have your experiences been, both at Gilt and now here at PCH, in terms of forming your team?
John: Finding a wealth of digital expertise is definitely difficult. The great thing about PCH is we’ve been able to marry people who have really grounded fundamentals in direct marketing.
And to me, digital is, again, just another avenue to apply your marketing skills, and you can learn that avenue if you have the direct marketing knowledge within you. I found that to be great. For us to supplement the team with more app experience and mobile experience, it helped to open offices in New York, Boston, and San Francisco. We’re able to tap into different talent pools. Being able to reach different markets to find the talent that is required has helped us tremendously.
But the fundamental grounding in direct marketing and just being able to apply those in the digital world is an easier path than being able to find someone with a lot of digital expertise, which is hard to do.
CMO.com: Is there a big social play?
John: Absolutely, especially on Facebook, where we have a very passionate following. And we also have something that’s unique to PCH, which is another nice draw for me personally: being able to work with the Prize Patrol. They definitely have their own personalities, and it’s a great opportunity to utilize the Prize Patrol voice and be able to give consumers on social media behind-the-scenes access.
Historically, you have a 30-second TV commercial to show the knock on the door and the awarding of the check. But social media allows us to open up that access a little bit more and have people follow the Prize Patrol, understand where they’re going; they’re at the airport, they’re in the van going to the next stop, they’re approaching the door. It’s a cool, fun element to add to the mix, and we have a very nice, passionate following. We have a little over 3 million Facebook fans who are very engaged, and it’s a lot of fun.
CMO.com: You’ve been on the digital side of marketing for a while with a variety of brands. For the CMO out there who’s struggling with digital transformation or dealing with the multiple channels and all the things that you’re dealing with, any advice or something that you learned that you can pass along?
John: Yeah, definitely. For me, it sounds very simple. But I think the best path is to really just understand the consumer. Break it down to the basic denominator of the consumer and what they expect from your brand.
Don’t get hung up on the actual channel. I think that’s where we’re doing a great job and accelerating the success of our business. The channels allow for tweaks, but they shouldn’t be total steps and deviations from your brand and other channels. So if you understand the consumer and what they’re ultimately expecting out of your brand, a lot of these answers come very easily, whether it’s digital or mobile versus tablet versus desktop experience. You might think you need the mobile web to do this, but, no, you really just need to understand consumers and what they want.
They’re going to interact with you on different channels. You just need to be your brand in that channel. So don’t try to get hung up on different divisions and resources and plans and functionality and one versus the other. I’ve seen so many companies go down a bad path with that. Just simplify it. Start off there and then you can always do tweaks and add functionality afterward to be more channel-specific.