The Bookseller Marketing and Publicity Conference 2016 YOU SAY YOU WANT COLLABORATION: Creating a successful Media Partnership The Bookseller Marketing and Publicity Conference 2016 Sam Baker CEO of The Pool Emma Bravo Communications Director, (Fiction and Partnerships) Pan Macmillan

What Makes a Good Partnership? YOU SAY YOU WANT COLLABORATION: Creating a successful Media Partnership What Makes a Good Partnership? A good partnership is like a good marriage – a shared culture and generosity, ability to make pragmatic decisions, reciprocity, a willingness to work together, flexibiilty and shared vision of the future. [Sam to say what other media owners might look for in a publishing partnership – what values / culture should publishers be offering.]

YOU SAY YOU WANT COLLABORATION: Creating a successful Media Partnership What do you want in a future partner? Know what you’re looking for \ We start by thinking why we want a partner and exactly what bit of our business requires that. At Pan Mac we had been wanting to trial time-relevant content more extensively. We also wanted to engage specific life-stage readers in a way we could test. We wanted to learn more about urban readers and female commuters. We wanted a partner who we felt shared our voice

YOU SAY YOU WANT COLLABORATION: Creating a successful Media Partnership Speed dating It’s easy to dream about what we want from a partner. It’s difficult to find this person. And it’s difficult to know it’s going to work. Discover and working with new partners require a huge amount of courting. Sometimes you can spend a long time on the early flirty stages, the giddy afterwork drinks, to discover it’s a no-goer. Rather like a dating profile, we look at the project, book or platform and use tools and analytics to tell a prospective partner all about our strengths interests, ambitions and reach. We also fess up to our shortcomings (typically financial and time!) in order to secure a good and honest match

YOU SAY YOU WANT COLLABORATION: Creating a successful Media Partnership Once we are sure that we have compatible ambitions, goals and interests we look to see whether we have a shared understanding of the softer, less tangible qualities that make a partnership work. By now, it should start to become evident whether you fit those sort of Good Sense of Humour qualities of the dating questionnaire – something we have found critical to our work with The Pool. These include openness, shared culture, voice, flexibility and ease with ambiguity

YOU SAY YOU WANT COLLABORATION: Creating a successful Media Partnership Are we sure we know what we want? Does our partner agree? Do we have complementary goals? At Pan Mac, as we look to firming up a partnership we use a one page business model with a round table check on potential pitfalls and what success looks like for both us and and our media partner. This sense checks what benefits we offer to our media partner [pr, social support, affiliate sales, good quality content that matches their own tone. And what we recognise to be the benefits to us. It’s also a useful tool for explaining back at Pan Mac HQ why we have chosen to work with this specific partner.

YOU SAY YOU WANT COLLABORATION: Creating a successful Media Partnership Can you live together? The paperwork Nuts and bolts It’s now time for the detail – the equivalent of the pre-nup and the wills. These are the bedrock of the partnership. The detail that allows us to work to mutual benefit. It’s the number of pieces of content, the nature and number of events, the expected sales, engagement and traffic. Once those key contracts are set up, we have the freedom to be flexible; to amend content, change the schedule, work with third parties, test the content, provide exclusives and share information, to learn and develop together

Running off into the sunset YOU SAY YOU WANT COLLABORATION: Creating a successful Media Partnership Running off into the sunset Of course it’s not *quite* like this, but we love working with The Pool. They work with us to develop our projects, to report back on what works, to improve what doesn’t. They share stuff, we plan and we take advice. We gently admonish one another when we feel one of us has missed a trick. We genuinely celebrate one another’s successes. It feels like the start of a good relationship.