The days are gone when the only thing sales and marketing teams could say to their editorial counterparts was “good morning.” Gone, too, are the days of specialist journalists. Entrepreneurial content experts who leverage deep market knowledge and relationships to launch competitive businesses have forced traditional media companies to adapt. Sit in on a conversation about the threat this poses, the opportunities it presents, and how you need to respond.

You’ll learn:

• Why your whole content-creation process may be obsolete.
• Why a collapse of internal silos is occurring because of the creator economy.
• How to identify and if necessary, neutralize indie competitors.
• How to effectively partner with indie content creators or even create a network of them.

Paywalls. Meters. Lead gen. Content marketing. Affiliate sales. White papers. Podcasts. The ways to monetize content are too numerous to count. And typically, the only KPI is whether you hit a budget number. Here’s a roadmap for taking a more holistic approach and standardizing content-performance metrics.

You’ll learn:

• Engagement and ROI metrics for an array of content-monetization initiatives.
• Why you need an all-inclusive dashboard for measuring monetization.
• How to track not just topline performance, but internal efficiency.
• How to use KPIs in managing expectations with marketers.
• How to benchmark against broader industry trends.

Sixty percent or more of all searches now done by AI agents. If your content isn’t machine-readable and “cite-worthy,” you probably don’t exist in the information funnel. Your content and SEO teams need to adapt, and fast. Here’s what your strategy should be for the next 12 months and beyond.

You’ll learn:

• How to publish information that AI systems can discover.
• The specific structural characteristics of content that consistently shows up in AI summaries.
• How to establish authority and reputation across the platforms that AI tools pull from.
• Technical optimization to ensure crawlers access and process your content.
• How to measure success.

Refreshment and networking break

After two decades of disruption, they remain the primary marketing vehicle for most media operators. But monetization can be hit or miss and email newsletters have their own complex set of rules and best practices for maximizing revenue. Hear how targeted campaigns, share of voice, programmatic and more can help realize full potential.

You’ll learn:

• How successful publishers use a cascade of formats to produce meaningful uplift.
• How to eliminate internal friction points, such as manual ad production.
• How order management and CRM should interact for optimal ad delivery.
• Why you should activate first-party data in the front of the process and not merely report it afterwards.

Some media operators struggle to monetize podcasts. The production costs are high and sponsor revenue is hard to build unless the audience reach is large. Hear how one media company has cracked the code and built an audience of Forbes Global 2000 companies, with more than 5 million downloads. You’ll learn:

• Why Emerj opted to position itself as an audio-first media operator.
• How the company structures its team and approaches production criteria.
• How Emerj presents its value proposition to marketers.
• What other media channels support its audio business.