The Wall Street Journal has long been a committed data-driven marketer, tapping site usage and its first-party data to inform its subscription efforts. For one of the Journal’s more recent brand initiatives, “Read Yourself Better,” a campaign challenging readers to go beyond the easy answers and echo-chamber certitude of our overloaded media culture, they began with the insight that Journal readers use its content to fuel progress in their personal and professional lives.
“Read Yourself Better” staked its claim on the theme of self-determination – only by reading past the memes, hashtags and algorithmically-selected news stories that populate our media feeds can we make better decisions, informed by trusted facts. It’s a message that’s resonated, with the campaign helping the Journal drive one of its largest sales periods on record, and helping maintain its stature as America’s most trusted newspaper.
Colm is a brand and creative strategist with 15 years of experience building brand-driven businesses around the world. He has a proven track record of pushing creativity at scale, particularly for complex clients.
He joined The & Partnership this year from McCann New York, where he was also CSO, overseeing a team of 60 across all strategy disciplines, pitching and winning three pieces of business in just a few months.
Prior to McCann he ran the strategy group at Droga5 New York, where he was responsible for making sure all its brands were driven by culturally-resonant, future-proof strategies that guide and inspire the total brand experience, not just communications.
In his current role Karl is responsible for driving subscription growth at Dow Jones for the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barron’s. As the GM of membership he leads a team of 45+ responsible for global new subscriber acquisition, engagement, retention, and data science. Karl and his team have been central to the subscription growth at Dow Jones, playing a key role in the transformation to a subscription dominated business. Prior to Dow Jones Karl worked at News UK helping to grow the Times of London subscriber base and launching a new subscription business (Sun+). Collectively Karl has 17 years of media and publishing experience having started his career at WPP (Mindshare and Mediacom) in comms strategy roles. Karl is based out of New York City with Helen, his wife of 6 years and Samuel (3).
