In this episode, Sherry Weiss, Chief Marketing Officer of Dow Jones, discusses the company’s evolving marketing strategy and dual-market approach, serving both consumer and enterprise audiences through brands like The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. She explains how Dow Jones leverages Fortune 500 relationships to expand into enterprise markets.
The conversation delves into the importance of a unified brand experience, customer journey mapping and the role of data-driven marketing in refining paywall strategies and subscription growth. Weiss shares how her team is driving digital subscription growth through predictive analytics and personalized engagement tactics. She also discusses the success of the "It's Your Business" campaign, which broadens the perception of WSJ beyond financial news.
In conversation with host Ruairi Doyle, Weiss explores the power of event marketing, WSJ’s expansion on social platforms to reach younger audiences, and the role of AI in driving innovation and audience engagement. She emphasizes the need for adaptability in the rapidly changing media landscape.
Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts
Transcript
Ruairi Doyle
[0:00] Today we're joined by Sherry Weiss, the Chief Marketing Officer of Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, Investor's Business Daily and a suite of business intelligence tools and assets. As CMO, Sherry leads efforts to drive subscriptions, elevate and promote the brand, and optimize marketing across the entire Dow Jones ecosystem.
Sherry's career path makes her uniquely equipped for this role with a track record of success spanning consumer banking and e-commerce before joining Dow Jones. Sherry held senior marketing roles at Citi and served as head of customer relationship management and loyalty at Jet.com, an e-commerce disruptor acquired by Walmart in 2016. A double graduate of Georgetown University, Sherry holds degrees in foreign affairs and business – a perfect foundation for navigating the intersection of global business, media and customer engagement, which we'll be diving into today.
Sherry, you are very welcome to the PressPectives podcast. It's great to have you here. Where are you joining us from?
Sheryn Weiss
[1:07] Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here, and I am joining from New York, Manhattan.
Ruairi Doyle
[1:12] Manhattan, the city that never sleeps.
Sheryn Weiss
[1:15] Exactly.
Ruairi Doyle
[1:16] You operate across such a wide mix of brand touch points, subscriptions, events, enterprise tools and much more. Can you share some insight into Dow Jones' broader strategy for all of these channels?
Sheryn Weiss
[1:33] Sure. It's one of the unique aspects of the role which drew me to why I joined Dow Jones is that we have a very strong and well-known consumer business across our consumer properties: Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and Investor's Business Daily. But as well, we have a thriving go-to-market for enterprise products across our risk and energy verticals.
We are uniquely positioned in both marketplaces. And at Dow Jones, what we do is we provide trusted news, data and analytics to help people make decisions, whether that's within your business day as part of an organization or outside of the office, but with an understanding or a business mindset. And if we think about this from a media perspective, it gives us a unique advantage because as we are marketing our overall subscription products right – the Wall Street Journal, Barron's – we also have the ability to open up another go-to-market. So it's not just consumer, but you can actually go to market from an enterprise perspective.
What people often don't know is that, for example, we have relationships with 90% of the Fortune 500 banks globally. We are already doing business deeply in large corporations around the globe. And so that actually gives us an entry to sell our what were traditionally direct consumer products into enterprises as well. It differentiates us from our competitive set, but then it also allows us to provide the brand and the convening power of the Wall Street Journal to our client base over on the Dow Jones side of the house. So from a marketing perspective, we are able to move across the full go-to-market approach to selling Dow Jones holistically.
Ruairi Doyle
[3:26] And how do you ensure that each of these channels function as funnels themselves, but also complementing one another to drive growth and engagement?
Sheryn Weiss
[3:38] So there's a variety of ways, but obviously we need to make sure that our brand tells the story holistically for all of our brands cross all of our go-to-market strategies. Our messaging needs to be consistent. Our story needs to be consistent. When you are a professional and how you're engaging with a product, you don't really make a distinction between, I'm reading something on the subway on the way to work in the morning that is something that I pay for on my own, but then I go into the office and I get data or additional content through my business, but also powered by Dow Jones, right? It's all one in the same.
And we need to make sure that we're meeting our prospective clients, our current readers, our consumers where they are. So, a lot of it is around customer journey mapping, understanding customer needs and figuring out how to engage with them, where they're reading, where they're convening.
Our event strategy is really important with that. It's an interesting way to get your brand out into market, but also be engaging with clients and future readers in areas that make sense. We have a very strong event presence at, I would say, global functions. Davos, Khan, with our journal house. That's an example of where you can take two different go-to-market strategies but actually leverage them in the same place.
Ruairi Doyle
[4:54] Okay, we will dive into those strategies a bit more in time. I also like to learn a little bit about people's paths into publishing. Your two degrees from Georgetown – a bachelor's in foreign affairs and a master's in business – they almost seem to have predicted your role with the Wall Street Journal and qualities that are very, very relevant in today's world in 2025.
Sheryn Weiss
[5:20] Yes, you know, it's funny if somebody had asked me when I was in undergrad if this is a role that I would be in, I actually thought I was going to be Secretary of State, so this was a bit of a divergence.
But I think over the course of my career, one of the things that has always interested me is different cultures, different backgrounds, different ways of engaging with people. I also come from a family of entrepreneurs, actually. And so, after I graduated undergrad, I gravitated more towards communications and customer relations and then decided it was time to seek out a business degree. And so that's what naturally moved me into marketing. I think it was a great combination of both.
Now that I'm in media for a global news organization, I can sometimes lean on my very early training at the School of Foreign Service, rarely, but sometimes.
Ruairi Doyle
[6:15] And now that you've been in the publishing world for over two years, what lessons or learnings or strategies have you found that have been transferable to take from consumer banking and e-commerce? And how do they shape your approach at Dow Jones?
Sheryn Weiss
[6:30] Yeah, there are a lot of hard skills that are very transferable, both from consumer financial services as well as e-commerce into my current role.
You know, a large portion of my remit is driving the subscriptions business. The largest portion of our subscriptions business is a direct-to-consumer model. If you think about consumer financial services – and I grew up in the credit card space – it has a very similar recurring revenue dynamic to a subscriptions product. And so how you acquire customers, how you build long-term relationships with them, how you deepen relationships with them through product development and value-added services and how you measure that are all quite similar. And e-commerce is very much the same in some respects. You're not seeing the same level of recurring revenue like a subscription, but how you build an e-commerce business, how you look to acquire customers and then how you look to drive repeat sticky behavior. Again, very similar types of strategies and skills that you put into place.
The other interesting thing is if you think about the work that we're doing at Dow Jones, we have a very, obviously, strong base that I came into, but the idea is what has driven growth in the past in this area is not what's going to drive growth in the future, right? We all know the ecosystem and the media landscape is rapidly evolving. And so, in most of my roles, both at Citi as well as JET, the focus was on transformation and what you need to do to drive transformation in a large-scale financial services organization that's heavily regulated. And then what you need to do to drive transformation or actually build from scratch in a startup are two very different things. But, interestingly enough, I've needed both of them to drive what we need to do forward at Dow Jones and how you take, I would say, tried and true strategies and tweak them for the future, I learned very much from Citi and scaling for growth, but then also being able to respond in a scrappy manner. In some cases, you know, test and learn and move forward oftentimes without all of the necessary information to make a big play bet; I brought that in from JET. And so, I think that's been helpful in how we've evolved the team over the last few years.
Ruairi Doyle
[8:51] You cover many of the similarities across the backbone of marketing across those industries. Anything surprising for you moving into the publishing world and the dynamics of a newsroom environment or anything different to what you've been used to in the past?
Sheryn Weiss
[9:07] Yeah, it's a great question. And you nailed it specifically with how you drive a business forward and then considering a newsroom. In all of my previous roles, I was selling a product and oftentimes as the leader of growth in that product, you are able to mold it and shift it and change it in the way that you think you need to to drive commercial viability. And what's really different and frankly exciting, though, about what we're doing here is we are here in service of our newsroom. And what we sell is unbiased journalism, right? And so, there is that wall between commercial and editorial that needs to be there.
And so, it's an interesting place to be in where you're building a strategy, you're driving growth, and the product that you are actually selling is editorial, right? And so, it's not how to work within those confines, those parameters. It's exciting. And the nice thing about it is I joined around the same time as the Editor-in-Chief of the Wall Street Journal, Emma Tucker, and so we were both new in role and relooking at how the teams could interact with each other to better drive growth for the organization. And we've set up a really fantastic operating model. We just launched a new brand campaign. The editorial team was at the table for that. They had a lot of, I would say, input and hands-on development in that process and how we approach our day-to-day strategy oftentimes has the two teams talking with each other frequently, which is great.
Ruairi Doyle
[10:40] I want to talk about the new brand platform. It was a major launch last year, as you mentioned. “It's Your Business” does a great job at spotlighting and connecting journalism coming from the Wall Street Journal's editorial team. Can you tell us a little bit about the goals and the vision of the campaign and how it's shaping the way audiences engage with the journal?
Sheryn Weiss
[11:02] Sure. I joined the organization now about two and a half years ago, and one of the first things I did when I came in was really take a relook at everything that the team was doing from top to bottom. So organizational structure, overall strategy, agency partnerships, marketing technology partnerships. And then one of the areas that we took a dive into was a relook at our brand platform and the first place we started was customer insights. So how do our readers see us and how did they connect with the previous brand platform as well as, and more importantly, how do our growth audiences see us, the people that we think should be reading us, but they're not. And then how do they connect with that, the previous brand platform? And our previous brand platform was “Trust Your Decisions”. And it was a strong platform, but I think one of the things that came out of the early customer research we were doing was trust is quite important, but trust is considered baseline.
What we were hearing from our customer base and our prospect base was, you know, really don't tell us to trust you, that should be baseline. You have to give us a reason why to trust you. And so that's when we decided it was time to relook at the platform and figure out what the future was. And we landed on “It's Your Business” for a variety of reasons; it's resonated quite strongly. Number one, what sets us apart, the Wall Street Journal is we are journalists and we tell stories through the lens of business. Everything that we do has that lens on it. And interestingly enough, when you were speaking with our growth audiences, oftentimes they were viewing us as very much like only Wall Street or only deep financial news and business was not for them. But the other insight that we gathered was business impacts everybody, whether they know it or not, right? Business impacts government policy. Business impacts your local community. Business impacts prices. And whether or not you are involved in business, it does impact you.
And also, how you define business is much wider than what our name, perhaps, provides to people. It's much wider than Wall Street. And so that's how we ended up on the “It's Your Business” platform. Because it really means two things. It's what we do. We're journalists telling stories through the lens of business. But business is your business.
And so the brand platform as it comes to life is really focused on leaning into our journalism and putting our journalism at the forefront and connecting future readers and current readers to those stories. And really, in some cases, getting them to give us a second look because they didn't actually recognize that what we write is of interest to them.
Ruairi Doyle
[13:47] Yeah, I have some examples of the creatives in front of me. Make hot dog economy your business. Make renters rights your business. And I can't help but feel the emotional kind of connection to that. Actually, you know, renters rights, that's important for me. I really like the campaign.
Sheryn Weiss
[14:05] You know, one of the fun things about the campaign is that these are actual articles that we wrote, but we also were able to bring them out into really unexpected experiences. Hot Dog Economy actually was out of home placement on a hot dog truck in New York City. It was fun to be able to be a little bit more creative with this campaign.
Ruairi Doyle
[14:25] Yeah, very tangible. I'm curious also, you know, how have you guys updated or evolved the paywall strategy in combination or in alignment with the new brand platform in the last while?
Sheryn Weiss
[14:38] Yeah, so one of the other areas that we're leaning into from a transformation perspective is how do we unlock predictive analytics to accelerate growth for our business? Again, I mentioned I come from a consumer financial services background. Everything is heavily analytical, model based, and we're really trying to unlock that here at Dow Jones.
One area where we have found success is in our paywall strategy. We run a dynamic paywall. It's really you know, how we think about it, how we think about that experience, it's very much based on the personas that we're engaging with. So, we're hoping to get to a place of an experience based on a customer as opposed to a segment. But it is all very much model based and something that we rapidly experiment around.
Ruairi Doyle
[15:30] Interesting. And according to your most recent quarterly report, subscription numbers are up. Dow Jones' consumer products are up 9% over the last year to 5.9 million and the Wall Street Journal subscriptions have increased by 4% to nearly 4.3 million. The strategies seem to be paying off and yet this subscription business is a perennial challenge for media companies, for publishers, for streaming platforms. How are you guys sustaining this type of momentum in such a competitive market today?
Sheryn Weiss
[16:04] Obviously, we're laser focused on engaging with new growth audiences and finding them where they are. That's the impetus behind our brand replatform and frankly, all of our marketing against our prospect populations. And really also trying to test into new places to find new readers. How are we thinking about alternative platforms? But I think the other really important thing to think about is once you've acquired somebody, you can't grow a business if you're not retaining them. And that's an area where we're laser focused on building habitual engagement from the first time that you are interacting with us all the way through to, most of our customers come on in a promotional price, most of our readers, and making sure that we are driving them to stay past that promotional price. Everything that we do has focused on driving lifetime value. So, it's not a short-term strategy but making sure that we're keeping and engaging customers over the long haul.
One of the things that's really great about this is it's not just on marketing to do that. In past roles, it's very much marketing-led effort, but this is the majority of engagement activities are run through clearly the newsroom. And it is a, if you think about media, it's a product that updates real time on the daily. So there's so much that you can do to keep bringing people back and engaging with your content. We're always looking to improve retention, but we're quite pleased with how we're retaining our customers, which is helping us drive that growth.
I think the other thing is once you have a customer, how do you deepen your relationship with them? How do you help them meet their needs outside of the product they're currently on? And so in the last two years, we have first tested into and now launched a new upsell product called WSJ Plus in which we are packaging together all of our publications, the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and Investor's Business Daily to provide folks who are really looking to understand the financial universe from all perspectives, a holistic experience to do that. And that's what I talk about deepening engagement and expanding value through that lens is giving further products and further value to people who are already deeply engaged with you.
Ruairi Doyle
[18:22] So the previous industries that you worked in are very data-driven. You mentioned some of the frameworks that you've been bringing to the business or enhancing or elevating in the business, like predictive analytics, model-based approaches. I'm curious, yourself as a CMO and your leadership team and the marketing org, how often are you looking at these metrics to make decisions?
Sheryn Weiss
[18:45] Every day. Every day and in some cases by the hour. I mentioned from a subscriptions perspective, we have two different go-to-markets. There's an enterprise go-to-market strategy, but on the consumer side of the house, we are a performance marketing organization. So when I talk about, we're looking at metrics daily, our North Star, as I mentioned, is we are looking to drive sustained revenue growth in our subscriptions business. And we're doing that through maximizing lifetime value of our reader base.
But there's a variety of other metrics that help ladder up into delivering that overall goal. So again, we're looking on the daily at acquisition conversions, how our orders are doing, we’re laser focused on retaining customers, so stick rates across all of our different cohorts, how people are engaging with the product or with our publications. And there's a variety of indications and measurements that we look at from average active days to what areas of the site are they engaging with? Are they on the app? Are they not? And then obviously, just overall customer satisfaction. So if you look in, you know, coming out of our customer service organization, what are our customers saying from a sentiment perspective?
Ruairi Doyle
[19:58] Back to some of your other channels, such as events, you mentioned earlier, the Journal House at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Cannes Festival. How do these events, how do they work within the mix of what you do? Are they largely for brand awareness and retention or is it about deepening the relationship with attendees at these events.
Sheryn Weiss
[20:21] Fantastic thing about our event business, in my mind, as the Chief Marketing Officer, it serves a dual purpose for us. It's a very important purpose. They are brand building, right? We believe that we have the ability to convene the movers and shakers of the world. And we have the ability to gather folks in some of the most important global events. And that serves us for a variety of reasons. Number one: brand building. It helps drive our brand recognition. It helps us engage with our current clients and our future clients. From a marketing perspective, we're able to open up the suite of offerings that Dow Jones and the Journal are able to provide. We're able to build the brand, engage with our current clients and future clients.
And then also, we've just relaunched our leadership offering, the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute. And that's another area where we're focused on continuing to deepen our relationships with global leaders and really help provide them the information and communities and data and analytics that they need to drive their businesses forward.
Ruairi Doyle
[21:24] So let's talk about trust. You mentioned earlier in some of the customer insights, the framing that trust is a baseline. I want to take a moment to unpack the word trust as it's both table stakes for media brands, but also increasingly under scrutiny. How do you see the Wall Street Journal's role in this context and how are you evolving your approach, not just to maintain authority, but to actively deepen your connection with readers in such a challenging news media climate?
Sheryn Weiss
[21:57] Yeah, I think it's one of the biggest challenges of the moment because as I think we're seeing daily, audiences are looking for news and information in untraditional places. What people think about as news is very different than what people have traditionally thought about news. People are seeking information more readily on social media or through content creators. We're also being faced in an environment where people are just deeply cynical and it's quite polarized.
And to that point around the research that we did where people are like, trust is a table stake, but don't tell us to trust you. I think for us, where we're coming at this from a marketing perspective, I know this is where the newsroom comes at it, is what we do on the daily is around driving trust. And so one of the areas why we decided from a brand perspective that it was critical to lean into our journalism and put that at the forefront of all of our marketing is that we believe our journalism speaks for itself. And the more that prospective reader or a current reader engages with it, they can make their own decision on whether or not the information that they are getting from the Journal as well as our other publications, whether or not it is fitting the bill for them from a trust perspective.
And we believe it is, right? If you look at brand sentiment, the Wall Street Journal continues to perform at the top of most trusted brands. We're looking to continue that.
Ruairi Doyle
[23:20] And are you observing any shifts in younger audiences and their perception of trust in credible news sources?
Sheryn Weiss
[23:28] You know, we keep a close eye on that. I think we have a code to crack around future audiences and younger audiences and how they think about where they get their information. It's important for us to meet our readers where they're at and how do we engage and frankly monetize alternative channels that are outside of our owned and operated.
We've had a lot of success so far with our YouTube channel. I believe it has one of the largest followings of a newspaper YouTube presence. It's a quite active community. The newsroom is making incredible progress with our TikTok channel. And these are the areas in which we're looking to start engaging with younger audiences and bringing them into the fold.
Ruairi Doyle
[24:13] Trying to bring this back to your broader strategy. What are you excited about at the moment and what trends are you keeping your eye on?
Sheryn Weiss
[24:21] It wouldn't be a conversation, right, if I don't bring up AI. In all honesty, I think the advent of Gen AI and the explosion of what is happening right now can be a bit disconcerting, but it also can be quite exciting. And we have chosen to feel excited about it.
There's a lot happening. It's disrupting everything from the referral ecosystem to how we're working internally as well. How you write a brief, you can leverage a chatbot very easily to brief in your creative team. There's a lot of exciting work there. How we're thinking about AI, we've been leaning into that space when we think about predictive modeling for quite some time, right? AI has been around for a while, but we believe that there are, from a marketing perspective, there's an enormous amount of opportunity to think through how we can rapidly scale our creative strategy, for instance, leveraging new and different Gen AI tools. How do we lean in and find new audiences when you think about the AI universe? How are we engaging with chatbots, for instance, and how are we using that to drive audiences over to our ongoing operated properties?
So it's exciting. I think there's a lot of places where you can test into, it’s quite innovative. And it's also something that you can unleash on your team and have them come back with really interesting ideas. It's not something that you require just a small, specialized group to lean into.
Ruairi Doyle
[25:45] Sherry, it's been an incredibly insightful conversation, getting to know a little bit more about Dow and the Wall Street Journal and what you guys are up to. Before we wrap, we always like to end on a little bit of a colorful note.
Sherry Weiss
[25:59] Okay.
Ruairi Doyle
[25:59] Your career path has not only brought you into the world of publishing, but into other industries. I'm curious, in a parallel universe, if you weren't a marketer in consumer banking, e-commerce or now publishing, what alternative career might you be doing?
Sheryn Weiss
[26:18] Very good question. I love to travel. If I had my druthers, I would be a nomad on the road all the time.
I'm a terrible planner though, so I don't think I could do something like plan for other people. But it could be some sort of interesting, I don't know what the career could be, but if there was a way that I can make money traveling and I don't know, maybe I would be the female Anthony Bourdain. That could be an interesting thing. But again, I feel like that kind of happened.
The other area I could do is, I don't know, move to a farm and rescue a bunch of dogs. That would be fun as well.
Ruairi Doyle
[26:54] All noble causes.
Sheryn Weiss
[26:56] Exactly. Maybe in my second act.
Ruairi Doyle
[26:58] Sherry, thank you so much for joining us today.
Sheryn Weiss
[27:01] Thank you so much for having me. Really enjoyed the conversation.
Ruairi Doyle
Well, that's a wrap for our latest episode of the Perspectives podcast. Thank you very much, Sherry, for joining us. And thank you all so much for tuning in. We'll be bringing you new episodes every month, each one featuring a different leader in the world of publishing. So be sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube to catch the latest.
So be sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube to catch the latest. Bye for now.
