Media in Focus - Conversant Media

Your Name: Zac Zavos, Co-Founder of Conversant Media
Your Media Brands: Lost At E Minor (http://www.lostateminor.com/) and The Roar (http://www.theroar.com.au/)
Target Markets: Lost At E Minor reaches urban creatives who are interested, and interesting; The Roar reaches Australian sports fans who want to write and discuss sports opinion
Launched: LAEM: 2005; The Roar: end 2007
Staff: 3

See The Roar's MediaScope listing here

Can you give us an overview of your background and experience?
My background was in IT consulting; working for IBM and Deloitte before winding up at a great company, ThoughtWorks, where I led their marketing for a new products division.

Tell us how & why you started Conversant Media?
I had a weekend where both our sites crashed because of traffic. They were hobbies at that stage but their growth in traffic meant that they took up more and more of my time. (The Roar received about 18,000 unique visitors in its second month.)  I already knew a lot about publishing strong websites with great content and thought I'd be OK at monetising our traffic if I had the chance. I've always been entrepreneurial and believe in the phrase: you only live once. With a supportive wife, my business partner and brother on board, I decided to make the big punt and launch the sites as a business. We received angel investment funding shortly afterwards.

Can you give us an overview of your brands, their current market position and your forward plans?
Lost At E Minor is a fantastic site focused on popular culture. It's an eclectic mix of high and low brow culture and art. The content is all put together by my brother, who's a genius (I think!) in finding compelling content. About a quarter of a million people visit the site each month and we have a large social media following.  It's also a profitable site because the demographic we reach is very hard to access. We sell it ourselves in Australia and have a few US firms who bring in frequent campaigns in the States.

The Roar has taken a great spot in the Australian sports space: we focus on sports opinion rather than news (which is already well done). And we enable the lean-forward passion that sports fans experience at games by promoting robust debate across the site. Each month we publish about 200 fan written articles and over 17,000 comments by our audience. This is about the equivalent of War and Peace written each week on the site!  We've just secured Network Ten as an investor in The Roar.

We plan to continue to grow traffic and revenue across both sites; while also offering our other services such as consulting and our iPhone app solution for other publishers (we power Rugby Australia's iPhone app, for instance).

What benefits do you offer advertising buyers and marketers?
We believe publishers need to be absolutely compelling with how they work with media planners and advertisers. If we can over-deliver by 50%, we will. We'll traffic within 10 minutes. Whatever we can do to be compelling, we'll do. Because there's lots of choice out there and we understand this.  And of course, our sites reach unique and attractive audiences. They look professional and have unique content.

What is the best & worst thing about being an independent media publisher?
The best thing is that we just get stuck in and do what we think is the right thing to do. We try things out and see how they go. We operate off very low costs. We're agile and it's a great way to run a business.  

The worst thing is that we don't have support infrastructure or redundancies in place. Most things we do are done on the edge so we can't really afford to make mistakes or waste time on things. Sometimes good things come from having the luxury of allowing waste in a day. Google, for instance, allow 20% of time to be spent on interest projects. It's usually a waste, but also produces amazing products like Gmail.

Finally, we want to grow as a business, and it's harder in Australia where the big publishers dominate spend with media planners.

Tell us about your advertising sales structure?
We sell direct to media planners.  We don't do the heavy sell, but we find we get a lot of repeat activity and we find we are able to build solid relationships with a core group of planners who are comfortable booking outside of the major portals.

What are some things you have learned when dealing with advertising buyers?
You have to be genuine and know your stuff. The online media sales process could certainly be improved and we're always learning the best ways to engage planners and clients. We don't believe in the nag sell; so we focus more on knowing our sites and audiences and executing on every brief we receive.

Can you offer any advice to someone starting a new commercial media  business?
In my experience, it all turns on traffic; not just the volumes but the quality.  LAEM has a small audience, but it's just so hard to get to these guys, so it does very well in terms of campaigns. The Roar has engagement in spades.

And I'd probably try to get a business model like Groupon!  Unbelievable revenue model; you'd need to sell a lot of campaigns to get what they make each day...

Where do you get your advertising and marketing information from?
We read a lot; including Australian blogs like Mumbrella, Talking Digital etc as well as print publications like AdNews and international media and tech sites.  Our whole team is passionate about online media and where the various trends are leading.

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