The publisher’s digital marketing director tells Tim Healey how AI and BookTok are reshaping the route from recommendation to purchase, why Penguin’s 90-year-old brand still matters and where personalization goes next.
You’ve worked across e-commerce, telecoms and now publishing. What were the key moves that led you to Penguin Random House?
I spent my early career working for an e-commerce startup in Toronto Canada, spent some time in tech, and moved to a boutique digital agency where I spent four years working on digital projects and strategy with some of the world’s biggest banks, pharmaceutical companies and telco brands.
Four years into that role, I was approached by a headhunter about joining a telecommunications startup in Qatar that Vodafone was building. It was the right time for me to make a significant life change. I learned so much over the six years I spent in Qatar, leading digital there.
I was looking for a change after those six years and was connecting with some headhunters, and from Qatar I went to Digicel from there, which was based in Jamaica to run central digital marketing for 32 markets across Central America, South Pacific, and in the Caribbean.
Then my wife and I said, “Okay, we want to settle down, we want to start a family.” I took some time off and we decided that we would move to the UK. At that point I rejoined Vodafone in a consulting role. I set up the digital marketing practice for Vodafone Partner Markets.
I was traveling two, three weeks a month, and I had a young daughter, and Covid hit, and I had an opportunity to spend a lot more time, I was feeling kind of guilty anyway, so I started to look around a little bit, and I saw this opportunity at Penguin, and I applied for it. Shifting from telecoms to publishing was completely outside of my experience, completely outside of my comfort zone.
I thought this was a unique and interesting challenge. In telecoms, the products are largely a commodity, and with Penguin I have 60,000 product pages, a huge breadth of diverse products, and every product has a different audience! This is one of the most complex marketing challenges in any consumer business. I thought, look, maybe I don’t have the same budgets, but setting up a data driven marketing engine to connect those two things up, was an exciting prospect.
What is the offer at Penguin Random House?
Penguin Random House is one of the world’s leading trade publishers and home to one of the most recognized brands in publishing. Our mission is simple: we make books for everyone, because we believe a book can change anyone.
Every year, we publish and sell 750 million books across print, ebooks and audio, spanning every genre, age and stage of life. From a baby’s first board book to children’s favorites, young adult fiction, bestselling novels, cookery, history, memoir and the classics, we publish books that accompany readers throughout their lives.
Our authors include Richard Osman, Lee Child, Margaret Atwood, Jamie Oliver, Haruki Murakami and Bernardine Evaristo, alongside the iconic Penguin Classics that generations of readers have grown up with. Chances are, if you look at your bookshelf, you’ll find a Penguin book on it.
What’s coming up for you and your marketing team over the next year?
Our focus is always on connecting readers with books and authors. Over the past four years we’ve taken the company through a digital marketing transformation. We have focused on bringing in the right skills, the right data, the right marketing technology, all with an eye on improving how we engage with consumers through campaigns and ‘always on’ communication.
There are three things this year that are top of mind for me but really they all relate to discovery and adapting to consumer behaviors at pace. The first is how AI is changing consumer discovery journeys. I think it’s a really interesting time as we see fundamental changes across discovery, advertising, and purchase. The most immediate and actionable focus, as we’ve seen search traffic decline, is on understanding and driving visibility across AI platforms. We are focused on new content strategies across owned, earned, and social platforms and increasingly thinking about both human and machine audiences.
It’s a time of constant adaptation but surprisingly unlike traditional SEO, if you get the content strategy right, tactics can have an immediate impact on visibility. Beyond consumer-driven discovery, I think there are some game-changing opportunities emerging. For the first time I’m starting to see ways that we can use AI to scale product recommendations, truly reaching an individual recommendation, without the need for complex decision engines. This was the promise of marketing for the last 10 years but for the first time I can see it actually working. Some of the AI paid media capability has improved over the last six months and our tests show that it is becoming more adept at finding paths to purchase that manual campaign setup was unable to achieve.
The second focus area is on building our customer relationships. We built this marketing engine over the past four years and now we need to scale it. We need to grow our first-party data, to fuel better engagement across all of our channels, so that we operate at scale.
The third thing that I’m excited about is discovery commerce. For us that means testing TikTok shop and really understanding how we can use algorithmic discovery to meet customer needs.
TikTok Shop is completely changing discovery for many industries, and in particular books. In a traditional discovery journey, a trigger, like an ad, or an email, or a display in retail, prompted a consumer to actively search for a book.
TikTok shop is completely different. The book, as a recommendation, gets presented to you based on an algorithm that understands your needs and your interests. It finds you.
By plugging in to this type of discovery, we see potential in partnering with influencers to help us reach new and diverse audiences. There’s a lot of testing that we’re going to undertake in that space over the next 12 months as we shape our offering and grow partnerships.
Readers now find books through other readers on TikTok. Above all, how has ‘BookTok’ changed your marketing?
BookTok is undeniable. The model of publisher-to-retailer-to-reader as the main funnel of influence has shifted to reader-to-reader. I mean people always have recommended books to one another, but the scale is different with BookTok.
This has grown niche communities and fandoms like never before. These communities have an upstream impact on the types of books and the types of content that we’re acquiring. We think a lot about how we can reach audiences that may not necessarily know that a book is an answer for a query.
TikTok recently announced that it is now the third biggest book sales channel in the UK. For us, it is about connecting with consumers wherever they are and an important part of this is working with and empowering influencers to help us find and reach these audiences, interest groups, and fandoms.
You publish thousands of titles a year, each with its own reader and own moment. How do you market at that scale without every book beginning from nothing?
In our business it’s a real challenge and as I was saying, given the diverse nature of the content we produce, the volume of new titles we produce every year, and rich back catalog from 90 years of publishing, it is one of the most unique consumer marketing challenges. The reality is that we cannot manually market thousands of books, but personalization and marketing tech can change that equation.
We just completed a four-year digital transformation with the goal to own and understand our own data, fully utilize our marketing technology, and inhouse the skills to retain learning and build a marketing engine based on the needs of our authors, brands and books.
This is the foundation needed to drive scale across such a diverse catalog of products. Based on this foundation we have started to implement personalized recommendations across our channels and we are seeing exponential increases in engagement from personalization. We are personalizing based on author, genre, interest area, and various combinations of behavioral signals and we are starting to see some very promising new capability from the AI built into the marketing platforms that could truly deliver an individually personalized offer.
As AI capability expands and all companies get access, the differentiator will be in our first-party data and the deep understanding our teams have to utilize that data so the foundational principles are critical to our success.
Penguin is one of the most recognized names in the world. Yet people buy the author and the story, perhaps thinking about the publisher secondarily. What do you think the Penguin brand actually does for a reader choosing a book?
90 years ago, Penguin was founded on the principle that really good books should be accessible to everyone. Allen Lane, our founder, described it as “bought as easily and casually as a packet of cigarettes” to drive that accessibility.
Today, not every book is branded in the Penguin tricolor, but the logo is a stamp of quality which is increasingly important as AI discovery grows. We can see that AI platforms recognize and reward our track record and as a result, our books, authors, and brands show up more often than our competitors.
As the use of AI increases, that stamp of quality increases in value. You’re buying a book that’s published by Penguin, you know it’s going to be the best of the best.
In this context, all our authors benefit from being part of the largest consumer-facing brand in publishing. Our top authors attract larger volumes of readers and can act as a gateway to expose their audiences to new and emerging authors. In turn our new and emerging authors attract new, diverse audiences that can increase exposure for our popular authors so the brand is at the center of a nice flywheel.
As a brand, growing future readers is important and so driving social impact working with schools, libraries and partnering with the government via the publishing association to grow across all audiences is something we invest in as a brand.
Is there an AI x human sweet spot?
We’re champions for human creativity. So when it comes to the content of our books, human creativity is at the center of that. We don’t see any technology as a substitute for human imagination. Full stop. Where I think there’s a sweet spot is on the support side and the marketing side and this is where we can innovate responsibly. Specifically, for me this is, how we can find insights and connections to offer the right book for the readers’ needs and wants?
When thinking about teams and the future of marketing, there’s an analogy I heard about the recipe versus the chef. The recipe is the list of steps that you’ll go through to execute a campaign and the chef understands the nuance, the audience, the objective of what you’re trying to achieve. My view is that the way things are evolving, we’ll need to develop that nuance, taste, and audience understanding along with the access and ability to cut through vanity metrics to ensure that the recipe the AI is executing is working.
We have to protect those skills and crucially at the same time we have to understand the data, what the machines are doing, because the ‘worst case scenario’ is the AI does something wrong, but nobody knows it. Having an overarching chef view and an understanding of the data gives you the ability to be able to guide the systems.
The challenge that I am thoughtful about now is, how do I develop team members into chefs if they don’t have a period of time working through the recipe to get there? So I’m really thoughtful about training and learning cultures and how I can create that within my team. I do think that there is a sweet spot, but we need to figure out exactly where it is and then train people to excel in those areas.
How important is creative risk-taking when marketing and publishing?
Our whole business is about risk. We take risks on the authors that we acquire. Is the debut author going to be the next James Patterson? We don’t know, so we take a risk every day. In a marketing context, I often refer to Rory Sutherland’s book ‘Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity’. This was published in 2019, three years before the AI hype cycle kicked in in 2022, but I think it should be required reading for all marketers.
Data-driven marketing is critical and in scenarios where data confidently tells us what you want, then perhaps our communications don’t need to be super-creative but creating awareness and demand for a new product or a new idea requires cut through. And cut through is based on a hot cognition, that emotional connection is really important. We know that is not always data driven: it is a mix of data and the magic of creative risk taking.
Could you tell us about a customer research discovery you’ve made during your career that you found surprising?
When I was with Vodafone Qatar, I went there with many assumptions that were based on my experiences in western markets. Given the profile of the consumers in Qatar, I started to build digital journeys that were focused on high-value customers and saving time: creating experiences for people who make a lot of money are time poor. But we didn’t get a whole lot of usage and penetration from the digital products we were building.
With 20/20 hindsight, we should have done our research. We learned the hard way that high-value customers actually had more time than we had thought. In Qatar, high-value customers wanted to have an in-person, white glove experience and they didn’t mind spending the time to physically go to stores.
This research had us shift away from many of the activities and the audiences that we were focusing on, and we built them different journeys that answered their needs. At first, it was really shocking for us to discover that actually we need to create a VIP, in person, account-style experience for high value customers – but it was also really interesting, and a lesson that I won’t forget.
Could you tell us about a challenge you’re facing right now, and your advice for other marketers facing that challenge?
There’s so much change happening right now that adapting to the pace of change is a challenge that we’re going to be experiencing for the foreseeable future.
Unlike the medium- to long-term challenges from change that businesses have faced before, the short term is now also uncertain as the changes in consumer behavior and the technology driving those changes are pushing the pace.
The biggest challenge is trying to make decisions on investments, team structures, where to focus our resources, where to focus our time as things continue to evolve at a pace.
What if the technology that’s going to be released by Claude next week is just going to be a game changer? What if that new tech platform we signed up to is now obsolete? It’s difficult to confidently pull the trigger when you can’t predict short-term outcomes.
I think the key is setting up teams so that they operate on agile principles – like pushing decision-making down as close to the consumer as possible is important. Owning your own data and technology and not outsourcing it to third parties is increasingly important. In this context there is a lot of value in proof of concepts and building in agility through composable marketing technology models over buying into a full ecosystem.
Lastly, I would say that the FOMO is real. There is pressure to sign up for the newest game-changing platform but as leaders it’s important not to get enamored by the tech and focus on the business need. It’s OK to say no if the business or the team are not ready to fully utilize the platform.
Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps you to make a great team?
Try to think of your team as a community: what are the resources, what are the things that the team need to thrive to achieve their goals and to feel safe as a unit.
Sometimes, making the right decisions aren’t always the popular decisions, especially in the short term. That requires shifting resources in different ways and changing teams. This all needs clear communication and shared ownership with an eye on the community as a whole.
In my experience, the most significant things I’ve learned about leadership have come from mistakes I’ve made. I think about the times that I haven’t got that right, and that’s typically when, as Mike Tyson once said, ‘everyone has a game plan to get punched in the face.’
When the business-as-usual avalanche comes in on the Monday morning, or I’m not meeting the KPIs the way I thought we would, that punch in the face prevents me from being able to see the big picture of the community, and those are the times I’ve got it wrong. I have learned that maintaining that helicopter view on the success of the team as a community is what creates those high performing teams.
Your question from the last senior marketer that I interviewed is, when budgets tighten, what should marketers protect at all costs?
The things that you offer that are valued the most by the largest group of your most committed customers should be protected at all costs. You have to understand what value you’re providing to customers right now. Really understanding where your strength is right now is key and sometimes that means that you have to make a tough and deliberate decision between two really good things. It’s easy to lose sight of your highest value connections as new channels, audiences, and technology emerge. Keeping an eye on audience volume and impact should be protected while investigating new territory and strategies.
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer when I interview them?
How do you see marketing roles and skills evolving over the next 18 to 24 months and the next five years? How are roles, learning and skills evolving? That’s two questions. Sorry.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…?
It’s that change is constant, and the velocity of change is increasing even more. The one thing that hasn’t changed is that marketing is about connecting with people and adding value to their lives. So the goal is to understand your audiences while the environment continues to change. To survive in marketing, I think that you need to think about difficult problems as interesting puzzles to solve and adventures to be on, all of which can be addressed by learning. Thus, the job of marketing is to learn and to get better, personally and also as a team in service of that customer connection.
This interview is brought to you in partnership with Worth Your While – an independent creative agency based in Copenhagen, working globally. Named one of The Drum’s Indie Agency Top 100, WYW exists on the belief that time is humanity’s most valuable resource, and that the only ideas worth making are ones that earn it. You might die tomorrow. Make today worth your while. https://wyw.agency/
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