Media Briefing: Publishers rewire sales teams for the outcomes era 

This week’s Media Briefing will explore how publishers are reshaping their sales teams, where client success or client services employees are getting more involved in the sales process to assist with more complex, direct deals.

• How sales teams are shifting to support
IAC rebrands to People Inc., CNN is beating subscriber targets, and more.

How sales teams are shifting to support

Publishers have steadily shifted away from traditional ad sales models toward structures built around outcomes, performance and custom partnerships. 

There’s been a slow but steady flip within publishers’ sales teams, where client success or client services employees are getting more involved in the sales process. 

At USA Today Co., about one-third of the sales team are active sellers, while the other two-thirds are related to sales enablement and customer success outcomes, according to Jason Taylor, USA Today Co. CRO. He said there are still dedicated programmatic sellers, but many on its teams can sell direct-sold programmatic at a more premium rate.

The sales team has been “realigned to support outcomes and performance as much as selling itself,” Taylor said. 

This lines up with the way agency holding companies are shifting the traditional agency compensation model. WPP is pitching a model that ties compensation to business outcomes – like sales and brand performance – rather than billable hours worked.

Having a dedicated team of sellers and client success employees for larger accounts has improved campaign performance at USA Today Co., said Taylor. “As more and more clients rely on us for full funnel solution delivery and performance metrics matter more and more, lead generation, etcetera it’s become a necessity to deliver those outcomes and update in real time the performance of our campaigns for our clients,” he added. 

This shift has also slowly taken place over the past few years at The Wall Street Journal, where sellers now make up just a quarter of the sales team, according to CRO Josh Stinchcomb.

The rest of the team is a quarter client success, a quarter custom studio and a quarter product marketing and strategy, he added. The client success team is mainly focused on the post-sale project, campaign and account management functions that are more client-facing, he said. The Journal’s ads business is “almost entirely direct,” Stinchcomb said.

It’s a similar composition at Hearst, where a quarter of the publisher’s sales team are sellers and the rest are client services, marketing or account strategy and creative studio teams (as well as people focused on social media, agencies and programmatic). 

In the past year, Hearst has combined the pre- and post- sales roles into one account manager role, Hearst CRO Lisa Ryan Howard said. 

Hearst is in the process of hiring seven more people to its client services team, due to the growth in Hearst’s advertising business and increase in video output, she added. Howard said Hearst has a “much bigger” direct sales team compared to its programmatic team as the publisher’s direct business has grown, though she declined to share specifics. 

The Wall Street Journal has organized its sales team in the past year around industries or sectors, such as financial services or luxury, from the sales process through ad ops, Stinchcomb said. These “pods” helped to create expertise around a particular industry, he said. 

A big driver has been the move away from impression-based or display advertising to more custom content, publishing execs told Digiday. 

Events, for example, have become a growing part of publishers’ businesses. A recent Digiday+ Research report found that events revenue has overtaken subscriptions as a top revenue source this year.

The WSJ now has a group of event moderators in the sales team, which didn’t exist a few years ago. “The main push behind this was the increased complexity of our campaigns and programs,” said Stinchcomb. “The percentage of our revenue that is now connected to custom content creation or event activations has meant that you need someone who can work with clients,” he said. If sellers had to coordinate with a client’s event, content and communications teams to prepare them for an event, “they’d be in 50 meetings,” he said.

“We realized we had to free the sales team from that kind of function so they could be out there selling,” Stinchcomb said.

Howard said Hearst needed larger, more structured sales teams due to the publisher’s increasingly complex advertising business that spans multiple platforms, including Apple News and YouTube. Advertisers now expect large publishers like Hearst to report on performance in real time, both on and off platform, which requires more client services people, she said.

Win rates and renewal rates are both “consistently going up” since the reorganization of Hearst’s sales team, Howard said.

“The pendulum has shifted,” said a publishing exec during a closed-door town hall session at last month’s Digiday Publishing Summit. “Five or ten years ago, you would see a sales team that might be 80% salespeople and 20% support – whether that’s ad ops, marketing, custom studio – and that’s completely flipped. So the people that are doing the selling are often the marketers, are often the support, and the post-sale process is often more important… We put so much more emphasis on the actual team itself, and not just that particular sales process.”

The publishing exec said their sales team is behaving more like “an extended marketing agency” for brands, requiring more people on the client support side of the sales team.

AI accelerating this evolution

This shift in the makeup of publishers’ sales teams is only accelerating as AI becomes more deeply integrated into their businesses. As AI tools help publishers respond faster to clients and improve campaign performance, it frees up even more people to focus on client services.

The WSJ is rolling out in beta some AI tools for plan creation, with full testing expected to begin in the second half of this year, per Stinchcomb. WSJ’s sales team is already using AI for prepping for meetings with clients, like background research, he said. 

Stinchcomb said using AI on manual tasks has impacted what skills he seeks. He now wants sales staff to behave more like “investigative sellers” who can get information before others and get ahead of RFPs. That means he looks more for skills like the ability to form deep, high-level relationships and presentation capabilities.

“It really sharpens what you look for in a salesperson. That’s going to be the thing we need humans to do. So we need people that are great at that, and it’s less important if they’re really organized and diligent and good researchers,” Stinchcomb said.

USA Today Co. is using AI to analyze a campaign that performed well and apply it across multiple locations in the U.S. – such as a cosmetic dentist account in Florida to a cosmetic dentist in Nashville, Taylor said. USA Today Co. is in over 200 markets in the U.S.

“We’re taking the entire advertiser journey. If you look at [it] from the moment the lead is generated for advertising all the way to the moment the cash is collected… We’ve taken that entire journey and we’re deploying agents throughout that journey,” Taylor said.

Taylor said the combination of integrating more client success people into the sales team and adding AI tools has improved client retention every quarter for the last few years. 

“I think it’s to both study, in real time, the data that we’re seeing on the campaign performance, and action and communicate back to the client, with suggestions and recommended enhancements to deliver better results for the campaign. The more people focused on that, the better,” Taylor said.

What we’ve heard

“It’s the ability to deliver a digestible story in [a few] minutes, which does not always come naturally to all reporters… Who can do that in real time? We think about this from our social video perspective. Sometimes too, it’s how would you describe this story to a friend over coffee?… Getting a peek into the reporter’s notebook and an understanding of the process, is one I think that lends well to this creator format.”

— Adam Banicki, gm of video at Fortune Media, on what his team looks for when scouting the newsroom for journalists to put in front of the camera.

Numbers to know

$400 million-$500 million: The amount of revenue Vox Media generates.

50%: The dip in readership to Vox Media’s lifestyle brands.

$10 million: The amount Robert Allbritton, co-founder of Politico, plans to invest in the Washington, D.C.-focused publication the Star, expecting the business to break even by 2029.

⅓: The share of websites created since 2022 that are AI generated, according to a recent research report.

What we’ve covered

The rise of deepfakes poses a new trust challenge for publishers

• As AI deepfakes spread faster and become more difficult to detect, publishers are caught in the crosshairs. Fact-checking teams are working harder to verify what’s real and protect their organization’s credibility in an internet flooded with AI-generated content.
• A new report from IdentifAI found 3,165 incidents of deepfakes in March 2026, up from just four in January 2020. It spotlights how synthetic media and manipulation have entered a more dangerous phase.

Read more here.

News UK turns The Times’ first-party data into synthetic audiences for advertisers 

• News UK is turning The Times’ first-party data into a synthetic audience-planning tool for advertisers to plan and test campaigns.
• Dubbed “Times ExplorAItion,” the tool pulls together multiple data sets and feeds them into synthetic-audience platform Electric Twin to generate versions of key audience segments. It’s helping to inform subscription strategy, content decisions and product development – The Times now has 659,000 digital subscribers, up 7% in the past year.

Read more here.

Beehiiv adds even more features to go up against competitors and win over creators

• Beehiiv has added more tools to its arsenal (including webinars, AI analytics for podcasts, and metered paywalls) in its pursuit to become the consolidated creator space of choice.
• The newsletter platform turned full-stack creator platform added a podcast offering, and privately reached out to podcasters on Substack and elsewhere asking them to migrate.

Read more here.

What we’re reading

IAC rebrands to People Inc.

IAC is rebranding to People Inc. to focus on the company’s publishing operations, and will cut staff to save about $40 million, The Wall Street Journal reported. People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel and CFO Tim Quinn are expected to take on the same roles at the IAC parent company, while Christopher Halpin is stepping down as IAC’s chief operating and financial officer.

The Washington Post is trying to bring back staffers it fired

The Washington Post announced sweeping layoffs in February, but then turned around a month later to ask some of them to return under a “delayed layoff,” due in part to fill the gaps left by the number of people who quit voluntarily after the layoffs, CJR reported. 

CNN is beating its subscriber targets

A year and a half after launching its dynamic paywall, CNN says it is beating the targets it set for subscribers, A Media Operator reported. 

Journalists sprung into action during the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner shooting

High-profile politicians and journalists hid under tables, livestreamed from their phones, filed stories and were escorted by security guards outside of the ballroom as a shooting occurred outside the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner last week, The New York Times reported.

iHeartMedia explores sale to Sirius XM

Radio and podcast giant iHeartMedia is exploring a possible sale to Sirius XM, Bloomberg reported. A deal would combine the largest radio station owner in the US with the largest satellite radio service, with more than $12 billion in sales.