What you need to know:

• Are Media is about to leverage its acquisition last week of e-commerce business, Hard to Find, to turn its 10.5m audience – mostly women – into direct buyers for advertisers.
• Boss Jane Huxley is already deep into the tech stack but former Accenture US media and e-comm specialist, Ian Harris, is leading the charge in commercialising the tech.
• Within six months, he said Hard to Find's 13 years worth of algorithmic learning and online user buying behaviour will be applied across Are’s portfolio.
• Harris insisted the publisher isn't about to become a retailer – but it is going all out to cut out the middlemen.

Second mover advantage

Former Accenture US media and e-comm specialist, Ian Harris, who joined Are Media last year as Director of Product & Platforms, says Australia will leapfrog international media and commerce blunders by learning from their mistakes.

Advertisers and e-comm teams are waiting on the details from Are Media’s acquisition last week of e-commerce business, Hard to Find, which sells premium products. That business will continue but the secret source for Are Media is in buying 13 years of algorithmic learning and online user buying behaviour to apply across Are’s portfolio, Women’s Weekly, Marie Claire, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Wheels and BeautyCrew among them.  

Are Media’s CEO and chief geek, Jane Huxley, is already deep in Hard to Find’s tech stack, but it is Ian Harris who’s charged with making the company’s first roll into e-commerce work.

“This is the biggest opportunity we've seen in terms of diversification of our revenue,” Harris told Mi3. “We’ve looked at other models for other publishers around the world.  We know our readers do want to respond to our content, the things that they read and they're inspired by because we've seen that through the ads. They click on the affiliate links, they click on the links to other sites to buy things. We see that traffic and see what they're doing when they respond to the content that we have. They want to be able to interact with the articles that we provide them.”

Harris says Are Media’s brands “influence millions of people” in what they're going to wear, what food they eat, where they travel. “Given that they trust that brand, they don't just want to learn about something. They often want to take action. They want to do something about that. The limitation up to this point is that's where our experience ends with our reader and then we pass them off somewhere else. We can now offer it to them, not just hand them over to someone else that really does feel like a handover. We can allow them to interact and actually create a purchase experience within that branded experience itself. So they're kept entirely within that experience.”

But Harris says Are Media has no intent of becoming an online retailer or building an e-comm fulfilment capability.

“We're not becoming a retailer per se,” he says. “We want to extend the journey that our reader makes with us but our desire is not to become a retail shop."

Are Media has started preliminary discussions with advertisers about its content and commerce strategy and although it will tap alliances with advertisers, it won’t be limited to those partner deals. In some cases, Are Media may source and sell its own products.   

“We haven't worked the end of that journey yet. Broadly, we really want to work with our advertising partners and the retailers that we work with directly to try and work out how we can bring their products to market. They've already got into our branded experience.

“But there may be particular purchasing journeys where the product is not available. We want to make that available. We're not interested in fulfilling ourselves, of course, but we'll pass it on to someone, and it may just be that the manufacturer, the product owner, does the fulfilment. We may have a fulfilment house that does it if they're not able to do it," said Harris.

He admitted the "exact details need to be worked out" for that particular model. "But broadly, instead of passing on an affiliate link to some other website where they make a purchase, we're pulling that into our branded experience and then once the purchase has been made, the mechanics of that can happen by some other means. And the advantage we have now with the Hard To Find tech stack acquisition is that we own the stack. And the joy of this is that they’ve spent 13 years optimising the browsing and sales experience to be the most seamless, easy way of purchasing products.”

Harris says it will take six months before the Hard To Find acquisition feeds Are Media’s e-commerce deployment.

“Australia media is now realising that it needs to make changes. They need to create new business models. They need to do new and exciting things with the relationships and the assets that they have.”