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CMO of the Week: Dow Jones’ Sherry Weiss


Sherry Weiss, chief marketing officer at Dow Jones is excited about the brand equity of Dow Jones and how to use this positive reputation to grow the brand.

“When I joined, I was blown away by the brand equity of our titles and the convening power that carries. What’s exciting to me as a marketer is finding new ways to harness that power and reputation to supercharge growth and to showcase how our products and services can support broader audiences,” said Weiss.

“For example, The Journal’s offerings are relevant to a much broader audience, many of whom do not necessarily understand how they can benefit from The Journal,” she continued. “If we zoom out to think more expansively and focus not just on what industry our audiences work in or their job titles, but also look deep into a reader’s attitudes and ambitions, we can expand the way we think about who the Dow Jones customer is and how we should be engaging with them.” 

Weiss joined the company in October 2022 and has since been focused on driving growth, engagement and retention through customer-focused strategies. She oversees all marketing activities across Dow Jones’s portfolio and is responsible for driving customer acquisition, retention and subscriptions and optimizing marketing efforts across the ecosystem.

Prior to joining Dow Jones, Weiss was head of marketing transformation and channel delivery for Citi’s Personal Banking & Wealth Management Group. She also led marketing strategy and innovation for Citi’s Branded Cards business and was head of loyalty and retention at Jet.com, a rapid growth e-commerce start-up purchased by Walmart in 2016.

Brand Innovators caught up with Weiss to talk subscription growth, database marketing and leadership. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

What excites you about being CMO of Dow Jones?

When you look at today’s media landscape and the swath of headlines published every day, every hour, we’re all facing a bombardment of news moments. That can be really overwhelming, but it’s also a reminder of how important it is to be well-informed about everything that’s going on in the world around us. And that’s where we shine at Dow Jones.

We empower customers to make more informed decisions and navigate through the noise—whether it be through our best-in-class risk products to help clients better operate their businesses or through the high-quality reporting of The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. We provide highly valued resources to help our customers in their day-to-day lives. 

What key initiatives are you working on?

The last year was a transformative time for Dow Jones – even as we continue to see subscription growth, we’re facing the same challenges as others in the industry: waving consumer purchasing power, an evolving ad market and news fatigue. We find ourselves at an inflection point, and much of what we do to drive our business today, will need to rapidly change to meet the future. 

We are laser-focused on our subscription strategy, evolving and enhancing our offerings to continue driving direct digital growth, recurring revenue, and added value for our customers.  

Another key initiative is reinforcing our position in the market as the enterprise partner of choice. The world is well aware of our consumer products including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch, but how do we expand that awareness to our enterprise brands including Dow Jones Newswires, Factiva, Dow Jones Risk & Research and OPIS. The story we need to tell is that our suite of enterprise products is powering some of the world’s most prominent and high-performing companies and that is a compelling differentiator for us.

How are you telling the Dow Jones’ story?

I touched a little bit on some of the products in the portfolio already, and while I might understand how this grouping of brands and businesses fit together, it’s my job to tell that story consistently to others, ensuring they also see how everything connects and strengthens the company and our value proposition.

For example, if you’re an executive at a manufacturer, you start your day consuming content from The Journal – perhaps the What’s News podcast to get your run down of the headlines impacting businesses around the globe that day and then the Risk & Compliance newsletter to understand the latest in your trade. Then, throughout the work day you’re utilizing our enterprise products, perhaps one of our best-in-class risk products, like our Dow Jones Integrity Check, to help you conduct due diligence research and better operate your business.

Business leaders across the globe have various touchpoints with Dow Jones products throughout the day and that’s the story we are telling. Our brands deliver trusted, enterprise journalism and information through the lens of business, and business impacts everyone – whether they know it or not. 

How are you thinking about innovation?

When it comes to innovation, we are audience first, not product first. Understanding your audience is not a new idea, but it does need to be top of mind as consumers become ever more demanding in their news and digital experience expectations. When it comes to creating new experiences and products, it’s about leveraging data and audience insights to understand and get ahead of our customers’ unmet and unvocalized needs. That is true innovation—solving for challenges that may not be apparent in the current moment.  

We have high aspirations and believe the key to unlocking future growth is through a data-first lens. Data must underlie everything we do – from the strategies we build to the decisions we make. 

What is your approach to leadership?

I’ve had the benefit of knowing some great leaders and mentors who invested their time and energy into my development. Through them, I’ve learned how to think big, execute with precision, and lean into my strengths, so I try to embody those same traits and am thoughtful about giving back in the same way. 

Being a leader isn’t just about delivering results or building products, it’s also about building cohesive teams that capitalize on each other’s abilities and empowering them to grow and explore new skill sets. I also believe that leaders need to be mindful of creating an approachable environment and listening to all levels in the room. If you don’t, you’ll miss impactful, and even innovative, nuggets of information that can open the door to new ideas or new ways of approaching a certain challenge. 

How does your experience at Citi and Jet help in your current role?

My experiences at Citi – a Fortune 500 company that had a breadth of resources – and Jet – which was a scrappy startup when I joined and was eventually sold to Walmart – showed me how to transform an organization, each with a distinct set of challenges. At Citi, I oversaw a multi-year transformation that focused on delivering real time, always on, customer level marketing and engagement journeys for our clients, and at Jet, I built a marketing strategy from the ground up. At Dow Jones, I have the opportunity to tackle challenges that pull from both of these experiences. 

Dow Jones is a brand that’s well-established, storied and trusted around the globe but our audiences’ needs and expectations are rapidly changing – from how and when they consume their news to what new services they need to better their businesses — setting a pace that’s similar to what a startup experiences. Pulling from my experiences at both Citi and Jet, it’s about identifying what works well for us – the deep trust we have with customers and the high integrity of our products – while also building a team and new processes with agility top of mind.



Read More: CMO of the Week: Dow Jones’ Sherry Weiss

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