A Moment with Sean Stanleigh, from the Globe and Mail

Sean is a journalist, marketer, and entrepreneur. He converted Globe’s small business magazine into a fully digital property, and is now stretching the boundaries of what it is to be a journalist and content creator, using the full suite of marketing tools to find new ways of creating revenue for the news industry. Sean has been working on creating new ways of turning the old ‘advertorial’ news piece into sponsored content that still achieves the story that satisfies an advertiser but provides more valuable content for the reader. This helps to increase views of the content but also maximizes engagement.

Sean’s project called ‘Innovation Lab’, was created based on the space they created to allow the 700+ employees to cultivate their ideas and to be able to bring them to executives and capable actors to be able to bring the ideas to light – to see if it has any business merit. First they are looking to help the person with their value proposition. Then they take them through the process of being able to pitch the idea. Sean gives advice to PR professionals on how to pitch: He says that too many people pitch without showing the true value of their idea. The idea should have some news value, especially to the Globe’s core readership, should be first to the market, and it needs to be trendy in that it is something that people are looking for today.

What does Sean look for in an Op-Ed? He says it needs to be newsworthy and it should not be about you unless you or your business are directly related to the news story. Finally, he says you need to come to them with a new and different argument. Are you bringing a unique but relevant perspective?

Darian asks Sean his advice to entrepreneurs on which organizations, incubators, accelerators they should join or utilize. He says the best thing any entrepreneur can do early is put together a great team to come up with a mínimum viable product so they can get it out to market to be tested and improved based on feedback. He believes the incubator or accelerator model may be best for entrepreneurs if they are trying to reach a broader audience.

Sean suggests reading “The Paying Guests” by Sarah Waters, and “Chop Suey Nation” by Anne Hui. He recommends “The Daily” podcast by the New York Times, as well as “Start Up”, which is an entrepreneurial podcast, and he is now producing podcasts. He has recently wrapped a retirement podcast called “Looking Ahead”, one called “Industry Interrupted”, and one called “I’ll Go First”, which is about starting up businesses in brand new industries.

When it comes to content marketing Sean is most interested in the browser space. He suggests downloading the Brave Browser, created by the former CEO of Mozilla, which has a built-in ad blocker. It is blockchain based and rewards tokens for attention to ads, and the tokens can then be spent on the consumer’s favorite businesses. He also thinks AR is a great new space that will eventually take over for VR. Finally, he believes in great design in content, meaning when content looks great the consumer is going to engage with it more.

Written by Claudia Palomino