Innovator Spotlight

Morning Brew

Michael Nallan

Director of Insights & Analytics

Morning Brew

Michael Nallan, Director of Insights & Analytics at Morning Brew, has launched customer research and analytics initiatives at two companies. He’s worked at both large and boutique media organizations and honed his skills at shaping, scaling, and communicating the value of customer research.

Lisa Goldsman

Senior Associate of Insights & Analytics

Morning Brew

Lisa Goldsman, Senior Associate of Insights & Analytics, and employee number 31 at Morning Brew, joined the Insights and Analytics team In February of 2022, helping to launch the research community and processes that followed. She specializes in media measurement and pre-sale research.

Starting with the end in mind

Mike and Lisa transformed Morning Brew’s siloed, ad-hoc survey activities into a research program that editorial and advertising teams count on. With a small team serving a rapidly growing, 300-person organization, they take a scrappy approach that delivers rapid results and enables their many stakeholders to make decisions.

Getting the lay of the land is Mike’s first step when he got to Morning Brew to build a successful program. “When I first came to Morning Brew, I downloaded every single typeform that we ever did,” Mike recalls,” I asked, “What do we know? What are our belief systems? How do we test those?’”

Humanizing customers

Together, the team saw that Morning Brew had lots of behavioral and declarative data about customers, but didn’t know who they were as people. “If you boil it down, I’m a marketer.But I like hats. I drink water. I’m drinking coffee. I love the Yankees.” Too often, Mike explains, “customer profiles say things like, ‘marketing people just love Tiktok,’ and that’s all.”They set out to understand customers by building the Breakroom community. Mike and his team now engage over 15,000 participants to understand their motivations and interests in new products and editorial content. Having a deeper understanding of customers also enables them to join client calls, optimize advertising programs, and influence revenue.

Best Practices

Perfect is the enemy of good. There's a delicate balance between spending too much time on something and making sure that it fits the needs of your stakeholder.
Be a storyteller. It's hard for people to imagine the value of research, because often they’re thinking about research 10 years ago. To get people on board, you have to sell the story of where you're going versus where you are today.
Minimize your touch points. Funnily enough, the metric that we pay most attention to is that our request volume is going down. We create resources for the team to make them more self-sufficient.