RSS feedsBig players cast long shadows, so it's no surprise that factiva is still labouring to emerge from those of its creators, information giants Dow Jones and Reuters. Even Factiva's most ardent supporters would have to acknowledge that, lacking general recognition, the brand doesn't open doors the way the names of its parenrts do.
This may, in part, be due to a certain reluctance by Factiva to spend a great deal on marketing. “Branding costs money and although all our sales people would tell us we don’t spend enough on branding, we believe more people have started to know about Factiva,” comments Claude Green, interim CEO of Factiva. “Within the information industry, we have no branding problem. People definitely know the Factiva name.”
The information landscape has changed since Factiva was set up. Factiva and its closest rivals, LexisNexis and Dialog, face a huge challenge from free online search engines. But Green remains confident: “The challenges are more in terms of potential threat than any major impact today,” he says. “We still encounter, for example, the same competitors as we have in the past.
"The big change, of course, since we set up Factiva has been Google, which has put our activities into real perspective. Like everyone else, I am curious to see have Google could change the landscape in future, but if we spent the whole time trying to second guess what Google is doing, we would never get anything done. We can probably predict that one day something will come along that we haven’t even thought of yet. The real question is whether we can be innovative enough and responsive enough to that, and we certainly hope to be.”
One way in which Google has changed the landscape for companies like Factiva, acknowledges Green, has been in raising awareness of the internet. That has been positive, but has also brought challenges, such as how to include blogging in content aggregation. “So far, blogging has been more a social issue than a business issue,” says Green,” but we have to complement our press information with what is on the blogs. We have many customers who need to know what their customers are thinking, and that will often come from blogs.”
Factiva has formed a partnership with Intelliseek to add consumer content from blogs to Factiva’s existing content aggregation services. Factiva receives up to 700,000 blog posts a day and indexes between 100,000 and 200,000. That may not seem a huge number, given that estimates of the total number of blogs ranges from anything up to 200 million. But Factiva indexes posts from the one million blogs statistically scored as influential, counted on the number of inbound links and trackbacks. “In trust, when you get down to it, a lot of blogs are not updated regularly enough to have an impact,” points out Green.
In future, he adds, content aggregators like Factiva will have to ensure they are able to pick out relevant content from all kinds of emerging sources, including blogs. Presentation of content is also changing. “How we deliver content is hugely important, with things like visualisation,” says Green. “We also want to develop job-specific content, via role-based applications, so we are more focused.”
Some in the industry believe Factiva has two great assets: its metadata and the expertise of its customer base. “Factiva has done a wonderful job in adding metadata to the content they license to create value,” comments Ian Kennedy, a former Factiva executive in the US who is now in Yahoo’s corporate strategy development group. “Anything they can do to make it easier for their customers to interact with their metadata to add value to it is a step in the right direction.”
Some in the industry have predicted a potential price war between the three leaders in the information provider market, but Green says this is unlikely. “A price war isn’t something that anyone wins from,” he comments. “It also is not likely, because we have to pay our publishing sources.”
Green also believes Factiva has the edge on its two main rivals precisely because it began from a different place. “When we were set up, we had to do something, because the systems [from Dow Jones and Reuters] were on older platforms. So we moved quickly and innovatively.” In contrast, points out Green, both Dialog and LexisNexis are now moving to new platforms.
“We try really hard to challenge ourselves to be as innovative as possible,” says Green. “Part of our culture is about pushing ourselves. We have a lot of constructive criticism inside the company, and that’s a good thing. People are not shy about expressing opinions.”
A change of guard
Factiva is in the middle of a change of leadership. The company is looking for a new CEO, following the promotion of former CEO Clare Hart, who ran the company since it was started, into a senior executive role at Dow Jones.
Green, former deputy CEO, has assumed the role of interim CEO while the job search goes on. He’s based in London, whereas Hart was based in the US, so the new job for Green involves quite a lot of transatlantic travel and a great deal of videoconferencing during US business hours.
“The search for Clare’s successor will take as long as it takes,” he comments. “In the meantime, it’s business as usual, but I have made it very clear that that is not about running on the spot. We have to keep the business on track.”
Hart and Green worked closely together in setting up and running Factiva, and Green is full of praise for Hart’s capabilities. As part of her new role at Dow Jones, Hart has also become chair of the Factiva board, so she is still closely involved with the company and is closely involved in picking her own successor as CEO. “I’m not losing any sleep over it,” comments Green. “I worked very closely with Clare for six or seven years and given that Clare is involved in appointing the new CEO, I have every confidence that someone will be coming in who will be able to work well with the rest of the leadership team.”
Meanwhile, as Green points out, there is a company to run. “Clare left the company in very good shape, and this year has got off to a good start, so I am reasonably optimistic about the financial projections for this year,” Green comments. Factiva does not declare its profits. Last year, its revenue was $281m, and profits were in double-digit figures, according to Green.
“Because we are a subscription business, if we enter the year well, that tends to set the pattern for the whole year,” he comments. “It is a very different business model from other companies.”
The biggest cost base for Factiva is its people and the cost of buying content from publishers. “The technology itself doesn’t cost a fortune,” says Green. “But we are not looking at cutting costs. We definitely are looking to keep costs under control, but where we are making cuts, we will be investing in other areas. We are investing in our products and in people.
"We are continuing the major investment that we began in 2005 in Factiva
Insight, SalesWorks and in Companies & Executives. We have bought Synapse
and we think that has been going well enough to invest more in that area. We are
certainly interested in the taxonomy arena and we are looking at whether there
are other bits that we could bring in, either by building things ourselves or
buying that in.”
Synapse is the US taxonomy company that Factiva bought in the middle of 2005.
Factiva Insight is the company’s suite of products in the reputation
intelligence market, an area that Factiva has previously addressed in
partnership with IBM, but has now returned to separately, with its own products.
“We agreed with IBM that the joint project wasn’t making progress in a way either of us was comfortable with and we have parted as friends,” says Green. “IBM is still a major customer of ours.”
Factiva sees the whole area of corporate reputation as a strategic challenge, rather than a technical challenge. “Bringing together all the relevant parts of reputation monitoring – everything from grabbing the right content to sentiment analysis, from business coverage to metrics like share prices – that is not something that our technical people are scratching their heads over,” says Green. “It is the strategic product possibilities that pose more of a challenge.”
Ahead of the market
Green believes Factiva was ahead of the market in getting into reputation
analysis and he says there are growing signs that customers out in that market
now realise the potential value of this kind of work. “Things are certainly
moving in terms of companies looking more closely at their social responsibility
and what is reputation management if not about social responsibility?” he says.
“The market will catch up and is already doing so.”
There is still, however, the question of the Factiva brand, and whether it
commands enough attention in the marketplace. Green’s answer is that developing
the product-line is where the attention and the investment should be going.
“Our strategy is certainly product-led rather than advertisement-led,” he
comments.
That is complicated by the fact that some Factiva customers integrate Factiva
content into their own feeds. “We do keep the Factiva branding in those cases,
but inevitably it is less prominent,” acknowledges Green. “So it is a
trade-off.”
Green believes Factiva as a brand is associated within the information industry
with innovation. “I like to think we are regarded as competent and we do have
our parents’ heritage, too. We do talk about parental content when we are
selling. That is a strong sell, especially where we are selling proprietary
content.”
So Factiva is still a company that relies on its parents’ reputation as much as its own, despite Green’s emphasis on the achievement in setting up Factiva as a separate entity. “From a business perspective, it has been about taking the two separate businesses, which were losing substantial sums of money, and moving into a double-digit profit margin,” he points out. “That is a real achievement and Factiva people are very proud of that.”
[main feature ends]
The Factiva Story: Two Become One
Factiva was formed in 1999 as a joint venture by Dow Jones and Reuters,
replacing the two companies’ existing news and business information services for
enterprise customers. The new company’s first product, Factiva.com, went live in
July 2001. It aggregates information from more than 10,000 sources, including
Dow Jones and Reuters newswires, the Associated Press, D& B company
profiles, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and other sources. The
company now has some 750 staff. Its largest office is in Princeton, where it has
some 400 staff. There are 150 staff in its London office, and there are key
Factiva offices in Sydney, Barcelona and Singapore, as well as smaller sales
offices around the world.
In2005, Factiva’s turnover was $281m, on which it made a double-digit profit
figure. Its products include: the Factiva.com news and information service;
Factiva Companies & Executives; Factiva Public Figures & Associates;
Factiva SalesWorks business news and information; and Factiva Insight Reputation
Intelligence.
It also sells a range of software packages and tools in areas such as content
publishing and customising news feeds into corporate intranets and portals.
Claude Green: Interim CEO
For almost six years, from May 1999 to March 2006, Claude Green has been deputy CEO of Factiva, overseeing HR, finance, business development and the company’s legal department. In March 2006, with the promotion of Factiva CEO Clare Hart to a senior executive role within Dow Jones, Green stepped up to become interim CEO. While the company looks for Hart’s successor, Green is in charge. A qualified accountant, with an economics degree from Kings College Cambridge, Green initially held a number of financial management positions within Reuters, where he worked for 20 years. His most recent post within Reuters before his move to Factiva was managing director of one of the company’s UK business divisions.
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