The Best-of-Breed Technology Series | Lineup

Here comes Lineup, an innovative media solutions provider, empowering media companies through transformative solutions for managing their subscription and ad-funded models.

For our latest instalment in our Best-Of-Breed technology series, we spoke with Juan Christen and Michael Mendoza at Lineup to discuss their subscription management platform Amplio. Let’s dive in.

An Interview with leading subscription management platform Lineup

Thank you, Juan and Michael, for joining us today. Michael, could you please give us a brief overview of Lineup’s journey?

Lineup’s journey started in the early 2000s, I was then the Global IT Director of Metro International, a free newspaper completely dependent on advertising revenue. We understood from there the need for a solution that helped sales reps “hunt” for revenue, and that’s how our core product, Adpoint, was born. It was the first and only media sales system focused on generating leads and closing new business.

Fast forward ten years and Adpoint has become the largest media sales platform in the world, able to support all media channels with CRM, booking, finance and analytics. We quickly learned that Lineup needed to help media companies with a solution that covered all revenue streams, not just advertising but also subscription revenue. So, we launched our newest product, Amplio, a subscription management platform.

Amplio is a purpose-built platform for the subscription economy and our mission is to increase total reader revenue for the media sector.

Thank you. Juan, what do you think sets you apart from your competitors?

Our focus on creating dynamically tailored offers to the reader using analytics and behavioural data is what sets us apart from our competitors. We have a deep understanding of the complexity of the subscription-based business model and have long-standing relationships with different media players and platforms. Our solution not only helps our customers manage their subscription offerings but also drives an understanding of the customer, using these insights to drive total reader revenue.

Our platform is easy to use, with no development skills necessary to quickly build offers, test, and tune to reach the best possible results. Our goal is to make a task, such as a price increase, as simple as possible for the people using it.
The platform is centred around individuals and their subscriptions. We identify our customers’ audiences and convert them into paying customers, assessing their total value as a reader and growing high-revenue users.

How do you help your customers succeed in the subscription economy with your subscription management platform?

We are helping our customers succeed in the subscription economy with our best-of-breed solution Amplio. Amplio has a multifaceted approach: first, we start with a single customer view as the centre of our platform, giving our customers the tools they need to manage their subscribers, second, it helps them to action the knowledge and insights gained to then target different subscription offerings, in all stages of the buyers’ cycle, either as a funnel or a loop.

Flexibility is another main point of difference, creating products that enable market-leading innovations such as dynamic package generation, combined ad and subscription revenue analytics, and marketing automation.

What trends have you seen in the last 12 months?

We are seeing an increased focus on using consumer data to improve the reader experience as well as the journey to paying subscribers. Now more than ever companies in the industry are focusing on understanding the total value of a reader, across both ad and subscription revenue. Specifically, we are seeing that media companies are leveraging this data to gain subscribers, and/or converting anonymous to registered users to leverage their data with additional ad revenue.

Another trend is that publishers are now becoming media groups, covering different revenue streams such as subscriptions, events, e-commerce, advertising etc. Nothing is off the table and that creates an environment fostering innovation in sales and requiring innovative software solutions to support these dynamic media businesses.

When and why should a business consider a best-of-breed approach when choosing a vendor?

Always. Always look for best-of-breed technology when choosing a vendor. You want a solution that is highly verticalized for your sector and not generalist at all. That’s the rationale behind Adpoint and Amplio and that’s why we partner with companies like Zephr.

Our product is one solution, however, we do license some components from partners which are experts in their field to complete the monetization ecosystem and give our customers a fast track to success.