This week we introduced one of the most significant developments in the nearly 40-year history of CIO: an entirely new brand platform and design system. It’s the result of a multi-year process that started with the simple question, “How can we make a great brand and deep relationships even stronger?”.    

CIO is the leading source of trusted information and the preeminent destination of CIOs, serving award-winning content across its online site, events, newsletters and communities. With this week’s release, we ensure CIO’s market-leader status for the next era of technology buying with a platform reimagined for the future.  

Here are a few of the highlights and benefits of the new CIO:   

  • Content and user experience:  Our continued focus on CIOs telling real stories that help peers make critical technology decisions – a hallmark differentiator for the CIO brand – has been modernized with a bold look and feel that aligns more closely to the personality and profile of the modern-day CIO.  A faster, more readable, and more connected experience seamlessly links content, experts, events, community and newsletters, enabling CIOs to engage more deeply.  You should check out Amy Bennett, CIO’s Editor-in-Chief’s article describing the new experience. 
  • Investment in trust and user experience: The new brand platform further solidifies our commitment to CIOs to deliver only the most relevant content and advertising while safeguarding their data. CIO continues to be closed to open auction third-party advertising platforms – ensuring a “noise-free” content and advertising experience for our visitors (a significant revenue source for other publishers).  Additionally, we screen ads for relevance and appropriateness for our audiences (yes, we turn away ad buys).  Most importantly, our brands have and continue to be at the forefront of protecting our user’s data (we don’t sell, share or co-op our proprietary data) and making sure content is accessible to all and responsive to how a visitor chooses to access our sites.
  • A new technology platform: We’ve purpose built the new brand platform to integrate with Foundry’s proprietary tech and software to enable more robust user experiences while generating, validating, refreshing and nurturing more highly-differentiated proprietary first-party data – further distancing our data and software businesses from others.   
  • Advertising impact: For our advertising customers, the new brand platform gives ads more breathing room so they stand out better. Our customers’ advertising is an extension of the award-winning content we create for the CIO community – everything about the experience is contextual and relevant. The correlation to advertising impact is demonstrable.  A recent study from CIO Tech Talk Community (our CIO panel) conducted in October 2022 showed that tech ads placed in tech-focused settings like CIO are 263% more effective at conveying quality, provide 457% greater clarity, are 171% more interesting, and 80% more memorable than ads that run on other non-tech focused or general media sites.    
  • Opportunities for our partners:  As part of the release of the new CIO, we are introducing a new class of “beyond the banner” sponsorship opportunities, including a new topic sponsorship feature.  In addition, BrandHub our fast-growing integrated B2B brand-to-demand solution – has proven to deliver engagement metrics far above expectations and a startling return on investment even amidst challenging market conditions. Built in-house, the CIO Brand to Demand solution brings together brand building with demand and pipeline creation all within the CIO brand ecosystem.  Customers self-report revenue conversion and ROI at rates of 10-20x.  Learn more about topic sponsorships and BrandHub.  

Market leaders drive transformation and invest even in challenging times.  This is something Foundry has done time and again for nearly 50 years. And CIO is just the start.  In the coming months you will see our other B2B editorial brands Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld and Network World migrate onto their versions of the same platform, along with new and exciting expansion plays.  

A trusted and vibrant community has developed around our B2B brands, and these brands remain front and center to the Foundry strategy. While many aspects of our business have changed, our commitment to providing the global technology community with high-quality, award-winning content in a manner that respects their time, their data and these relationships has not. The continued evolution of our brands fortifies that commitment.   

 We hope you will find time to explore the new CIO.  We trust that you’ll be as excited as we are that we’ve set the brand platform for the next era of the most prominent CIO-focused brand in the world.   

 

Real people. Real data. Real results.     

Charles Lee , Global Managing Director , Foundry B2B