E&P staff report
Artificial intelligence wasn’t just a talking point at this year’s Indigo Trigger Lead-to-Cash Bash — it was the throughline. Speakers from Hearst Newspapers, Data Axle, Site Impact, Minnesota Star Tribune, Cox Media Group, The Seattle Times and others demonstrated how AI is reshaping sales enablement, audience targeting, political advertising compliance, and operational workflows across the industry. What emerged from the two-day event was unmistakable: AI is now embedded in the business of news, not as an experiment, but as a fully operational growth engine.
The event opened with Hearst Newspapers detailing how a 137-year-old legacy publisher is rebuilding its sales infrastructure around AI. In “Smarter Sales, Real Results: How AI Is Powering Change at Hearst Newspapers,” Katerina “Kat” White, director of sales operations and enablement, and Michael McCarthy, senior director of AI, Sales & Business Solutions, offered a rare inside look at a modernization push that is delivering measurable gains in onboarding speed, sales confidence and productivity.
The publisher’s AI-powered cold-call simulator, customized coaching tools, automated prep workflows and new cross-platform integrations have helped turn a once fragmented tool ecosystem into a cohesive sales-enablement hub. Adoption rates have surged, and the ethos — “everything comes back to confidence,” as White put it — set the tone for the broader discussions that followed.
AI Supercharges Audience Targeting and Marketing Performance
A session led by Greg Heiman of Site Impact and Daniel Babb of Data Axle spotlighted how email, long considered a “legacy” channel, has become a precision marketing engine powered by machine learning. Using a dataset of 300 million consumer profiles and 1,000+ behavioral attributes, the companies showcased how AI is producing larger, more accurate, action-ready audience segments.
Babb summarized the transformation succinctly: “AI isn’t just finding audiences — it’s predicting which audiences will take action.”
Case studies from travel and automotive advertisers showed major boosts in reach, open rates and click-through performance — concrete proof of how algorithmic audience-building is outpacing traditional targeting methods.
AI Agents Take Over Operational Tasks — and Open New Revenue Streams
The conversation shifted sharply toward automation during “Scaling Your Team with AI Agents,” featuring Brian Kennett (Star Tribune), Shajan Thomas (Cox Media Group) and Paul Deraval (NinjaCat). Demonstrations included new AI agents capable of generating SQL and Python code, fixing underperforming search campaigns and autonomously performing political-ad compliance tasks.
Kennett’s remarks underscored the moment: “By leveraging agentic tools, Star Tribune will be able to do more in a month than we used to do in a year.”
Cox Media Group reported reclaiming 20% of staff time previously spent on manual keyword-review tasks — the equivalent of one full workday per week, per employee.
Deraval’s live demonstration of an agent named “Negative Nancy” — designed to detect and correct poor Google Ads performance — electrified the room and prompted his line that quickly became a conference favorite: “The future LinkedIn profile of top sellers will highlight the AI agents they’ve built and deployed.”
Seattle Times and Star Tribune Push AI Into Pre-Sales
Day two featured a deep dive into AI copilots built through Lenfest Institute grants. The Seattle Times’ Allyson McKinney demonstrated tools handling tasks ranging from lead scoring and outbound email generation to collateral retrieval and ADA-compliance checking. Capturing workflows via Scribe has helped institutionalize the process and reduce intimidation around AI adoption.
Kennett unveiled “Virtual Brian,” an agent trained on 3,500+ pieces of internal knowledge — from client-answer emails to training manuals — giving account executives instant access to subject-matter expertise. The system even includes an “Is this correct?” verification loop designed to curb hallucination. His caution to the audience was clear: “You still need human review. Always.”
SMS Reactivations and Smarter Payments Deliver Subscription Gains
The Bash also highlighted the growing sophistication of circulation strategy.
A standout session led by Spokane Spokesman-Review’s Aaron Kotarek showed how shifting from email-heavy reactivation to an SMS-driven strategy produced a 350%+ increase in reactivated subscriptions. The immediacy of SMS, paired with tighter segmentation and rapid optimization, moved results far beyond previous efforts.
Meanwhile, Anchorage Daily News CFO Joshua Petersen and Payway EVP Kimberly Miller made a compelling case for treating payment operations as a core reader-revenue function, not a back-office obligation. Declines, expirations and failed transactions, they argued, are preventable churn — and payment strategy must be integrated with circulation workflows.
DOOH and Agency-Style Services Expand Opportunity
Forum Communications and Vistar Media closed with a case study demonstrating how Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) campaigns can expand audience-extension revenue. Using Vistar’s location-level targeting and visualization tools, Forum helped an electronics client lift in-store sales by 25% during a 90-day test, along with an 18% increase in search conversions.
The Media Playbook Is Changing — Fast
Across every track — sales, marketing, circulation, compliance and audience — one theme echoed: AI is no longer optional infrastructure. It is the connective tissue of the next-generation media organization, enabling:
• Faster workflows
• Better decisions
• Higher profitability
• Lower operational risk
• More confident, capable teams
Indigo Trigger’s Lead-to-Cash Bash didn’t just showcase new tools. It showcased a new operating model — one where news organizations that embrace AI holistically will outpace those that hesitate.
