9/4/2023 0 Comments Open road mediaThe Vulnerable Road Users stream will support projects that improve road safety for pedestrians, people with a disability, young children, older Australians, motorcyclists, and cyclists. The Community Education and Awareness stream will fund campaigns, programs or other education and awareness initiatives to support young or disadvantaged drivers to get their licence and have a safer start on our roads, reduce risky behaviours such as drink driving, improve workplace road safety, increase compliance with road rules, and ensure safer interactions between heavy and other vehicles. Grant funding is available for projects up to 2025-26 and anyone seeking funding for, or completing, road safety activities over the next three years are encouraged to now apply. Grants of between $20,000 and $1.5 million are available for the Community Education and Awareness, which includes workplace road safety, as well as the Vulnerable Road Users focus areas. The launch of the program comes at a time where more Australians are being killed on our roads than in years before, with the road toll sitting at 3.2 per cent higher than this time last year. The grant program, announced in the 2023-24 Budget, will provide vital funding to non-infrastructure road safety projects and programs across the country. Steinberger said he is looking forward to working with Slavin and added that he was "thrilled with the work the Open Road team has done."Īs for company founder Jane Friedman, she told the WSJ she was “very happy that the company has gotten to the point where it was viable for sale.Applications are now open under the first two focus areas of the Australian Government’s new National Road Safety Action Grants Program. Slavin will continue to work with Open Road as a consultant. Steinberger will take over as company CEO January 1 from Paul Slavin, who joined Open Road in late 2015 and helped the company focus on its marketing efforts, which led to consistent profitability. The private equity firm Abry Partners, which specializes in investments in media and technology, is also part of the group as well as what was described as “a number of prominent individual investors from the worlds of publishing and finance.” It's most recent earnings statement, Open Road said profits were up significantly in 2020 and are on the rise in 2021, with second quarter results showing and increase of 22% in revenue and EBITDA improvement of over 292% in 2021.Īmong the newly formed investor group’s backers are two Open Road clients, Grove Atlantic, which has its full catalog of titles with Open Road, and MEP Capital, a media and entertainment-focused private equity fund that is part owner of Rosetta Books. Since it has honed its marketing strategy, Open Road’s sales have doubled over the last three years and, according to the WSJ, revenue will approach $50 million this year and the company is profitable. Open Road absorbs all costs of marketing. Partner publishers pay nothing to Open Road until marketing services generate revenue that exceeds the publisher's baseline sales (a mutually agreed upon sales number for the titles prior to inclusion), and then a revenue split kicks in on the uplift for those titles. Operationally, Ignition involves the use of powerful consumer outreach vehicles, direct demand stimulation, strategic and tactical pricing, consumer segmentation and personalization, content syndication, metadata and copy optimization. Steinberger said in November alone Open Road launched about 52,000 campaigns. The company is currently working with 35,000 titles (including about 11,000 titles to which it owns the rights) through its Ignition program and executes tens of thousands of individual marketing campaigns each month. Open Road’s data scientists analyze “thousands of data elements to determine the most appropriate marketing campaign,” Steinberger said. During that time he saw how Open Road's proprietary search engine optimization had potential to double the sale of backlist books. Steinberger told PW that after leaving Perseus Books Group following its sale to Hachette Book Group and before he formed a group that acquired Arcadia Publishing, he had consulted for Open Road. Founded in fall 2009 by former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, Open Road began life as an e-book publisher and marketing company that in recent years has focused on using its proprietary platform to promote e-books for about 70 publishers. A newly formed investor group led by David Steinberger has acquired Open Road Integrated Media (OR/M) for what the Wall Street Journal reported was a purchase price between $60 million and $80 million.
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