The Ozder Group / LaCona

Elizabeth Ozder built The Ozder Group over 10 years as a consulting practice focused on helping legacy media brands figure out how to survive and thrive in a digital-first world. After a decade running her agency, she took on a parallel role as head of revenue at LaCona, a content management platform serving 150 million unique users monthly across local television stations. Rather than viewing these as separate gigs, Elizabeth strategically leverages both sides—her consulting insights feed into LaCona's product strategy, and vice versa.

The consulting practice wasn't built from scratch on an ambitious product roadmap. Instead, Elizabeth started by solving real problems for real clients. She worked with major brands like AOL, Univision, Associated Press, Ogilvy, and Group M on digital transformation strategy. The practice matured by doing unglamorous, detailed work: analyzing circulation data, identifying cost structures that needed cutting, and helping publishers understand who their true audience was and what they'd pay for.

Elizabeth's early clients came through relationships and reputation. She worked with Fortune 500 media companies and recognized conglomerates. Her value proposition was clear: help these organizations understand that the old model—chasing scale at pennies per impression—was dead. The future belonged to publishers who could identify their most loyal audience, create differentiated content, and ask for direct payment or build premium tiers around that engaged audience.

What worked: positioning media strategy as a business problem, not a creative one. Elizabeth didn't help clients "look cool"—she helped them make money. She advised clients to stop doing free partnerships just for press releases and instead negotiate equity stakes on their cap tables when trying new products and platforms. She pushed back against the industry's emotional attachment to brands and scale, forcing conversations about ruthless cost-cutting and hyper-focused editorial missions.

What didn't work for many of her clients: staying in the commodity game. Trying to compete with Facebook and Google on scale. Building apps that nobody engaged with. Elizabeth's core insight was that sustainable media required either premium subscription models (like Bloomberg's terminal business), or surrounding free daily journalism with paid research, conferences, or data products (like Skift does in travel).

At LaCona, Elizabeth helps orchestrate deals with third-party platforms—negotiating with recommendation engines like Taboola and Outbrain to maximize revenue for a network of 150+ local TV stations. She's advising media companies to invest in startups and new products, not just do free trials for marketing theater. She recently worked with Nathan Latka's startup (which charges $10k/month for SaaS database access) and praised his model of bundling a physical magazine as a value-add to a high-ticket data service. Elizabeth's playbook: identify your actual differentiated asset, understand who pays, and build recurring revenue around deep engagement rather than broad reach.