The head of marketing tells Tim Healey why setting the news brand apart requires an approach “that speaks to head and heart.”
Over nine years at The Guardian, you’ve worked your way from marketing manager to senior marketing manager, head of global brand marketing to now head of marketing. Please walk us through your career path to your role today.
I landed on marketing relatively quickly. I’m fascinated by people and love storytelling, so it really felt like a path that I would find interesting. The first role that I had was a mix of PR, marketing and events, all in a B2B context. I knew that if I wanted my career to accelerate, I needed to be doing marketing activities within a brand that I really cared about – one where I could justify committing to long hours and really get my teeth stuck in.
I had a list, and it wasn’t that long. The Guardian featured very much towards the top as there was a shared worldview and frankly I found it amazing (still do really) to see a truly independent news source available to all. A role became available here that was slightly more junior than I was doing before, but it felt like the right thing for me to take the leap, learn what I could and progress.
Looking back on the last decade, I’m really proud to be part of a legacy of change-making campaigns. From a reimagined, data-driven print marketing strategy to a global digital rebrand. Then focusing on product marketing to help people make sense of a world that had unexpectedly shut down and reduced to the size of their living rooms in the pandemic. And more recently helping to pioneer a new way for news media to remain open, independent and reader-funded through marketing that speaks to head and heart. It’s flown.
Nowadays it’s less about delivering campaigns and more about creating the conditions for our talented marketing department and agencies to get brilliant work into the world. We’ve put a lot of effort this year into refining our operating model and it’s been great to see this come to fruition in campaigns like our DMA-winning Feast recipe app launch.
The Guardian and The Observer newspapers, photographed inside the newspaper offices. King’s Place, King’s Cross, London. Photograph: David Levene
On your watch, the marketing at the 200-year-old newspaper has undergone considerable changes. What are the main shifts and how did you go about implementing these new approaches?
I am slightly obsessed with the competition for attention and just how challenging it is for brands to cut through and mean something to people. It’s especially important for a news brand like The Guardian where our diverse output can place us in multiple categories in a person’s day: news, podcasts, magazines, tickets for live events and more. So we have to be really focused about where we spend our time.
We are clearer than ever about our audience, how they differ across our product portfolio and what that means for the products themselves and the way we market them. This sense of clarity has enabled our internal teams and our agencies to hit their stride with some big wins. There’s been lots of lessons learned this year across social, brand and performance marketing. Change is always a tough sell and it’s been really important to make sure everyone is clear of the rationale and that they’re comfortable with the pace. The latter point is also important for my own sanity.
The Guardian’s new Europe edition online. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian.
With so much data at the modern-day marketer’s disposal – and especially as The Guardian is a media company that provides a digital, as well as physical newspaper – which metrics have you found most helpful in optimizing return on marketing spend?
Our north star is to grow the number of readers around the world supporting The Guardian. In pursuit of this, the role of marketing is to complement our journalism by shaping perceptions and driving product uptake. In practice, this means sharing our unique brand story as well as promoting app downloads, ticket sales and digital and print subscriptions. That inevitably leaves us with a fairly broad array of performance metrics to monitor.
Across the piece, we are looking to draw the thread between reach and acquisitions. Firstly as a mass reach platform we look at this organically, ie the correlation between site visits and conversions, which is driven heavily by the news agenda. Then we layer our marketing analysis on top of this, assessing how many journeys we are driving directly into our product checkouts and how this changes in campaign moments. The engine is optimized with every quarter of new learnings – and news events.
How do you ensure clarity around market orientation?
We have tons of interactions with our audience and need to be selective about how we make sense of the data. We have developed an increasingly robust understanding of what it is about the Guardian that motivates people to seek us out, to come back to us and support us. Coupling that with a view on the industry landscape keeps us well informed on what makes us unique and where our opportunities and challenges lie.
The Guardian is a purpose-led brand, how have you managed to stay true to purpose and bring others (colleagues, agencies, audiences) with you in your role?
We often revisit the old school definition of marketing “to meet consumer needs in a profitable way” – it still rings true and it’s a great starting point to make that statement relevant to your organizational mission. For The Guardian, the consumer need we serve is both individual (bring clarity to our readers and feed their imagination) and societal (ensure that quality, rigorous reporting and analysis is available for all). This brings an intrinsic sense of purpose that we then seek to make relevant through culture – for example using the Premier League launch weekend as an opportunity to remind audiences about our decision to reject gambling advertising.
We have quite a broad range of products and messages, from serious to light, so one challenge for us is to make sure there is a strong sense of consistency across everything we do. It all comes back to understanding the audience and how we meet their needs at the moment they see our marketing. That helps anchor decisions in an objective space, which is really important when you are responding to emotive news events.
The Guardian’s ‘Not For Sale’ Campaign. Photograph: David Levene.
What question would you like to ask the next senior marketer I speak to?
What do you think is currently missing from the media mix?
Your question from a senior marketer: what would you be doing if you were not in marketing?
Emergency career switch ideas have included hairdresser, Lisbon tram driver, estate agent and lubricant manufacturer (the fun kind). So, in short, I have no idea and think I should stick at it for a bit longer.
Consistency with the The Guardian’s ‘Not For Sale’ Campaign allowed for abstract applications in London. Photograph: David Levene.
Please expand on the impressive ‘Not for sale’ campaign: the insight/thinking behind it and the different ways that it has manifested.
We know that for The Guardian, independence and open access are a very powerful pair of motivating factors driving people to support us financially. We don’t forget that we are driving a fairly unusual behaviour: well over 1 million readers pay for something they can access for free. So we wanted to shout proudly about the reasons behind that to our global audience to drive more of them to support.
We knew we’d need to take some risks in order to cut through so we went for a bold tone and I think quite a brave approach in celebrating the good and bad reactions you get when you open yourself up to the world: loved, hated, respected, feared – but never told what to write. That really resonated with audiences. The message has been a winner across our performance marketing efforts since launch.
The offices of The Guardian, King’s Place, King’s Cross, London. Photograph: David Levene.
Creative bravery: what advice do you have for fellow marketers who may hesitate before taking creative risks with their campaigns?
Firstly, don’t go bravely for the sake of it and without thinking it through… we’ve all seen what happens. It’s really important that you take the time to fully understand your brand, what you stand for (which doesn’t need to be a confected purpose) and the personality.
Spend time with internal teams, make especially good friends in research and have conversations with stakeholders and agencies to get everyone comfortable with how you need to stand out in your competitor set (or increasingly now, competitor sets). Ask your colleagues whether there are brave decisions that need to be made outside of marketing, as this provides important reasons for all your audiences (internal and external) to believe.
Gone are the days when bravery meant sending an ad van around Westminster! We all need to think ever more creatively about how we show up and matter to people.
Imagine you could go back in time and you’re able to give your younger self advice at the start of their career. What might you encourage a young Joel to do more of and what might you suggest that he avoids?
Don’t be afraid of debate. It will get you somewhere better – both in terms of the work and the working relationship. You probably won’t look stupid – or sometimes you might a bit, but it won’t matter. So my advice would be: bite the bullet and have those difficult conversations.
Feature Image Credit: Joel Midgley
By Tim Healey,
Tim Healey is founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer community. Join our exclusive, hand-picked gatherings of the UK’s most senior and experienced marketers and you’ll leave inspired, ready to implement new ideas and having made new and useful connections with your industry peers.
