National World will seek to create a leading position in the UK publishing and digital media
The objective of the Company is:
“To create a modern platform for news publishing through the implementation of a new operating model across multiple brands and platforms by acquiring a number of media and digital technology assets and leveraging its portfolio to launch new media brands across the UK.”
Key pillars of transformation
In a world of media commoditisation and increasing domination by a handful of tech behemoths National World’s strategy is to create a new publishing business model that enables us to “localise, energise, digitise and monetise” relevant and unique content:
- Localise – Our publishing assets provide compelling content for local communities; both consumers and businesses. A greater sense of community awareness has also been generated during the COVID-19 pandemic as more consumers have lived their lives in a smaller locale. With this new spirit of localism, we will ensure our journalists and commercial teams are more connected with the local communities they serve.
- Energise – Energise our products and services to enhance user experience and engagement and provide a strong platform to leverage our unique quality content to launch new products and services across multiple platforms. While our print news-brands will be managed creatively and profitably, our strategic focus is on growing local, regional and national online audiences who are deeply engaged with our content.
- Digitise – Enhance the digital infrastructure to improve responsiveness, engagement, data analytics, AI content generation and user insights.
- Monetise – Create enhanced first party data and use the latest available digital technology to more effectively define audiences to drive multiple digital revenue streams: digital display advertising - targeting growth in higher yielding video content and local digital advertising, digital subscription - targeting both consumers and businesses and e-commerce - focusing on specific categories of content.
National World will retain, recruit and develop talented people, appropriately incentivised and motivated, and provide them with the prerequisite digital skills that will aid the execution of its strategy.
National World’s strategy will involve consolidation and change by combining acquired digital technology innovation and traditional print assets in a new industry model designed to grow revenue by aggregation of audiences and maximising efficiencies.
As the operating model can be applied to many territories, the Company will not be limited to particular geographic regions. However, the initial focus will be to invest in the UK.
Implementation plans
National World will deliver its vision through a clear set of strategic initiatives:
- Materially reduce the size of the central infrastructure. Minimise central infrastructure for the key functions of editorial and commercial to ensure all parts of the organisation have full clarity and responsibility for the delivery of product and performance enhancements. The central function will provide efficient back office functions (IT, Finance, HR, etc) and will have editorial and commercial expertise to support local management to drive engagement and revenue;
- Significantly strengthen local management to prioritise the generation of unique local content and building revenue supported by a focused central expertise;
- Focused portfolio management to ensure the right titles on the appropriate platforms are serving the right local communities and businesses. The titles in both print and digital need to be energised through relaunch with enhancements to content, layout and commercial appeal increasing engagement with consumers and providing advertisers with an improved response on their marketing spend;
- Capitalise on opportunities to launch new products and services, initially across the UK, leveraging the strong base of editorial and commercial expertise; and
- Continue to evaluate acquisitions, investments and strategic partnerships to build scale, accelerate digitisation, product enhancement and drive efficiencies.
Key deliverables
To monitor progress the Board will assess the appropriate KPIs which will be actively monitored and reported and will cover:
- Digital audience. Including unique users, page views and registrations;
- Digital revenue. Build through the key categories of display, subscriptions, video and e-commerce;
- Revenue trends. Management are intent on developing a model to improve revenue trends with KPIs that monitor a transition from dependency on print sales to an accelerating digital performance; and
- Cash generation and financial flexibility. To provide headroom for investment and the return of capital to shareholders through either dividends and/or share buy backs. Management is keen to ensure financial flexibility will be a key KPI.
