AV ‘100% key’ to Mail Metro Media’s success in 2025

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Last year, Mail Metro Media made a concerted effort to grow and communicate its commercial AV offering, with substantial investments in expanding its podcast suite and leaning in to short- and long-form video production.

In 2025, the publisher intends to capitalise on that strategy through building out a stronger commercial offering around not only AV but also data and commerce opportunities for brands.

In conversation with senior reporter Jack Benjamin at The Year Ahead event this month, Mail Metro Media chief brand strategy officer Ryan Uhl said AV is “still 100% key to our success in 2025”.

“The real success of last year was our scale in short-form video,” Uhl said. Over the course of the year, the Daily Mail more than doubled its number of subscribers on TikTok to surpass 20m. Earlier this month, Metro also surpassed the 1m mark and Uhl also highlighted the importance of growth on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.

“This year will be about translating that into real successes for clients and advertisers,” Uhl explained.

He added that Mail Metro Media will increasingly look to focus on data and commerce — a “parallel” growth stream for the business.

Watch the full interview:

Leveraging human insights

Apart from Mail Metro Media’s own growth strategy, Uhl noted that the embedding of AI into working practice will be the key trend in 2025 — an opportunity he sees as both exciting but also risky.

“[AI] will enable efficiencies in scale that we have probably never seen before,” said Uhl. “But there is a danger if we don’t invest in the human layer that sits across it, that looks at governance and checking work.”

He argued that publishers like Mail Metro Media have long invested in quality control practices and this must be adapted to apply to AI tools used across the entire media and advertising industry.

“Because these tools are so quick to optimise without human decision — we’ve got a real risk that we could damage trust with brands, damage trust with consumers and damage trust with regulators,” Uhl continued.

For Uhl, human collaboration will become increasingly important and teams will need to be structured to put human creativity at the heart of output: “The best ideas are going to come from real human insight, not insight that’s just told to you by some AI bot.”