Last week my team and I hosted the inaugural Media Leaders Lunch.
The event, by all accounts, was a tremendous success (and if you attended and didn’t enjoy it please let me know.)
If you missed it, you missed a good one.
Why?
Well, numerous reasons – for which I can thank my excellent editorial and events teams, great venue, great food, great audience, great speakers.
But it was more than that.
I both sensed and gathered from my networking a new spirit of collaboration amongst media owners, clients and agencies. Nothing to be overly celebrated just yet, but definitely something palpable that I haven’t felt for a while.
It was probably started by the excellent Jan Gooding, a leading CMO and regular Mediatel News columnist, calling for everyone in the room to work together to achieve better results for all interested parties in the advertising mix.
This was then backed up by the editors panel being comprised of three super smart women, who were:
– neither of the generation that were dismissive and ignorant of the digital future
– nor so enthralled and enraptured by the tricks coming out of Silicon Valley that they were prepared to ignore commercial realities.
Instead they offered an erudite understanding of the way they need to monetise the different segments of their audience.
This new generation of media leaders at our national newsbrands were, of course, joined and complemented at the event by new agency leaders – people like Jo Sutherland of Carat coming in straight off the back of her Vodafone win; Nick Maddison at the consistently successful the7stars; and new multifaceted leaders on the commercial side, people like the ex-agency and press guy Stuart Mays of Global now guiding the worlds of both audio and outdoor; and Chris Forrester, ex Spotify and Exterion now leading the Telegraph revenue team.
As I looked around the room I felt the industry was in good hands despite the wider economy’s political woes.
I was delighted to see this.
Because at Mediatel, as well as a being an events company, a publisher, a software house, and an internet pioneer, we are also a business that still proudly sits at the heart of the UK media industry and is dependent on the success of that business for our own growth plans.
I recently shared my vision for Mediatel with our people.
“Bloomberg for the Media Industry.”
Bloomberg describe themselves as the central nervous system for the financial industry.
If we can replicate this for a buoyant UK media industry I for one will be very pleased and gratified.
Greg Grimmer is the CEO of Mediatel
