Reach sets out to improve UX as it drives Studio and ecommerce strategy

The Media Leader Interview
Reach’s new CRO discusses how the publisher is improving its UX, driving digital growth video ecommerce and its content studio, and why agencies should lean back into news.
Amid long-standing complaints over poor user and advertiser experiences on ad-supported news titles, Reach has been rolling out changes.
“I think the criticism around UX was fair,” admits Emma Callaghan, the new chief revenue officer for Reach. “Basically the reason that we had to put more ads on the page was the loss of the referral traffic; we had to make decisions as a business to protect the business and protect journalists. But I absolutely agree that there was a point when the UX was pretty poor.”
Speaking to The Media Leader in Reach’s London offices in Canary Wharf, Callaghan reveals the publisher has been rolling out a new website platform that aims to improve page and ad load, prevents ads from making pages “jump around”, and reduces the number of ads served to users.
The effort to improve the began last summer with titles like the Liverpool Echo, Manchester Evening News, Mirror and Star, with a wider rollout expected to complete through the rest of the year.
“We’ve taken a bit of a hit on the revenue so that we are moving in the right direction,” she says. “Anyone that would go on our sites now would agree there’s a marked change from 18 months, two years ago.”
The long-term aim for Callaghan under her new remit is to drive greater value via more direct relationships with advertisers and higher-quality ad products. But it’s a tightrope — the lion’s share of Reach’s revenues are driven by advertising, so it’s “about getting that balance right” between quality and quantity in the short-term.
“We’re not alone in this”, Callaghan adds, referring to other publishers similarly struggling to right for ad revenue. Advertisers have in recent years moved away from supporting publishers, following audiences to platforms and demonitising well-trafficked articles if they are deemed “brand unsafe” by keyword blocklists that have often been characterised by critics as overly blunt.
At Cannes last month, Luxottica director of global media Caroline Proto frankly stated the brand is “spending less on news” because of the “current climate” meaning news outlets are covering stories that are “not safe for our brand affinity”.
Such a posture is tough to swallow for Callaghan, who while understanding of the criticism over Reach’s UX, thinks it’s a bit rich to hear advertisers complain given their own decisions to move away from news have led publishers to make difficult choices about how many ads to put on a given page.
“If I knew that I could clean up the sites tomorrow because we were going to get the investment that I believe we deserve, we would do it,” she says. “All we can do, I think, is keep giving the advertisers and agencies the right reasons to invest with us”.
A new leaf?
Callaghan was named chief revenue officer of Reach in April after a month as interim CRO earlier in the year. She replaced Piers North, who became CEO of the UK’s largest publisher following the resignation of Jim Mullen at the end of March.
Callaghan, who has been at Reach for 10 years and who previously worked agency-side at Omnicom Media Group agency PHD, tells The Media Leader she’s enjoyed getting “under the skin” of the business in greater depth than she had as executive director of advertising and strategy, describing her first few months as CRO as “like I’m back at school”.
“Sometimes, when you’re in sales, you’re out with agencies, you’re talking about marketing camapaigns, and you can become quite removed from the engine that’s in Reach,” she says.
She credits the publisher with allowing for a “great approach” to work-life balance despite the expanded remit, with flexibility in place for her to take care of a young child even while moving up in seniority. Still, she jokes: “I don’t know how I had so much time before.”
In fiscal year 2024, Reach’s revenues declined 5.3% to £538.6m, driven primarily by a 7.3% decline in print, which still comprises three-fourths of total revenues. Digital revenue, on the other hand, returned to growth last year (+2.1% to £130m).
Callaghan tells The Media Leader Reach is hard at work adapting its business strategy under new leadership as the publisher remains focused on “delivering sustainable digital growth”.
“It’s an exciting time for us, under new leadership, to start an evolution of our journey,” she says.
A strategy for ‘sustainable growth’
Apart from delivering improvements to the user and advertising experience, Reach is looking to drive stronger revenue diversification through a mix of ecommerce plays and direct sales with its branded content multimedia Studio, which launched last year.
Yimbly, the publisher’s marketplace which soft-launched earlier this year, is already “performing well”, Callaghan describes. She likens the effort to Next, but focused primarily on homewares. Its top product vertical has been gardening, and the publisher is keen to conduct further research on how ads placed against Reach titles drive actions on Yimbly.
Meanwhile, Reach’s OK! magazine is also leaning into ecommerce with the launch of its Beauty Box product earlier this year. Callaghan boasts the Box was “one of the most trending beauty products on TikTok Shop for a couple of days”. When asked whether this was Reach’s standard of success, she replied: “It’s not the only standard, but it’s one of the things that we’re monitoring and it’s a good metric that we’re viral”.
In all, ecommerce revenue grew 38% year on year last year.
The Studio also has a high degree of business potential, according to Callaghan, with the current focus centred around producing more “quality long-form YouTube-first content” for brands across the Reach portfolio.
One example of the studio’s output is All Out, which has different verticals for fighting, Rugby League and gaming, with All Out Football launching 1 August with a weekly programme.
Studio revenue will generally be driven by direct sales as opposed to via ad revenue derived from platforms like YouTube or other social video leaders like TikTok and Instagram Reels.
“I have confidence that we can create enough of these sponsorable properties”, Callaghan says. “From an indirect space, that’s more long-term. We’re not going to start making loads of money from YouTube overnight, but as we grow our subscribers and grow our scale, that’s where we’ll start to see some of that flow through”.
‘Can’t rely’ on platforms
Reach knows as well as any publisher that becoming too reliant on platforms for audience reach and revenue generation is a Faustian bargain. The publisher has repeatedly blamed the likes of Facebook for sharp and sudden decreases in referral traffic, with Jim Mullen remarking in 2023 that platform owner Meta was “choking trusted news“.
Thankfully for Reach, its overall portfolio hasn’t been as negatively impacted by Google’s AI Overviews as one might think, according to Callaghan, who notes Google Discover has helped mitigate declines in referral traffic from search.
“At the moment, we’re sort of okay,” she says. “That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be prepared for what this could look like in the future”.
She continues: “Everyone is relying on platforms for audience reach. It’s not just us. Look at the way the TV businesses are pivoting; all media businesses are somewhat reliant on social platforms because essentially all of us want to get our content in front of as many eyeballs or eardrums as possible.
“Given what we’ve been through before with Facebook, we are better prepared now than we ever have been — we’re trying to grow our direct audience as much as possible.”
Reach turns to WhatsApp to drive audience growth and engagement
Reach has a combined 9m subscribers across its titles via direct outreach like newsletters and WhatsApp channels (also owned by Meta), which helps provide more consistent audience acquisition.
So while Callaghan is bullish about using video platforms to drive incremental audience growth and create a more holistic commercial offering for sponsors, she’s “not betting the house” on indirect revenue from platforms.
“We have to keep up with platforms, we have to have products in that space, but we can’t rely on that,” she says. “We shouldn’t be complacent about our revenue”.
The pitch to agencies: ‘Where people live’
Of course, it’s not enough to simply create more ad inventory, sponsorship and commerce options for brands. You have to convince them the news is the right place for them to be.
“There can’t be any more research out there about the value of publishers,” says Callaghan, who laments the evidence of news’ effectiveness is “not necessarily being heeded”.
As such, her goal for the next few months is to ingratiate herself and the Reach sales team within the community of media planners. Measurement and effectiveness are thus top of mind to be able to prove the business case for publishing.
“We need to make sure we’re on the front foot with agencies, that we’re seeing the right people”, she tells The Media Leader.
“A lot of the media industry talks about the fact that investing in publishing is the right thing to do, and obviously yes it is — for society — but that’s not enough of a reason for Mr Unilever. So we have to talk about how we can also deliver outcomes, how we can deliver the results that they need. We have to make sure every conversation we have captures that”.
Reach is thus leaning into its wide portfolio of local titles as a way for advertisers to reach sought-after communities, with Callaghan referring to the local business opportunity as “significant”, be it from global brands wanting to speak to granular audiences or local businesses wanting to advertise in premium spaces.
Reach soft-launched a new positioning to agencies last year as being a destination “where people live”, but Callaghan warns the London bubble risks stifling growth.
She suggests publishers, like many other media owners dubbed as “traditional” by industry figures, are easy targets for negative bias, admitting: “We don’t see many planners engage with our content at all”, referring to young twentysomething agency staffers she suggests probably spend more time on TikTok than reading local newspapers.
She adds that Reach faces “some of the snobbery in the industry” over the perceived quality of its editorial product across its various titles. Callaghan praises recent important reporting conducted on the Liverpool FC parade incident by Reach titles like the Liverpool Echo and Mirror, and notes that its outlets have produced nearly 3,000 pieces of local court coverage this year, a huge scale of local interest journalism that otherwise might go uncovered.
“Defining the quality of the content, different people are going to have different perspectives on that,” she says.
“We’re reaching a mass market audience across the UK. Some of that content might not be what a 25-year-old planner in London might read, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not quality content”.