Ben Hughes, Worldwide Advertising Director, Financial Times

“The Asia Pacific region -- where we launched our Asia edition in 2003 -- over the last three years has become very important and it is growing very rapidly. And that’s really where India fits in, because clearly there is no barrier as far as language is concerned and we believe there is a huge amount of potential not only in terms of circulation numbers and readership, but following on from that, in terms of advertising sales.”

After a degree in Modern Languages from Jesus College, Oxford, Ben Hughes, Worldwide Advertising Director, Financial Times, taught for two years at Radley College before taking up a post at the Sorbonne University in Paris. From there he made the strange but career-making step into advertisement sales at Playboy magazine before being employed at The Financial Times Paris office in 1983, running the sales and marketing for the newspaper in France. In 1987 he became Publishing Director in France (when the FT opened its printing site in Roubaix, Northern France) and became European Advertisement Director in 1991 based in London. He was then made responsible for all the newspaper’s commercial activities in Continental Europe and was appointed to the Newspaper Management Board in March of 1994. He became Worldwide Advertisement Sales Director in 1995.

In a freewheeling conversation with exchange4media’s Shanta Saikia, Hughes talks about Financial Times as a brand, the challenges and opportunities in advertising sales in a market increasingly encroached upon by the Internet.

Q. Partnership with Business Standard.

We have a partnership with the Business Standard, we would like to continue to consider that particular partnership. We are very proud of this partnership, which has lasted for some time. We believe that Business Standard operates in the same kind of niche readership in which we want to operate and we want to make a huge success out of India like we’ve made a success out of the other markets that we have gone in to. .

Regarding printing in India, to do that, I think you need to have your product available on Day A, and at the moment we’re not. Of course we are on the website, but that’s different. But in terms of getting copies of the Financial Times newspaper into people’s hands on the day of the publication, that’s something which is very important to us. It doesn’t make sense to me that I am sitting here with a copy of yesterday’s FT, it should be today’s. That should be the case in all of the major cities around the world, and we believe that Mumbai and Delhi certainly fit into this particular list. So we will continue in terms of possibility of printing in India.

I have seen a lot of changes in the advertising world. Most recently a huge amount of centralization, where most of the major media buying agencies – and there are not that many of them left now – seem to be centralizing most of their media buying in the London market. In terms of how I have seen the world of media change over the last 23 years, I think the current time we are in the most dynamic period of that particular change. The Internet is here, has been here for many years already and there are two things worth noting here – first of all we have to be very, very wary that we don’t think, and I certainly don’t believe, that this is signaling the end of newspapers, I think a lot of people were talking about the end of newspapers five, 10, 15 years ago, I think that newspapers will continue to play an important role in people’s media consumption, but there is absolutely no doubt at all that the Internet is something that we need to embrace as media companies. .

I think the big change is that in the newspaper, it is the editor who dictates the content to people and says ‘here is our daily offering, this is what we offer to you today to read’. As far as a website is concerned, people decide themselves, they choose what it is they want to pick out from various sites, and not only do they choose but they can choose to be incredibly interactive, and these days with the blogs and the Internet communities that are being created, people can not only interact with journalists, but they can also interact with one another. I believe more and more communities will be created so that people will have the opportunity to interact with one another on topics that interest them. So, I think there is first of all a wonderful opportunity, but I do feel we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. .

To give you an example, at Financial Times, 90 per cent of our revenues come from our print business – whether that’s the newspaper or the magazines. So the remaining 10 per cent of our revenues – and it’s a significant part and it’s growing by about 30 per cent a year, I am talking about our dotcom advertising revenues. But there is not doubt that the biggest chunk of our business at the moment is coming from print. The challenge of all media groups who are in the same position as ours is really how do we embrace correctly the Internet, how do we make sure that we are able to offer an integrated platform to advertise and to readers. .

The other thing – how do we make money – because for the moment, our advertising yields – the amount of value we get, the amount of revenue we get per page – is really quite significant in the print business, but the advertising revenue yield from our dotcom business is not particularly large. So we have to find a way, either by inventing new revenue streams or actually proving to our customers that we are giving them proper value for their money, therefore we will be able to charge more. And then of course the question is how quickly the print business will migrate to online. You can see it already happening in the classifieds, an awful lot of recruitment advertising is now moving from the print products to the online products. And whilst our print recruitment business is still very robust, we already have a classified recruitment online business, which is starting to grow very, very quickly.

First of all I haven’t been here for 10 years. Secondly, I want to see our friends in Business Standard. I want to push forward our plan to develop the newspaper in the Indian market. And I wanted to thank the people who have been supporting Financial Times loyally as advertisers over the past few years and in my role as global advertising director to persuade them to continue advertising in the years to come. A typical business day really! We believe the Indian market to have huge potential for us. And again the fact that English language is not a problem here, the fact that it is the language of business says to me that we have a huge potential here not just in terms of circulation but also in terms of advertising sales.

We are actually one of the few global publications to be delivered to our readers on a daily basis. Maybe I should say a few words about our competitors to try and explain that a little more. From a daily newspaper point of view, the Wall Street Journal is clearly our competitor. Although their circulation is really very heavily based in the US, and most recently they have taken the decision to downsize their European and Asian content and produce it on a compact format. We are the same size worldwide and our circulation is very evenly spread. The other competitor that I should mention is The International Herald Tribune, which again is more perhaps of a traveling business read. Again, they do not circulate their newspaper in the US. .

So we are a truly a global brand delivered on daily basis, part of our uniqueness is our pink newspaper, but I think more important from the content point of view is our analysis of world events, financial events. We want to cover things in a totally independent way. In our magazines the competitors include The Economist, BusinessWeek again has withdrawn from the international market place and they are delivering just their international edition. So I think we are unique in the sense that we are a global brand, delivered on a daily basis, printed in 23 different print sites, we also have a global website, and I think we offer a unique perspective, perhaps a British perspective. I am not sure, but many of our competitors do that, the Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune are certainly very American in their perspective.

So the Asia Pacific region, where we launched our Asia edition in 2003, over the last three years has become very important and it is growing very rapidly. And that’s really where India fits in, because clearly there is no barrier as far as language is concerned and we believe there is a huge amount of potential not only in terms of circulation numbers and readership, but following on from that in terms of advertising sales. .

So we think that the Indian market is a very fruitful one. We have been operating in India now for sometime, we have a representative here, MediaScope’s Marzban Patel and his network of companies throughout India. We have been producing special reports on India now for many, many years. We started this year, for example, by producing a special report on India and Globalisation, which coincided with the Davos Summit. We will be doing another special later on in April called India Infrastructure, and what we are trying to do is basically find topics, which we think have a global resonance and clearly India and Globalisation is one, Infrastructure is another. And we are able to sell advertising on back of that. I think we are doing that very successfully.

I think you have to offer something different. Although having said that, what we found in other markets – you can France or Germany or any of the European markets – people actually continue to read their first newspaper of choice, but if they want an international perspective, if they want to know what is happening more broadly across the financial market, then they would choose to read either the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal or The Economist or The International Herald Tribune. What I am trying to say is there is room for both. There is clearly a lot of competition from reader time, there is a lot of competition from even radio, television, the Internet. .

But there has proven to be a lot of opportunity in all these markets that we have decided to print in. .

I don’t think we become a threat to the local newspapers. They have carved out their own markets already. I just think we offer a different, perhaps a little more into the senior level, the C Suite level. And after all these are the people we are trying to reach most of all, because these are the people our advertisers are trying to reach. They want to read a newspaper that offers a different perspective.

I think it is a question of perspective. I think it is a question of credibility, which is not to say the Indian newspapers don’t have that caliber of people. National newspapers focus far more readily on national news. What we try and do at Financial Times is to interpret what is happening on the national on a global scale. If this is happening in a particular company, what does this mean for you business globally. And I think that’s the different perspective that we offer.

Your guess is as good as mine!

Financial Times is very much a global brand and we want to be a global brand across all platforms, whether that is as a newspaper or as a website. We have a very good performing website – www.ft.com. We also have a stable of magazines. We have a magazine aptly called ‘How to Spend it’ and we produce 20 editions of those on an annual basis. We run a separate magazine in the UK called the ‘FT Magazine’. But more and more we are trying to offer to our clients a way in to the Financial Times brand. I don’t believe in scale or indeed on a regional scale, because we are advertising in the UK edition, the European edition, in the US, in Asia, or indeed global. So we want to be a fully integrated media global brand and I think we are well on the way to be that. We print in 23 print sites around the world and we now actually sell more copies of the newpaper outside the UK than we do within the UK. I think we are the only global newspaper to be able to claim that we do that. Our circulation is also very evenly spread, we sell a 130,000 copies in the UK, a 130,000 or so in Europe, a 130,000 copies or so across the US and about 40,000 in the Asia Pacific region

We have people who are specialized of course in selling dotcom advertising, there are particularly in the UK, but I am sure they exist also here in India. What we are finding more and more when you go and see a large advertising that these people not only want to talk about advertising in print, but they are also very willing to talk about advertising online and in print at the same time. I’ll give you an example, you are aware of the Mittal-Arcelor takeover bid and Arcelor ran some advertising in our newspaper. First of all the conversation was about advertising in the newspaper, but shortly they were also advertising online as well because they realized they could reach a similar and also a slightly different audience by advertising online. .

What is interesting for me is to see how our competitors structure themselves as well. I think for us, as a global product and as an integrated global brand where we are trying to offer different solutions… I have people in each of the regions who report to me. We also need to be an integrated sales force so that our people can sell not only in print, but online as well. I think that’s very important. If you have separate teams, then you won’t succeed. And it not only works on the commercial side of the business, it also works on the editorial side of the business, too. Our editors, our journalists write not only for the paper but also for the website. .

However, some people still believe that having separate sales forces for dotcom and print products are a must.