AgriBriefing – formerly known as Briefing Media – was established in 2012 by Rory Brown and Neil Thackray following the acquisition of Farmers Guardian from UBM for £10m. Brown and Thackray were convinced that the wider media market was overlooking key opportunities in a rush to scale, and a reliance on platforms.
The company has grown rapidly over the past eight years, and now employs over 200 people in the UK, Netherlands, France and the US. AgriBriefing now delivers price reporting, news, analysis, events, data and market intelligence to over 500,000 professionals in 200 countries.
At Making Publishing Pay in February, co-founder and CEO Rory Brown talked about AgriBriefing’s journey, from the initial acquisition of Farmer’s Guardian to its growth into a divested media powerhouse worth £150m.
Shift to subscriptions
Farmers Guardian has been going for over 175 years after starting as a weekly title for farmers in the north. At the point the title was acquired by AgriBriefing, it had 2,500 commercial customers, and was selling 35,000 copies a week, with over 70% of those being sold on the newsstand.
“UBM was scared about what was going to happen,” Brown explained. “They’d seen the subscription market go, the classified and display advertising disappear…whereas we saw the opportunity to buy a great brand with a huge customer base, and all sorts of opportunities to monetise.”
But from day one, Brown knew that the newsstand model was not something they wanted to base a business around. “We had to start transitioning those customers into being subscribers,” he said. “We actively harvested the newsstand subscriptions…we gave them incentives to move across to being subscribers as they were already quite loyal.”
“We’re now at a stage where we have nearly 80% of our customers subscribing on a direct debit relationship, which is very powerful for the business.”
Creating value
Another key to Agribriefing’s success has been their focus on value. Brown outlined the drastic turnaround they implemented in the early days of owning Farmers Guardian. “We’ve always had this view about value in media,” he said. “ So rather than just understanding the profits from media, how do you create value?”
When they first went up to Preston, they met with the 60-strong team of journalists and salespeople. “We sat there and we said, ‘What’s your job? What are you here to do?’”
“‘That’s a stupid question,’ they said. ‘We’re here to produce Farmers Guardian every week.’”
Brown emphasised that they did a fine job, but that more was needed. “We’re going to stop publishing Farmers Guardian in two months time, we’re going to can it,” he told the team. “Our job is not to produce Farmers Guardian. Our job ultimately is to help farmers do their job better, and there are many ways in which we can do that.”
With the assurance of no redundancies, Brown sent the team off to think about what they were going to do without the magazine. “How are you going to add value to farmers?” he asked. “How are you going to find the thing that helps them do their job better?”
The teams went away in different working groups and came back with a wide range of insights and ideas, from farmers’ struggle with red tape to needing access to legal assistance, and small business help, whether in HR or procurement.
“We said, we can do those things. Let’s develop the tools, the services, the data solutions, the partnerships with other people,” said Brown, before adding that they were joking about cancelling the print magazine. “We have to think differently, so breaking the mindset from an industrial process of producing a physical artefact every week on a hamster wheel, into ‘how do we add value for customers?’”
AgriBriefing then focused on developing a number of tools to meet these needs, from a grant checker to see what subsidies were available for farmers, to partnering with legal and buying groups to offer a free legal helpline and buying advice. This allowed the publication to change the conversation around subscriptions.
“We could then start having a conversation with those customers not just as subscribers, but as members, with access to a whole range of other services,” Brown explained. “The magazine was still very powerful, but it was all of the surrounding stuff that allowed us to start presenting the membership proposition with digital services, tools etc.”
Adding value to the subscription has meant that not only can they charge more, but that the revenue per subscriber has increased. According to Flashes and Flames, Farmers Guardian pushed up revenue by 57% in the first four years.
“We started off with around 10,000 subscribers in the old newsstand days, but that’s now up to nearly 20,000.” said Brown. “Those customers pay double the amount for the whole package, and only a small proportion of people actually use all that, but there’s a perception of value in terms of all the other services.”
“It’s important that you understand the presentation of perception of value, as well as the reality.”
Read the rest of this article by Esther Kezia Thorpe on What’s New in Publishing…
