Mel McVeigh, the PPA’s Head of Digital, is leading the Association’s push to help publishers embrace a consumer-first and product-oriented mindset. She argues that the future lies in ‘liquid content’ – stories seamlessly adapted across formats – and shares some of her key learnings from a recent media-focused playbook produced with Enders Analysis.
When the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) appointed Mel McVeigh as its first Head of Digital, her remit involved being responsible for creating and implementing Association’s member-focused digital strategy. That’s quite a task, particularly given the speed with which the industry’s own thinking around membership is changing.
However, despite the scale of the challenge, McVeigh approached it pragmatically. She explains: “For me, [the question] was actually really simple, how to bring customer-first thinking into a publisher’s mindset?’”
Mel McVeigh is this week’s guest on The Publisher Podcast. Listen below, or find us in your podcast player of choice:
She states that, regardless of the radical shifts in consumer behaviour that have typified the past few years, there are fundamentals that remain constant. “Audiences want content, they want great stories, they want trusted editorial. That doesn’t change whether it’s in a print format, podcast or website. I think it’s changing the way these stories are told and consumed that was really critical.”
To provide evidence for this, the PPA recently partnered with Enders Analysis to produce the Rewriting the Media Playbook report around consumer attitudes to publisher content. Mel says that Enders’ Douglas McCabe “challenged us on the exam questions” that led to the report ultimately delivering insights that the team didn’t expect.
The first of those findings is that consumers are more platform agnostic than expected. McVeigh says: “Brand is everything, and brand in the context of media, is also content, trust and identity. That hasn’t changed since the beginning of time, but the way that’s framed in a consumer’s mind is shifting.”
In practice, this means that simply having a storied history does not necessarily translate to trust. Consumers are now likely to trust individual content creators as much as a legacy media brand depending on where and how their content is presented.
Is the website dying?
The Enders report suggested that the website as a destination has lost its primacy, though McVeigh is quick to point out that claims of its ‘death’ are – like print – exaggerated. Instead, the rise of social platforms has enabled an interest-based approach to seeking out information among consumers. That means publications that take an inch-deep and mile-wide attitude to coverage are often losing out to speciality publications and individuals.
McVeigh says: “Often the topic in your mind is very niche. I’m interested in X, and so I will be searching for that, right? I’m not necessarily looking for five different topics at once. And so [the] brands that are performing well are those that really own their niche and their community.”
But, while legacy brands are not enjoying the same immediate benefits they once did, they are still able to leverage their expertise with branding across a number of channels.
McVeigh explains: “At a macro and a story level, you can really identify the brands. The New York Times looks like the New York Times. The Atlantic looks like the Atlantic. There is a design language as much as a content language occurring across formats.” As a result, “whether you’re on YouTube, social, or the magazine” branding is instantly recognisable.
McVeigh says that consumers have a holistic relationship with a brand’s content wherever it happens to be. It’s an example of what she calls ‘liquid content’ – the same ingredients, just conforming to the particular glass, jug, or beaker that the consumer currently happens to be using.
“I think that some of the best media organisations are doing it that way,” she says, “or at least that’s how it comes across to the consumer. It’s distributed in the format and the platform as needed, but it’s actually architected at a programme level.”
She thinks, however, that approaches to content creation and dissemination will undoubtedly continue to change in the future. And that will in turn require new approaches to everything from commissioning to monetisation.
Even the parts of digital publishing we have long taken for granted, like the website, will not be around forever: “Will an article that is driven by a URL exist in the future?” she wonders. “If traffic is decreasing and declining, our definition of a website looks like will change.”
Product thinking
McVeigh argues that to maximise the impact of new ways of content distribution, a more product-oriented mindset is needed. To some extent, that will require tearing up the rulebook; what once worked for a destination-based publishing strategy won’t necessarily mean success in 2025.
She explains: “[For instance] if the website is dying, what does the new website experience look like? People are asking ‘where do we begin? How do we experiment? And how do we enable our teams to manage with this change?’”
A switch to a more product-oriented mindset may be underway at many media businesses, but is far from universally implemented. McVeigh says smaller publishers, for example, don’t have product teams – and often outsource all aspects of their design and tech stack. That presents a challenge, but it’s one that can be mitigated by knowledge sharing throughout the industry.
“You need to understand what kind of content [the consumer] wants. And then the product thinking comes around, how you then create a wrapper.”
The PPA’s report with Enders was designed to be provocative. It was intended to galvanise discussion – and subsequent experimentation. McVeigh notes that it is an expression of the knowledge-sharing responsibility of the PPA and its members. Going back to her own remit as head of digital, she argues that a shift in mindset is well underway – and for the better:
“The feedback was really positive. It’s like, ‘okay, what next? How do we do this?’. From the festival [we saw] the buoyancy and the optimism that this is a solvable problem – not an easy one, but definitely solvable.”
Listen to the full conversation with Mel McVeigh in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast above, or wherever you find podcasts.
