Pacific Magazines restructures commercial team in effort to ‘future-proof’ the company
Pacific Magazines has restructured its commercial team in the first major move under the company’s new leadership of CEO Gereurd Roberts and commercial director Prue Cox.
The changes to the team will see the publishing company offer a total network approach, with teams selling the whole portfolio of Pacific Magazines’ print, digital, social and experiential assets while a new team of dedicated project managers “will ensure seamless pre- and post-sales implementation and integration across channel”.
Cox joined Pacific Magazines on July 18, replacing Gereurd Roberts who was appointed Pacific Magazines’ general manager of food, family and home before taking on the CEO role at the end of September.
Prue Cox: “It’s a bold, strategic future-proofing change to our sales team”
Speaking with Mumbrella, Prue Cox said: “It is a bold, strategic future-proofing change to our sales team. We have spent quite a bit of time in market understanding where things have shifted to and what we need to do in order to set ourselves up for the future to position ourselves as the new Pacific.
“This is why I took the role. For me it was about the opportunity to take the positive Pacific sentiment that we have in market and driving that forward into the new era of where we’re going.
“It’s very timely for us considering the re-definition of our commercial partnership with Yahoo7. We have taken back the management of the brand websites at Pacific and are looking at how we can work with Yahoo7 alongside that. The changes are about strengthening our alignment with Seven West Media. No one else in market can match the power of Seven West Media. For us, we’re working closely to have shared goals and a stronger process.”
Three new teams form the new commercial offering: strategy and solutions offers an insights-led framework for innovation, ideation and creativity; client services offers a focus on maximum market coverage, establishing strategic marketing partnerships and immersion into client and agency businesses and commercial operations is designed to ensure seamless end-to-end campaign delivery and maximum ROI for clients.
Cox said: “The key changes for us is a total portfolio approach and making sure we have a 360-view on how we’re working and responding to our clients, looking at multiple channels and multiple brands.
“The strategy around the three core teams is really aligning strategies, operations and systems and making sure everything we do has the client at the core of it.”
The commercial shake-up sees Nova Entertainment’s digital commercial director Nicole Bence join the company as commercial solutions and strategy director.
Nicole Bence Joins Pacific Magazines from Nova Entertainment
News Corp’s sales operations manager for NewsLifeMedia, Roslyn Batty, joins the team as commercial operations director.
“We’re really investing in this structure, bringing in new talent and retaining the fantastic talent we have here is very important,” said Cox.
The restructure follows on from the publisher reviewing its offering with clients and agencies in market.
“They wanted one point of contact. For us we have worked very much in a brand silo in how we’re structured and that sometimes meant we’re not as easy to work with as we’d like. Clients are really demanding increased speed to doing business and also ease of doing business. They are actually demanding more strategic-led solutions, really focused on in-depth consumer insights,” Cox said.
“They want media partners that complement their business structures as well and again make us easier to work with us.”
Pacific Magazines will also open a new commercial studio in November which has been established with the aim to deliver bespoke content and creative media solutions to commercial partners.
On how the studio is different to Pacific Magazine’s custom arm, Cox said: “Pacific+ is a custom business and has many key partnerships out there. The studio is focused on digital and print, delivering for our commercial clients. In the past we’ve excelled in the delivery of our creative print work for our clients, that will expand to encompass digital solutions but doing a lot more not only in the paid space but also in the owned and earned space as well.”
An appointment to the head of the new commercial studio is due to be announced later this year.
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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