Gorkana meets Rupert Heseltine

26 February 2010 | written by Ciar Byrne

At the start of our interview, Rupert Heseltine gallantly offers me one of the better chairs and takes an uncomfortably low sofa for himself. He has just moved into a new office, but despite a view over the rooftops of Hammersmith, his new abode is, like the man himself, rather modest.

The office swap coincides with his appointment as Executive Chairman of Haymarket Media Group, replacing his father Michael, who set up the company in 1957.

While Heseltine Junior is now responsible for the day to day running of Haymarket, Lord Heseltine remains Chairman of the holding company and still occupies the office next door to his son.

Haymarket today publishes a wide range of business, customer and consumer magazine brands from the advertising bible Campaign to the market-leading motoring magazine What Car?. The company has offices in the UK, the US, Germany, India, Hong Kong and Australia, as well as licensing its titles with more than 80 publishers in 42 territories worldwide, and running exhibitions and live events.

From a display rack set against one wall, Heseltine hands me a battered green 1961 edition of The Directory of Graduate Opportunities for Qualified Men, one of the earliest Haymarket publications. Then, to demonstrate how far the company has come, he picks up a glossy coffee table tome recently produced by Haymarket’s customer publishing division for India’s Scorpio cars.

Following one of the toughest years the media has ever faced, he is optimistic. “The opportunities are limitless, as long as we never have to go through 2009 again, I’ll be happy,” he says.

Last autumn, Haymarket took the decision to restructure its media division with the loss of 18 editorial jobs. The print version of Media Week closed after nearly 25 years, and the title’s editor Steve Barrett departed, although the brand still exists online. The monthly title Revolution, meanwhile, was folded into Marketing as a quarterly.

Heseltine describes the impact of the recession on the company as “incredibly difficult”, adding: “Having to make people redundant is the worst thing any manager has to do in their career. It’s horrible. Closing magazines, yeah, that’s very difficult, but we are a commercial organisation and you have to make business decisions.” He points out 78,000 users accessed Media Week’s advertising-funded website last month, compared to the 15,000 who paid for the magazine at the height of its circulation.

Despite hard times, he does not think journalism is in crisis. “We’re going through change. Is change crisis? I don’t believe so.”

He is confident advertising will return. “Advertising will come back over time. What nobody knows yet is where advertisers will put that money. It’s the effectiveness of your advertising dollar that’s going to drive the change.”

Haymarket’s approach to the new media landscape of social networking sites, iPhones and e-readers, is to treat its titles as brands which can be delivered over multiple platforms. “About five years ago we changed our name from Haymarket Publishing to Haymarket Media Group,” explains Heseltine. “That signified a big change in the perception of what we do. We now are a company that has approximately 100 different brands across the world in about 21 different markets.”

“Once, you would publish a magazine and it would go on a shelf and you would start all over again. Now at the heart of our brand we have the magazine, but then it will go out via 20 different forms on the internet – on a website, via an email newsletter, via Twitter, on somebody else’s site where we have syndicated that content. Most of our products or brands have got awards attached to them, conferences, forums, exhibitions, special projects divisions.”

Haymarket’s What Car?, for example, has existed as a magazine for nearly 40 years, and is now also a popular motoring review website, with a spin-off new car guide and used car price guide, a recently-launched Indian edition and licensed editions in Italy, Russia and Kazakhstan.

“We take in media in different formats at different times of day,” insists Heseltine, recounting how the previous evening he bought two magazines on his journey home, went online to buy cinema tickets, went for dinner with his wife, stopped at a bookshop on the way to the cinema to buy a book, watched the film, went home and read a newspaper.

When it comes to online charging, however, Heseltine is more cautious than some of his rivals. He reveals, “We recently did a survey of our online users. We asked them all the same questions and every market gave a different answer. There will always be those who just want the news. There will be others who will go down deeper. Then there will be those who say ‘this information is so important to me that I will pay’.”

“It might not be a financial payment; it may be a form of information exchange. People may want a subscription to the archive of the magazine because it’s got data they need to do their job. People may be totally happy to pay to read something on an e-reader, or an iPhone app. There’s no one solution fits all.”

A handful of Haymarket’s specialist business titles, such as Windpower Monthly, already require readers to pay to access their websites, but charging for other sites is not a priority.

Heseltine says, “I look at my competitors, a huge number of them are putting content behind a gateway. Then you get to a point where everybody is putting everything behind a gateway and then someone will open up a gateway.”

The latest set of financial results posted on Haymarket’s website date back to 2007 when the company made a £31.7m profit before tax on a turnover of £247m. When I ask Heseltine whether the company made a profit in 2009, he laughs and replies “of course”, explaining that being a private, family-run company has given the business greater flexibility to ride the recession.

“It makes us quite agile. It means the staff can have access to senior management any time they want. We make decisions pretty quickly.”

When he handed over power in December 2009, Lord Heseltine sent a cautiously upbeat farewell message to staff, saying: “The mood has lightened and it is possible to argue that the worst is over. Over the last month or so, trading in many divisions has been better than we forecast.”

His son speaks of “quiet optimism”. “One swallow doesn’t make a summer is the expression that needs to be used. Our budgets are nowhere near where they were in the height of 06/07, but they have just taken a step forward.”

After joining Haymarket at 26, Heseltine worked his way up from classified sales executive, to publisher, to research and development. He started out on the BBC Gardeners’ World Live exhibition and has worked on What Hifi?, Sky Sports magazine, Gramophone, the launch of Revolution and the launch of PR Week in the USA among others. He also helped to run the company’s Indian business, which has its head office in Mumbai, overseeing the launch of Campaign, PrintWeek and Stuff in India. “I walk the floor,” he insists.

Over the next five years, he would like to see double digit growth in Haymarket’s overseas operations. In the UK, he wants to “take our brands and make them bigger and stronger, diversify in terms of revenue streams and the editorial products we put out – we could be in online TV, in radio”.

How can media companies position themselves to benefit from an economic upturn? Heseltine’s formula is: “Keep very close to your market, stay close to the people you write about or sell products to, spend a lot of time looking at what you produce, at how it helps readers do their job better and make sure that every word affects the reader in a positive way.”

Training journalists to be multi-skilled is also crucial, he believes. “Our journalists will go out and research a feature and from that write a news story, a comment piece, they might do a video blog, a podcast. They take their ability to ask the right questions and present the results in different formats.”

When Lord Heseltine announced he was stepping back from the day to day running of the business, The Guardian questioned whether if The Directory of Graduate Opportunities had been published today it would have featured many openings in the media.

“Unfortunately it’s always tough for those trying to get jobs in a recession,” admits Heseltine junior. But he adds, “As soon as people start hiring, the opportunities will roar back. Some of those graduates will be part of the entrepreneurial surge we will see as we come out of the recession.”

He enthuses, “Haymarket’s energy has come from those young graduates who have started at the very bottom and bashed out phone calls, that’s given us great strength and I look forward to more of it.”

Heseltine is confident that even in this digital age, printed magazines will be with us for decades to come. “I think in 20 years time there will still be magazines. What they’ll look like I don’t know, but if I go back into the archive of Haymarket magazines from 20 years ago, they’ve come a long way.”