There’s been a lot of new developments within The Irish Times and Irish Examiner Group in the recent year, can you talk to us about the key changes what these mean for agencies and brands?

There really has been, it’s hard to know where to start, but we’ll be sharing all of our new updates in our spring roadshow!   We have aligned our agency teams set up within Media Solutions, previously The Irish Times and the Irish Examiner agency teams have worked separately and in many cases would have been pitching for same publishing budgets, in a time where the market is competitive and complex we believe working together strengthens our market position and offers agencies a more diverse range of commercial opportunities.  Our new set up means that we have organised ourselves around our agency partners in hubs, we still have specialists leading on individual titles but where we see opportunity to leverage our group for a stronger response or proactive idea that’s what we’ll be bringing to the table. Working in this way not only allows us to take the ‘best bits’ and most effective elements of our portfolio for a more powerful offering but it also means we can scale campaigns across our 2.1m weekly group audience (that’s 54% of all Irish Adults!).

What makes your Group’s media solutions offering special – any new innovations you’d like to mention?

When we relaunched breakingnews.ie it was decided that this would be our ‘space for innovation’ our sandbox for trialling and testing new products that if successful we would roll out across the rest of our group.  We’ve had recent success with a suite of new video formats, which uses streaming technology, allowing us to scale video in HD quality in display inventory and report on video metrics.  What’s more the new formats have a lesser impact on the environment, streaming technology vs traditional downloading reduces data transfer which is a major driver on the internet’s pollution. Sustainability is high on our agenda as it is with most brands and we work with credible partners in this space across the year, so it’s brilliant to be able to offer ‘greener ad formats’ that align with not only our overall objectives but with the objectives many brands now have.  We are currently working on a new digital innovation Discover which we’ll be sharing with our agencies shortly. Combining this, with the recent launch of our first party offering Audience Solutions, means our campaigns are tailored, trustworthy and transparent, in terms of results, reach and overall potential.

You’re relatively new to the Irish Times group, tell us about your background and what attracted you to the Irish Times?

That’s right. My previous role was at The Guardian as a Director in the investment team and prior to that I was at Dennis Publishing where I started my career as a classified sales executive. For me, it’s always been about belief in the titles I represent and I’m grateful to have worked on some of the worlds best.  The Big Issue was the game changer in my career, working on a publication that strives to make a genuine difference to society, that every single edition produced has to be the absolute best it can be for the vendors to sell. From then it’s always been important to me that the titles I work on have values & purpose that I believe in and that’s what I see in The Irish Times and the Irish Examiner group, journalism that’s campaigning, that’s trustworthy and that holds the powerful to account .