PPA: A world of ‘trusted content for specialist communities’

by Shailesh Solanki, Andy Marino

The Professional Publishers Association (PPA) Festival is acknowledged to be the biggest annual gathering of the publishing sector – both consumer-focussed and B2B, offering networking and learning opportunities to delegates from across the entire industry. This year’s festival (held for the first time at Whitbread’s original eighteenth-century building, The Brewery on Chiswell Street, London) spanned four stages – Product, Audience, Content and the Together stage – where a number of important insights in areas to help businesses thrive were shared by over 70 speakers from major publishers and media organisations.

In her opening address, PPA CEO Sajeeda Merali highlighted how members of the association have a vast reach with both the public and business, connecting with 84 per cent of the population: “We feed peoples passions and interests, from Fashion and Food to Fishing and Photography,” said Merali, describing how the sector supplies trusted content for specialist communities, that commands attention and drives deep engagement, unseen by other sectors of mass media.

Indeed, with social media and Big Search suffering reputational travails after several decades of seemingly sweeping all before them, there is a surge of interest in and popularity of professionally authored, properly researched and authoritative journalism, often also cherished in print, as private citizens and businesses re-evaluate just how vital objective niche expertise and communications can be:

“We serve expert B2B insights to professionals leading some of the biggest industries shaping our world – be that Technology, Financial services, agriculture or the health sector,” said Merali.

“The work of our highly respected editors and world-class writers, as well as our leading marketers, product and data experts, give us insight, create content, and devise experiences that help people to navigate the world around them – on both a personal and a professional level.”

A changing UK

Shelina Janmohamed, head of Islamic Marketing at Ogilvy, convened an extremely interesting panel that discussed the opportunities offered by the changing demographics of the UK

WPP, Ogilvy’s parent company, had commissioned  a big report, the Consumer Equality Equation. It was a two year-long collaboration between WPP, GroupM and Ogilvy Consulting with original research from Kantar, BAV and Choreograph, compiling data from 8,300+ participants across six UK ethnic groups: Black, East and South East Asian, Middle Eastern, Mixed Ethnicity, South Asian, and White.

It confirmed that the demographics in the UK are changing, and that this presents many opportunities for the sector – but also commercial dangers if action is not taken to make the most of developments. With the number of people from Minority Ethnic groups set to double to almost a third of the UK adult population by 2061, the report revealed that their combined estimated annual disposable income will rise by that time to £575 billion, more than twice what it is today. Catering to the interests of this massive and prosperous new social configuration is a fantastic opening for the publishing sector, but businesses that fail to engage meaningfully with these consumers (and businesses) stand to miss out on a cumulative disposable future income of £16.7 trillion.

“Engaging just one per cent of Minority Ethnic groups now will have an immediate effect for brands which multiplies over time to bring medium and long-term commercial growth,” said Karen Blackett OBE, WPP’s UK President.

Action stations

This need for action places a premium of the strategy and praxis of the PPA, moving forward. Chair Nina Wright, previously CEO of New Scientist, spoke of how the association had gone “from strength to strength” over the past year, confronting new challenges such as the sudden advent of AI and the Online Safety Bill – necessary indeed, but also needing to be framed to protect the rights of smaller, independent voices on and off the internet in the face of the power of “bigger tech platforms” that might otherwise silence or deform them.

Likewise “Section 40” of the Media bill, which the PPA successfully lobbied to change so that there was no compulsion to sign up to a state regulator; and related to which, The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill will ensure the rights of independent media to be heard not silenced by the tech platforms. In addition, Wright revealed that the PPA had won with its lobbying the battle to ensure the Royal Mail continues six-day deliveries – vital to postal distribution of magazines and journals “in a timely manner” – a nod to the lasting and actually increasing relevance and interest in the printed product as a proof of value and intellectual investment, alongside and not inferior to internet publishing.

After a period of struggle for the publishing sector, the PPA festival, building on last year’s success, showed the way to a renewal of public and business engagement, and optimism in the sector as technical and cultural change corrects the course of recent decades back towards a researched and edited, committed expertise that the sector embodies: professionally.