Content is king, time is priceless

In the words of Harvey Mackay, “Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.”

How we spend our time matters.

It’s therefore a matter of pride to me that, in engaging with our many ITP Media Group brands and offerings, millions of users are choosing to give us their most prized resource: their time; and ultimately, their attention. I want to spend some time reflecting on why this is, and on the ground-breaking digital innovations, including AI, which are helping us continue to prove ourselves worthy of our users’ attention.

As a starting point, allow me to share a story about a change we recently made at ITP Media Group. We all know that organisational change efforts are often met with opposition, and sometimes backfire altogether. Not this one – the small amount of resistance we had in the beginning was quickly overcome, and I’m proud to say that we’ve all been able to reap the rewards.

So here is what happened. Just over six months ago, we improved the way we track engagement with our digital propositions. We wanted to unite everyone in ITP Media Group behind one common goal. We thought about how to do this, and quickly realised that the target we wanted everybody to rally around was not a financial one. After all, financial targets aren’t all that galvanising – often, they can seem distant and detached from everyday reality and not always an accurate reflection of extraordinary talent or diligent application. We realised that to unite everybody, we needed to get to the heart of who we are at ITP Media Group, what it is that we all share and are passionate about.

Fundamentally, what we are expert at is creating content. We are first and foremost content creators and storytellers. Ultimately, this is what our business is all about. Our multi-platform brands, our interviews, our exclusives, our photo shoots, our events, our newsletters, our podcasts, our new technologies – they are all designed for the sole purpose of creating engaging, unique, insightful and valuable content: content that is relevant, timely, and supremely interesting and worthwhile to the individuals and communities we want to reach; those that will serve us, and our partners, well.

We all have different roles to play in that process, but ultimately, we are working in unison, with everyone reaping the benefits. Our journalists, for instance, use their expertise to create original and timely content, which the design team ensures is presented so as to maximise specific audience engagement. Our sales teams benefit from the fact that there are more people from key demographics engaging with our content, which increases the visibility and brand awareness of the messages our partners have entrusted to us, offering them more value and benefiting their brands also. Everybody wins when our content is more visible online (and offline too).

So, since the fourth quarter of 2022, we have sharpened our focus on not just tracking, but continuously growing, our unique users: the number of different individuals who meaningfully engage with our brands online in any given period. This is a valuable insight because it shows us how successful we are at reaching and attracting an ever larger, wider audience, and both reflects and educates us on the efficacy of our strategy – no mean feat when there is so much choice available in the vibrant, if somewhat crowded, digital world we increasingly occupy in the 21^st century.

Effectively, a growing number of unique users indicates that, within a competitive landscape, more and more people are choosing to spend some of their precious time and attention engaging with our content, and in the case of our flagship title, Arabian Business, to pay for that experience too.

From January through to August 2022, the number of unique users stood at an average of 4 million per month across our brands. Having set our sights firmly on growing this number, in the final quarter of 2022, we doubled it, successfully reaching an astonishing 8 million aggregate users per month before the year’s end.

Of course, this wasn’t a happy accident. Far from it – this achievement was the just reward for the concerted effort of all ITP Media Group teams to rise to the challenge, seeing it as the next essential step in growing our business and continuing to deliver a sound return on investment to our partners. The fact that, in uniting every single one of our ITP Media Group teams around this target, we are increasing the value of what we’re offering our partners is, of course, crucial. This means that there are now more eyeballs than ever across all our verticals, interacting with our partners’ advertising messages, with that number on a clear upward trajectory.

When I first set this challenge to our talented staff teams, the target was to reach an average of 10 million unique users per month through the course of 2023. Having started off the year with a monthly average of 8 million already comfortably under our belts, we are now aiming for an audacious 25 million.

How we do this calls on the expertise, shrewdness, talent, and hunger to learn and put those learnings into practice, of all our staff, whether editors, journalists, content creators, sales and marketing, design or tech and support teams.

It also draws on the amazing human ability to collaborate not just with other humans, but with non-human forms of intelligence also. Most recently, we’ve introduced ITP Virtual Intern, a powerful tool that supports our editorial teams and journalists by handling tasks that traditionally require human input. Using GPT-3 technology, this tool leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline our editorial processes, free up time for our journalists and editors to pursue breaking and long-form stories in ever greater depth and deliver high-quality content to our readers faster and more efficiently than ever before. Although we are embracing AI, it’s worth mentioning that our editorial charter forbids us from publishing any content that is not edited and fact checked by a human. After all, the unique qualities of a human journalist are unmatched.

While it’s understandable that new technologies are sometimes met with suspicion, in this case what we’re anticipating is the eventual reshaping of job roles to allow greater room for editorial freedom, rigour and creativity. If anything, we look forward to the creation of new roles and exciting career opportunities, as the media ecosystem evolves around this latest innovation. By leveraging the strengths of both human and artificial intelligence, we are confident we can integrate the best of both worlds.

Indeed, as I reflect on time – the passing of time, and how we use it – I realise that embracing innovation is something we’ve become particularly good at. I’d go as far as to say that it has become part of our company’s DNA. Looking back on ITP’s first 35 years of business, there are many defining moments, but the landmark date that stands out for me as particularly relevant to where we are today is 2017. This is the year that ITP Publishing Group, traditionally focused on print publishing, transformed into ITP Media Group. From then on, our digital and in-person offerings skyrocketed simultaneously, happily feeding off one another.

Other independent media companies have struggled with this shift, lagging well behind social media platforms and search engines in capitalising on digital technologies. Nevertheless, it’s worth reflecting that, important as social media platforms and browsers are, with very few exceptions they are not content creators. Instead, they rely predominantly on the unscrutinised efforts and unpaid labour of others, and as a result, the quality of content is variable.

Our focus is different. Everything we do is about creating excellent content: content we are confident about, which we can stand by, and for which we can take ownership and accountability, giving it pride of place on our webpages, apps, print publications, and even our in-person events.

I have faith in the intelligence of human beings, and I am certain that there continues to be a clear need and desire for responsible, rigorous, authoritative and ultimately accountable content from independent media companies.

We have long prioritised this aspect of our operations, integrating it into our vision and mission. We all know what it is that we do as a company. We create content that touches people’s lives. At best, it is informative, educational, and supportive. At its most simplistic, it is entertaining (and we really do see this as the worst-case scenario. We do not create or publish content that is irresponsible, unsound, or potentially causes harm.)

This is why our obsession with unique users holds so much energy and potential. As an obsession, it focuses our attention on what matters most: the fact that users continue to flock to us, and the size of our engaged communities continue to grow, because we generate value for them. Quite literally because it is worth their while. The more our audience grows, the more we in turn learn from their behaviours. The more insights we gain, the sharper and more effective our strategy becomes. The better our strategy, the greater our audience growth.

In an age where time is one of our most limited resources, that’s a clear vote of confidence.

Fundamentally, in a world where there are seemingly endless options, and consequently less clarity of purpose, that’s where the challenge lies, and the secret to success, too: in one’s willingness and ability to ceaselessly engage with the harder, bigger questions about what is of value, what is worth doing.

For us at ITP Media Group, these questions are never done and dusted. We return to them again and again, with curiosity and a keen willingness to innovate, so as to create better value for our millions of users (and growing) and our many partners in an ever-evolving landscape.