Marketing Week goes monthly

Marketing Week, the leading UK trade magazine for the marketing industry is abandoning its weekly format and going monthly. The move is part of a long-term strategy by publishers Centaur Media to move away from print and concentrate their efforts on digital publishing and events.

Despite its change to a monthly publication the magazine will retain the word “Week” its title, with publishers keen to highlight the fact that the online version of the magazine will continue to be updated daily.

Chief executive Andria Vidler told journalists that the move was part of the magazines “evolution” and was partly due to Marketing Week’s “significant success online”.

Marketing Week attracted 328,000 unique monthly visitors to its website in January 2017, a 100% increase on the previous year.

This success is largely attributed to a £1.5 million investment in digital implemented after Vidler’s appointment in November 2013.

Other weekly titles in the Centaur Media roster have also been earmarked for monthly publication, including The Lawyer, while other titles are to lose their print editions completely.

Vidler said: “I pressed our board to let me invest in this business to ensure they were never in a place to cut these magazines purely on cost. That would have been detrimental to these brands.”

She continued: “It’s been led deliberately by a strategy. We were determined to be able to diversify the formats and our revenue streams to enable the brands to be strong in the future.”

But Vidler is keen to point out that print is quite yet finished and said: “Print isn’t disappearing at Centaur at all but it is evolving in being able to have a role that is distinct and complimentary to digital.

“Print has a role in our community’s lives and what we wanted to do was to ensure that the brands had options and had the flexibility and the infrastructure to be able to be really agile and adapt to what that community needed at whatever time, and that’s what I’m proud of.”