Andy Marshall is CEO and major shareholder of Our Media Ltd, the Bristol-based, UK specpub which was recently sold by Burda’s UK subsidiary Immediate Media after being de-merged in 2021. It means that he is now managing some of the brands for the fifth time under different ownerships.
The company – whose 20 brands include BBC Science Focus, Gardens Illustrated, BBC Music, Quilting, Mollie Makes, Gathered, Cycling Plus, Mountain Biking UK and BBC Wildlife – was once the startup Origin Publishing before being acquired by then BBC Magazines and subsequently sold to private equity where it became part of Immediate Media which itself was then acquired by Burda and is now independent again as Our Media. In 2021, the predecessor company had revenue of £42mn and EBITDA of £600k. Marshall began his career studying accountancy before switching to marketing at a company owned by Robert Maxwell. He spent five years in the 1990s at Future before co-founding Origin in 1998. Our Media is 100% owned by Marshall and his management team (with no external shareholders) which, presumably, creates the scope for future expansion through mergers and collaborations.
He graduated in classics from Cambridge University.
What were your earliest career ambitions?
At university, I really had no idea what I wanted to become. In Britain, in the 1980s, it seemed you either became an accountant or a banker but neither really appealed to me. Somehow though, while I was making up my mind, I found myself working at the headquarters of the late Robert Maxwell’s Daily Mirror Group as an accountant doing a day release studies once a week. I soon realised that it wasn’t for me but one of the great things about head office life was that you built a large network quite quickly so long as you prioritised processing people’s expenses ahead of everything else…I was pretty rubbish at everything else but I made sure I was very good at that! And, before long, I joined the marketing team at the Maxwell customer publishing business. It was a great move for me…
What was your first job in media?
That job taught me so much: I learnt the art of making people feel comfortable in big presentations and how, even in the board room, if you are yourself and get people engaged you get great results (and have more fun too). There was the late William Davis – ex editor of Punch magazine, former economics editor of The Guardian, inflight magazine pioneer, and broadcast presenter of The Money Programme and The World at One – who showed me that brilliant writing is about understanding your reader, and that using simple language and learning to craft 1,000 words in double quick-time is a very useful talent to develop. And Martin Vernon – ex professional cricketer and superb presenter – who taught me not to be intimidated. They were great days. They let me make mistakes – and I made many of them – but never too important. They let me tag along to board meetings and important client presentations, so I was really in the thick of it. I learned so much just by watching, listening and remembering. It was a rich start to my media career.
What did you learn from those early days in Future?
I joined Future in the early 1990s when it was still owned by Chris Anderson (now head of TED). It was the first time I had worked outside London (I never went back really) and my first experience of specialist media. It was a brilliant business – high energy, a real focus on editorial quality, a deep understanding of our audiences and an attention to detail in crafting content. We started building the business outside the core computer magazines.
We had some misfires (Today’s Vegetarian was probably a bit ahead of its time) but we established a thriving portfolio of craft, music and cycling brands, launching magazines and events as we went. I learned that, to launch a business, you need a great idea, real confidence and a willingness to step into the unknown and take risks. You need to know when to spin and when to stop and ask questions and you need to trust those around you because things will get scary at times. That was the great strength of the early Future – the go-getting, can-do, action-based approach to everything. Perhaps we were sometimes more tactical than strategic, perhaps we didn’t have the most robust internal reporting processes, perhaps we gave too much rope to people – and we sometimes got into a mess. But we moved more quickly than anyone else and we grew a great business. And it must have been a good academy because so many of the colleagues I worked with at Future went on to launch their own businesses or be a terrific success in other fields. It had a big impact on me. When I left, Future, I felt ready to start a new business with Kevin Cox – my former boss at Future – and we founded Origin Publishing in the late 1990s.
You have managed some of your brands under five different ownerships. How have their fortunes changed?
That’s a good question! It’s true I have worked with a number of brands over some decades, albeit under different corporate ownerships. We launched the World of Cross Stitching in 1997 (it was our first launch at Origin) and it has thrived successively under the ownership of the BBC, Origin (again!), Immediate and now Our Media – moving through start-up, a private arm of the public sector, MBO, private equity, big corporate and independent business again.
In that time, the whole strategy of specialist media has changed beyond recognition from a multi-brand, single-channel business to a single-brand, multi-channel model because the newsstand – once the make or break of a UK magazine business – is now just one of a plethora of revenue streams. Our best-selling newsstand issue ever – for The World of Cross Stitching – was 75,000 copies in the early 2000s when we managed to licence Winnie-the-Pooh from Disney which feels incredible. Currently newsstand sales are now around a tenth of that and we rely more on subscriptions (both print and digital), our multi-discipline web offering and our growing footprint on digital platforms like Readly, Apple and Amazon.
This is true also of other brands I’ve worked with over a long time (I was actually the marketing lead at the launch of Cycling Plus in 1992 at Future which is now in our stable here). The biggest change I have noticed is that the intellectual challenge of running a media business feels greater than ever – there is more complexity in all we do and the trick is to try to keep things as simple as possible, while understanding that complexity.
What have been your milestones of the last 10 years?
Working closely with the team at Immediate Media to build a great business from three different companies has to be a highlight. It was an amazing journey for us and it was great fun to see our culture – which we worked so hard to develop – bring brilliant results for us. For me personally, it was also fantastic to work across a number of different businesses and markets especially the children’s business which went from strength to strength and the Immediate live events business.
What was the process of acquiring the business from Immediate?
It was a longer, more drawn-out process than we had envisaged. The rationale was that Immediate wanted to focus on its large global brands rather than some of the smaller specialist brands. So we embarked on a controlled transition which saw parts of the business based in Bristol leaving the group. We rebranded the company as Our Media in 2022 in anticipation of becoming an independent entity but the journey took us longer than we thought, mainly because of the trading pressures caused by the energy crisis. But we eventually got there.
Our Media is now very different because – as well as moving structurally towards independence – we also had to build our own platforms and digital capabilities. At times, it has felt a bit of a whirlwind and we know there are still challenges ahead of us. But we are now in a good place and are looking forward to an exciting future as a smaller independent – but a no less ambitious business.
What is your own primary role?
I see myself as the leader of Our Media – but at the very bottom of the business. In fact, we feel that the more senior you become here, the lower down the organisation you go – because our role is to support everyone to do their best work (our org chart is the different way up to most other businesses!). Most of my time is spent with people here and outside the business, listening, sharing and making connections to share best practice, and identify opportunities. Of course, you have to do the usual business things – budgets, boards, reports and so on – which are all important but probably do not add as much value as helping your people do their best work.
What’s your vision for the company?
If Our Media is not totally transformed in the next 10 years, we won’t have made the progress we need to make. Some things will stay the same – great content must be at the heart of what we do – but everything else will change beyond recognition. Our strategy is just five words: Create outstanding content, Amplify, Monetise. In the next decade, we must become experts in new platforms: video, audio, digital, possibly apps, certainly platforms that don’t exist now. We will become skilled at knowing when to partner and when not. We will build new commercial models around membership and media sales. Print will become a tiny part of our revenue rather than the current majority. And I expect AI will be a major opportunity and threat for us. Everything will be different and that’s why we put a lot of emphasis on learning, development and building leadership skills. We are looking forward to the journey.
Which companies do you most admire?
So many businesses have so much to offer and so much to learn from: Immediate Media, for creating a brilliant culture which drives success; Future, for developing and believing in a strategy which became world beating; The Lounge Group, for developing a hyper-local success and successfully taking it nationwide; Triodos Bank, for staying true to their values and creating a best-in-class customer experience; English Premier League football-soccer club Crystal Palace, for climbing to the top after being 10 minutes away from extinction; Kingsand Gin, for proving you can produce a world-beating gin from a tiny English village in Cornwall; Apple, for consistently taking us all to new places; and the UK’s world-famous Glastonbury music festival, for creating a dream every year at huge scale in an oasis of kindness.
What are your best lessons?
- Respect everyone and everyone’s view
- Being clear is the kindest thing
- Act as soon as you know you need to
- Listen more than you talk
- Smile yourself into a better frame of mind
- Not everything is going wrong: there is always plenty going right if you look
- No-one turns into a star or a problem overnight – take the time to find out what has changed
