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Bauer Xcel’s Director of Content and Audience Development, Ian Betteridge, is the special guest for this Media Voices podcast. Bauer Xcel Media is the digital division of Bauer Media Group, a fifth-generation family run business, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. With 150 million monthly unique users and offices in New York, Hamburg, London, Sydney, Melbourne and Warsaw, Bauer Xcel Media has become one of the world’s fastest-growing digital media companies.
Ian’s experience in digital content is vast, with over twenty years experience as a successful journalist. He was previously editor of the renowned Alphr.com, heralded at the time as a ‘fresh take on tech’. Since its launch in June 2015, Alphr.com (from Dennis Publishing) has won the AOP 2016 award for Best Digital Publishing Launch, as well as winning Best B2B Digital Product and Best Brand Development at the Drum Media Awards in the same year.
In this podcast, Ian talks about drawing together the separate roles of editorial and data-driven audience development, how commercial needs drive content strategy and how he brings together the print and digital teams to make the many brands he oversees a success. He also tells the story behind ‘Betteridge’s Law’.
Two areas of differentiation standout:
- Firstly, rather unusually, it is the global arm of Bauer Xcel Media which looks after all the digital brands, as well as the digital side of its print brands.
- Secondly, having a separate digital side of a media business feels ‘old school’; almost a church and state separation. However, this separation has allowed Bauer’s digital side to figure out what works universally and experiment quickly across the brands most suited, whilst also supporting smaller teams and those that don’t have the time to focus properly on a digital strategy of their own.
