Martin Tripp Associates media headhunting Archives

Listen to your media headhunter, it might just change your life…

Martin Tripp 14th April 2016

“The opportunity of a lifetime only lasts as long as the lifetime of the opportunity.”

It was not a quotation I had heard before Anthony Joshua’s IBF world championship fight this week. But in the aftermath of that bout, a BBC commentator attributed it to a former Olympic athletics coach*. It struck me as a pretty significant thought.

Within 24 hours, the British golfer Danny Willett had become US Masters champion. Conventional wisdom would dictate that neither man should have achieved these amazing goals. Joshua became heavyweight world champion after only 16 professional fights: fewer than almost anyone else in boxing history. Willett had previously finished in the top ten of a major tournament only once in 11 attempts.

What can we learn from media changes in the 20 years since I became a headhunter?

Martin Tripp 14th January 2016

In 1996, half the Internet users in the world subscribed to AOL

2016 marks twenty years since I became a headhunter. While that makes me feel incredibly old, it has been a fascinating time to be an observer of the media landscape across the UK and beyond.

When I first started, the internet existed, but was a hard-to-use and limited resource with dial-up access. Email also existed, but not in my office (we relied on faxes). Things were changing, yes; but no-one had really grasped the magnitude of what was about to happen.

If you really want to know how much the media world has changed in the intervening years, imagine saying this back in 1996:

Become a trusted voice: what content marketers can learn from media brands

Martin Tripp 7th October 2015

Among newsstand titles, what do the Daily Mail, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal have in common with Retail Week, Slimming World, and Garden News?

Well, love them or hate them, they are all titles that have bucked the wider media trend and maintained strong brands and readerships over the last few years. They have become trusted voices by delivering appropriate content in the way their audience demands – across print, digital, social and video media.

So what can content marketers learn from their success?

Five trends that dominated media headhunting in 2014

Albert Ng 19th December 2014

MTA media headhunters It seems like 2014 has shot by in a blur. The executive search industry moves fast, and for us this year seems to have moved particularly quickly. Yet, here we are with the calendar year drawing to a close. Well, what better time could there to pause and look back at some of the major trends and challenges that clients (and us headhunters) have witnessed and undergone in that time?

Here is my guide to the major themes of 2014 for headhunters and their clients:

Brands are getting interested in ‘efficacy’ – how digital media helps firms get what they plan for

Alan England 1st May 2014

In recent weeks the concept of “efficacy” has become something we have been thinking about more and more. In conversations with clients and prospects, the ability for them to ensure a desired or intended result with the services and products they supply has been high on their list of concerns.

How do we – the conversations go – ensure we produce stuff our customers really want or need? How do we ensure a great reception for the things we produce or the programmes we run?

Increasingly, the answer is to establish a better understanding of the customer – and the way to do that is to talk to them more directly, more personally, and in an overall smarter way.

Will sequential messaging take a foothold on the advertising and marketing sectors?

OliverLuft 24th February 2014

What does a typical night-in look like in in the ‘teenies’? X Factor on the TV? Youtube during the breaks on an iPad? A constant stream of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram updates in-between? There’s also email and texts to check, not to mention all those WhatsApp messages flying back and forth.

Ask a digital advertiser about the biggest challenges they see ahead and they’re likely to tell you it’s this type of ‘dual screening’. Or, more accurately, it’s the inability of advertising to follow consumers as they hop from one device to the next. But all that could be about to change…Yes, welcome to the Brave New World of Sequential Messaging!

For the uninitiated, sequential messaging is the ability for marketing communications to leap between screens – for a campaign to play out in a chronological succession that builds from an initial touch point on TV, then across Twitter and so forth, dependent on a consumer’s next point of interaction with digital media.

Native ads: The Debrief, going mainstream and legal concerns when hitting it big

OliverLuft 11th February 2014

Image of Debreif website News came last week that Bauer Media was launching a multi-platform title called The Debrief. There’s no great shock in a magazine publisher launching a new digital brand aimed at ABC1 20-something women, but the difference with The Debrief is that it plans to make its money by eschewing traditional banner ads in favour of native ads buried amongst its editorial content.

For the uninitiated, native ads are essentially pieces of promotional content designed to fit with the look, feel, and tone of a specific digital publishing platform. Some publishers claim they aren’t even a new phenomenon (advertorials anyone?), but the point is that 18 months ago saying ‘native ads’ to a brand manager might cause them to stare back as if you were talking Swahili. Say it to them now, and they’ll tell you it’s a phenomenon in which they’re extremely interested.

Three great examples of content marketing in the financial sector

OliverLuft 6th January 2014

Libor, PPI, and high-profile stories about boardroom incompetence have done little to end the public beating dished out to the finance industry during the economic crisis. If that wasn’t bad enough, the sector’s pedestrian approach to content marketing seems to have done little to help win back old sympathies or convince new customers of its trustworthiness or expertise.

In part, the problem is one of justified anxiety. Perfectly reasonable fears about breaching regulations and falling foul of one penalty or another have fed a culture of risk-averse marketing in the financial sector. Consequently, everything has a beige hue and fails to light the imagination.

Media headhunters’ view: content marketing for financial services

OliverLuft 16th December 2013

With its traditional conservatism and complex regulations, the financial services industry doesn’t immediately strike you as a sector ready to embrace the brave new world of content marketing, but scratch the surface and what emerges is a set of compelling reasons why it should.

Unlike consumer disposables, buying a mortgage or a pension product is a significant purchase. When faced with such a big decision, potential customers tread carefully and have important questions. Digital technology has enabled them to seek out answers like never before, meaning firms that can engage individuals with high-quality content have the potential to build lasting relationships. But how do they go about doing that?

Media Headhunters’ View: native advertising is here…and don’t brands seem to love it?

OliverLuft 2nd December 2013

When you click to a web page how often do you notice the adverts that surrounds the content you’re interested in? One in ten? One in 20 times?

It may be a crude approach but banner advertising is the established – if unspectacular – way publishers generate the bulk of their online revenue.

But as mobile usage increases publishers have found it hard to innovate the humble banner ad and link valuable click-through info to customers; couple that with increasing consumer ‘blindness’ to banners and you have a system in need of overhaul.

Media headhunters’ view: how to avoid generic content marketing and build a brand publishing strategy

OliverLuft 18th November 2013

In a short space of time almost all discussions on business communication have become discussions about content marketing – but unlike previous hot topics, this isn’t just a passing fad.

Media headhunter’s view on Leveson and press regulation

Martin Tripp 30th November 2012

Like most people who will comment upon it – or certainly have in the last few hours – I have not read the Leveson report in full. There are, after all, 2000 pages, and media headhunters‘ lot is a busy one (I’ve been in a lot of meetings today). But I have read enough and seen enough to give an accurate and definitive summary (I hope). Here it is:

1) Everything that is bad is

Changing face of media – fifteen years as a headhunter

Martin Tripp 9th December 2011

Today marks fifteen years since I first became a media headhunter.

It is astonishing how much the sector has changed in that time. The job titles themselves are indicative of these changes. While we still recruit MDs, Editors, Sales Directors and so on, we are now as likely to be working on roles like Head of Product Roadmap or Chief Scientist. As business models keep changing, so too do the attributes of the individuals who can add value.

Tag: media headhunting