Join Owen Griffiths, Commercial Revenue Director at The Sun, as he shares how one of Britain’s most iconic media brands is evolving across platforms, from print to programmatic, partnerships to original video. Learn how The Sun blends scale, creativity, and data-driven insight to deliver front-of-mind results for brands like Tesco and Paramount+, while tackling news brand perceptions with bold innovation and a human touch.
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Hi. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. Great pleasure to be here. So my name is Owen Griffiths. I am the commercial revenue director at The Sun, which is part of News UK. So broadly speaking, my role is to look after the entire commercialization of The Sun across all of its many platforms and portfolios. So whether that’s everything from a display ad in print to a full-blown partnership on our website, all the way through to our new video offering, and really think about what goes beyond that and how we might diversify our revenue in the future.
What an incredible role, particularly at times like this. I mean, you must just see this huge expansion of channels and new ways in which to kind of engage people across that entire kind of series of touch points. Completely. I just I think it’s never been more important that, you know, we as companies are really able to help clients and agencies that work in that space distill all the things we have to offer.
I think I was looking this morning and even just on our video offering alone, we have something like 140 different sub channels across nine different platforms. So I mean, getting my own head around that takes a lot. But when we go out and we talk to partners about how they can integrate with that, that really means we need to bring it together.
What we’ve done for that is really work at looking what the data in the background tells us. So we’ve worked quite hard to have the amount of first party data that we have on the site and what we know about our consumers across all the platforms come together. We’ve packaged it up nicely in a format which we call Nucleus, which is our data platform. And we have tools within that that can help to connect all of those advertisers to those different communities and really speak about where they’re consuming things at a certain time.
And of course, pretty much everyone that’s listening to this is going to know The Sun. But for just bring us kind of up to speed with just the size, scale, reach that you kind of currently have today. So The Sun is now what we call like a global business. So we have operations here in the UK, but also a growing US business across the two. So globally, we’re reaching around 41 million users per month across all sorts of touch points.
So as I said before, we have the traditional newspaper offering here. We have our apps and we have off platform offerings on the likes of YouTube and increasingly and maybe in the future, maybe even moving into other spaces such as CTV. How exciting. Come back and tell us more about that when it happens.
So you’ve mentioned agencies already and you’ve mentioned brands, obviously critical in terms of the wider sort of partner ecosystem. Tell me a little bit about sort of your key partners and alliances and how critical they are to kind of your role. I think absolutely critical. So in terms of how we look at our business, we have some categories that if you think about our audience, which is certainly in the UK, very much around the kind of the heartland of Britain, it is the kind of everyday consumer. There are some advertising categories that lend itself very naturally to that.
So for instance, if you take the grocers, we have a lot of long established partnerships with them. So I’ll take one of those as an example. So Tesco, we’ve worked with them for forever now. We have a long running partnership that fingers crossed renews and will hopefully move into its 10th year. And I think that partnership really highlights just how we like to work with our partners.
So it’s all about brand synergy for us. So do they speak to our audience and can we speak to theirs? And I think in that case, it’s obviously bang on. Then we have a creative idea. And for them, it was really putting them front of mind of our readers, making it almost the first thing they think about when they consume our products.
And then it’s around communication. And you think about lots of brands work with an agency. So for instance, with Tesco, we’ll work with Essence MediCom and we’ll also work directly with the clients. And we have a four way communication going on a daily basis where it could be between us, between the agency, between editorial and between the client.
So every week when we put out one of their executions, everyone’s informed about what’s happening. Everyone knows their roles within that and how we can help develop it. So for them, if that creative idea, which was to be front of mind, was actually literally to place them as the first thing that they see whenever they come to one of our products.
So overthe course of 10 years, we’ve managed to evolve that from what was a fairly simple kind of newspaper based partnership where they took an ad on the front page, which despite sounding pretty commonplace was very, very controversial with the editorial team at the time. So we had a lot of work to do to get them on board.
Now we’ve moved that into the digital space. So they will be the first ad that you see whenever you land upon our website on the day they’re running. And even through into just the last year of the partnership where we added in new formats inside our app to them where there’s a splash screen that launches just as you open the app. So again, making them that first thing and power of mind.
And, you know, from their point of view is how do our readers recall them? Are they front of mind? That’s something that that long term partnership has really been able to provide for them. So we’ve grown those sorts of recognition from around 45 percent to around 51 percent, which is, you know, quite a substantial growth if you think about how saturated they are in the market anyway. And, you know, reaching a significant portion of the UK population and really demonstrating the value metrics that they wanted.
And of course, on the opposite side of that sort of long term strategic kind of relationship, there’s clearly the ability for you to be insanely responsive and agile to whatever is happening. I mean, the beauty of digital and the multiple touch points you’ve got is that you can do that.
Tell me more about kind of how you’re able to kind of offer that type of sort of experience for brands.
Yeah, and I think with them, again, it’s really leaning into the creativity and content side. I mean, we are a news brand. That is probably our USP, the content that we have and the journalists that work to craft that every day and the stories they tell.
So I’ll give a recent example, actually, which was for Paramount Plus and they were launching a sort of 80s themed show. So we sort of went away and we thought, how can you really lean into the 80s with our editorial? Obviously, there’s lots of nostalgia for that around. And we ended up coming up with this complete execution, which saw us turn both the newspaper and parts of the website into a mock 1980s version of that, incorporating some of the characters from their show in, you know, very obviously specific Sun style headlines. I think we even changed the masthead from the Sun to the Current Bun to really get into the feeling of what they were. And again, it’s just almost prompting that recognition in our readers. What’s going to make them stop and think, yes, this is the way, but not in a way that feels forced or conducive as that humor and creativity shining through.
Really interested in sort of hearing from you on how and what makes a great partner. Like what are the kind of fundamentals that you kind of look for?
I think for us, it’s a willingness to work with us and evolve with us over time. So where you can both be clear on what your KPIs are, so where you know what you can deliver and perhaps what’s going to be a challenge to deliver. You know, particularly when you’re doing partnerships that for us integrate with editorial, always have to be conscious of editorial objectivity and not just essentially telling them what to write. Because also we know that won’t chime with our readers. They want a level of independence.
So being clear on your objectives and making sure everyone feels involved back to that communication piece. And I think for us, it works very well to bring all the groups together and having that constant dialogue. That’s the sort of ideal that we would look for in a partner, someone who’s willing to work with us on an idea and develop it naturally over time.
And what sort of data and insight kind of do you bring to the table?
So for us, we would like to have everything that we can about our readers and what they’re consuming. So in terms of the brand, it might be how the brand is currently perceived by our readers. So we have a facility to poll our readers on our website instantaneously. So if you ever want to know exactly what they’re thinking about anything at any one time, you can do that.
I always remember when we’ve worked with clients on reality TV shows, our audience have a habit of picking the winner from the start. So if there are any bookmakers listening, go to that. But getting that instant feedback on where the brand actually stands, as opposed to potentially sometimes where they think they stand, is quite valuable for helping shape the readers.
Then we can look at what that target audience is consuming, how long they’re engaged with it for. Potentially, if you’re looking at talent tie-ups, we can tell you the types of celebrities that they’re generally searching for or reading about. So we can bring all of that into the mix. And ultimately, just provide the client and theagency with more context for why they’re doing things in the positions that we choose. It’s fascinating. And with that, tell me more about the dynamic between the brand and the agency. Is it brand-led? Is it agency-led? Is it Sun-led? I think it’s a mixture of all three of those, actually. I think the best partnerships, frankly, come from when all three of those are in the room talking to each other, and we have some great examples from that.
But there’s been plenty of times where we’ve gone out proactively and approached brands or agencies with ideas. But I think if you’re going to do that, it’s incumbent on us to almost know what their challenges are before we go into the room and be proactively tackling them. And again, that will come through long-term communication with them. We like to maintain a good level of relationships with the agencies, but also with the clients themselves in both the kind of marketing and senior executive. So we can bring all of that knowledge together.
And just talking about content for a bit. So I really subscribe to your point around the editorial relationship with the commercial side of the organization. Again, how much of that is commercial-led versus editorial-led when it comes to kind of new innovations and new touch points? You mentioned video at the beginning, for example.
Yeah, I mean, that’s actually a really good example of how we’ve done things going forward. Obviously, in a digital space, the Sun is a predominantly free-to-view proposition. We do have a small membership scheme, but it doesn’t make up the majority of our readers or our revenue. So we always have to be somewhat commercially minded with what we’re doing.
So when we were looking at our new video proposition, which we’re calling Sun Originals, and that’s around creating very deep, engaged, long-form video content that will resonate both with our readers and advertisers. We actually sat down and mapped out everything, almost creating a Venn diagram of where did we know there was kind of existing commercial interest with our partners, but also where do we have a historical editorial stance to play with? Where would people associate us with? And when you get the two of those, we came up with two initial areas which we’re tackling:
Sports: Obviously, the Sun sports is longstanding, very famous, known for the insight that we provide into sport. If you look editorially, we even managed to get Prince William talking the other day about his love of football and Aston Villa. So, you know, an amazing exclusive and shows the power of the journalism that we can bring into that area. And then you start to think how you can connect brands with that. So, for instance, we’ve just launched a show in conjunction with Betfair, which is called Tactics Exposed. So that’s where our journalists will go deep into the tactics that a manager might use for that weekend’s football games. It’s very technical. People love it. And then we will invite Sam Rosbottom, who’s Betfair’s PR guru, to come onto the show, give his point of view and, you know, organically add in betting to that content. So that’s a really good example of how we do it in that area.
Fabulous: which is our female lifestyle brand. And again, it’s sort of how do you talk to those women who are predominantly sort of 25 to 40, maybe kids in the household, really starting to think about their life moving into motherhood and where do they connect with? Like, is there then feeding their family, for instance, which we’ve got a show coming up with. And again, you can see how that will naturally chime in with the likes of, say, Tesco then for looking at their audiences.
That’s really fascinating. And sticking with audience for a sec, you know, you talked right at the very beginning about the sun being global. Tell me more about sort of, you know, the kind of differences in behavior, consumption, you know, from a global perspective, because clearly you started in the UK, but as you said, you’re a global brand now.
Yeah, so we’ve been predominantly out in the US seriously for about four years now. And over that time, I think we’ve done a lot of experimenting to see what works and frankly, what doesn’t. So some things you find translate very well, some things do not. I still need to get my head around calling it soccer when I’m talking to American clients and agencies rather than football. One of the first things we did was actually realize the value of having boots on the ground there and translating things from a knowledge that you only get by being in the territory. So we have a team of around four to five journaliststhere, sales staff of around three or four people just there dedicated to us. And they will really know, and they’re responsible for the type of content that we know is just going to resonate with the US audience. Where we come to with other things is there is some content we do. So for instance, our tech content, where it can actually span both. But we still need to make sure that it’s translated appropriately. And it’s probably worth noting that we always do that from a human element. One of the early lessons that we made was trying to experiment with AI translation, not just to America, but to non-English speaking territories. That is probably not at the state it needs to be now. So, you know, we’ve gone back to a kind of human in the loop function for that one.
Interesting. And I mean, that obviously leads me, because you’ve mentioned it, to a wider kind of conversation around sort of the rapid kind of rise of AI and, you know, complementary technologies. What sort of like innovation are you kind of seeing coming through the sun at the moment, be that audience led or brand led or, you know, coming from you and your teams?
So I think for us as a company, we’re very focused on the creation of content still being very much in the human realm. So, you know, I think people come to us because they know and trust our journalists and they want the opinion that they give. So it’s not in our current plan to change that. That being said, I think where we can use AI and other similar technologies to look at efficiencies in the background or how we propose our data and what have you to our partners, that’s absolutely where we’re looking. So that could be anything as simple as how do I create multiple mockups of an ad in order to better facilitate that quickly to a client or an agency, but also in how we present our data. So we were looking at, do you have an external facing, almost chat GPT type interface where someone can ask questions of our brand, get insight into our audience and almost self-serve themselves in that, leaving us to come in and really do the creative and bringing that to life inside that only a human can do at this point.
A lot of people are going to look at you as sort of an exemplar, you’re leading the way in many areas. When you think about structuring your team, I’m assuming you’re constantly kind of refining and honing that, but are you able to kind of share like how you structure your team?
Absolutely. So from a commercial perspective, we broadly structure around expertise areas or areas that we want to focus. So we have a dedicated team for speaking to clients directly. And then we have agency teams who speak to varying levels at the agency. So a kind of direct investment team. We have an agency development team who will be responsible for seeing kind of high level strategists and planners. We have a studio team who are kind of our commercial creative arm, if you will. So they will see partnerships teams and also create all the commercially funded work that we do with partners. So if there’s any asset creation in there and a commercial services team that sit kind of as the rock behind all of that, almost a back office, if you will, which are responsible for providing all the insight and data points that goes into that. So, you know, frankly, what leads our thought process. And then also the delivery, execution and optimization of all of those campaigns.
I think for us, it’s important to where we do tweak, it’s where we inject expertise. So as we move into new areas where perhaps we don’t have the historic backgrounds, if you take video, for instance, or when we moved into digital, it was about putting the expertise in those teams and allowing the rest of the teams to bring themselves up to speed and learn by osmosis. And that’s how you really get people able to articulate our portfolio across all of our touch points.
Let’s talk about measurement and metrics, because, you know, it’s always a really juicy sort of subject. So give me a sense of kind of where you are on kind of like the metrics that you sort of live by.
So for us, obviously, in terms of kind of how we would measure ourselves editorially, that’s done on kind of your standard metrics of page views, newspaper circulation. But more and more, I think it’s around what that looks like per user. So I’m more interested and certainly where the commercial world is moving, and I think brands are more interested in measuring engagement, whether that’s kind of intent. So are they takingan action after that, which shows they’re in the mood to buy? Or is it around just sheer numbers and what they’re doing there? So within the nucleus, our data platform, we’ve worked very hard to ingest different targeting models into that. So again, if you were a brand working with us, we want to talk to you about what type of outcome it is. And we would optimize accordingly for that. So yes, there are people who still want to optimize for CTR, believe it or not, in this day and age. But we’re also really keen to discuss how we might optimize on attention metrics or emotional targeting that we can offer. So I think it’s really about having the right tool for the right job and starting with the outcome of the client first and working it back from there.
Yeah, it’s really interesting. And I love what you were talking about earlier when you’re using the Tesco example. And ultimately, when you said front of mind, right, it’s an ongoing relationship that you have, right? So that requires a different way of thinking about measuring the effectiveness of that long term relationship. Absolutely. So obviously, they will have their own econometric modeling, which will work alongside ours. But we work with partners such as Differentology to offer brand uplift studies. We will, of course, be measuring every kind of click and impression they get on our websites and the polls functionality that I mentioned earlier. We also maintain our own reader panels of around 300 readers. Again, you can get a far better kind of deep insight into what they’re thinking. And actually, in their case, and we’ve done this with a few of our larger partners, we run what we call almost a speed dating workshop with our readers. So we invite the client and the agency in. We invite 15 or so of our readers from quite a diverse background, as you would imagine. And they get to ask them one on one, literally exactly what you thought of the brand. Did you see this advert? And while that can sometimes be a bit dangerous, I think that’s where you get some golden insights and they really get to see where the things are working and how they resonate with the everyday people.
I think that’s great, isn’t it? Because you’re really confident about kind of the products ultimately. And it’s all about, as you said earlier, and this conversation is all about partnership and collaboration. Exactly. So I’m a marketeer and I’m listening to this podcast and I’m thinking, you know, the sun. What’s the kind of first step you would kind of recommend anyone kind of takes to engage with you guys? Obviously, I would recommend reading the product first. But also, I think challenge us, you know, come onto the phone, tell us what you’re trying to achieve. Let us demonstrate how we can reach that audience and deliver on those KPIs. I mean, we are such a diverse portfolio and by nature of the scale of the people we speak to, there are actually lots of different communities and touch points that we have a right to speak to and a right to play in. And that’s where we can start to do interesting things with brands and really talk to them.
And the team itself, you know, and the organization, culture is so critical today. Tell me a little bit about sort of like how you like to kind of really think about creating that kind of that culture of growth and support and nurturing and development. I think it’s important to have a structure that enables people to grow within their role and also open communication between the teams. So you can imagine when you’ve got many disparate teams with lots of different individual KPIs, it’s sometimes hard to ladder that up into one overarching one. So commercially, we have a kind of vision around connecting brands with communities through the power of content and data. So that acts as our North Star. So are we always kind of striving towards that? So in every team meeting, we would kind of come back to that. Myself and the rest of the leadership team will hold regular kind of sessions where we update on strategy and again, making people feel included by giving them information and really trying to make people realize that. And this is particularly true when I think you move into new areas is you can spot talent and bring people up who maybe in a traditional structure might have been involved. I gave this example yesterday, but I’ll use it again as we move into the video space. Just looking for talent that we can use in video has thrown up so many people that I think previously wouldn’t have seen themselves in that space. So Dean Scoggins, who’s one of our sports editors, very much with a background in print is now fronting two of our shows front and center and has almost found a new lease of life as a TV personality. So I think it’s that idea. And this is something that I buy into it is having been there for 17 years is anything is possible. And there are so many opportunities to take advantage of. And I’m going to kind of try and capture some of that excitement you’re expressing there by asking you about the trends and shifts that you’re seeing that really are, you know, can’t wait toget my teeth into. Oh, I think for me, it’s probably two things. One, as I’ve mentioned in video, the way the market and the consumer are moving towards those just provides. many more opportunities. There’s so many more platforms now we can tell our story on and I think bringing that to life through a visual aspect is super exciting and the way we can inspire brands with that I think will really take off.
On a kind of different level, I am very much enjoying the trend of questioning the historic narrative around news. So there’s been a lot in the trade press around news avoidance and brand safety and how that all ties in. So you’ve got people like Stagwell or recently named the News Alliance really looking to tackle that. Of course we’ve long been telling that story but I think if we can remember the importance that having like a quality free press and journalists within that brings to our country then that’s no bad thing in my opinion.
And that relationship as well in video of media and commercial and editorial, that again is something that is all yet to be defined and evolved and innovated on. Exactly, it’s still very early days for us and I think if we look at the type of content that we might be making even a year down the line from now that’s exciting.
If you look at how video is used predominantly on social media now, so obviously TikTok is the fastest growing platform which is entirely short form vertical video. How do we think about telling our stories in that? What are the opportunities for brands to partner with us? There’s no necessarily revenue there right now but I am confident that there will be in the future.
And I think I know the answer to this question but I’ve got to ask it anyway because how do you stay curious and motivated? I think it’s by constantly challenging yourself. I think the business does that for me frankly. So for me it’s having one is a team around you who are all so curious and motivated and constantly challenging you to look at things and new things. But also speaking to others in the industry. I think we sometimes forget in media that it is an industry of relationships so always meeting people, making sure you can hear their point of view and absorbing that into your own.
And here we are at Adweek with you doing that right now. Exactly.
And last one, going back to the Owen, was it 17 years you said? 17 years at news and some years before that. Love it, love it.
So go back to that Owen taking his first step on the ladder. What advice and wisdom would you give him? So I think I would say to someone try and find yourself a mentor early on. Someone who’s maybe walked that path before you or you would aspire to be. I think that serves two functions:
When you’re completely new and you know nothing they can give you the practical knowledge of how it works on a day to day basis.
But also I think, and this is something I talk to my team about, it’s important when you are in organisations to learn how they work. And often you’ll find experienced people there can tell you how to navigate those tricky inner corridors with better functionality.
Owen, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. It’s been great.
