Three senior publishing directors at Centaur are to leave in a management shake up of its marketing and creative division.
The division of the business publisher – which includes Marketing Week, New Media Age and mad.co.uk – is to be brought under the control of a single manager for the first time.
The move means the removal of a layer of management, with the individual magazine publishers reporting directly to the business publishing managing director, Tim Potter.
Annie Swift, publishing director of the marketing division, Roger Beckett, who oversaw the creative division, and Robin Coates, who reported directly to chief executive Geoff Wilmot on a number of briefs, are all leaving the company as result of the changes.
Potter said the changes were prompted by a need for a single management vision to help implement a multimedia strategy and oversee new product development.
He said: ‘We have an opportunity within the marketing and creative community to really grow the business because we have some really strong individual brands.
‘But with the development of what we’re doing on the web there’s a lot of opportunity for cross promotion and other things we can do.
‘To really help that process, it is important that you have a single strategic view of things, so you need a single senior management view of how things should develop.”
Potter said new product development will come from expanding the content on websites such as Marketing Week and Design Week, both of which launched 18 months ago.
He said: ‘A lot of our product development will come from the development of those vertical brands into fully fledged websites. At the moment they are very much focused on news and jobs, but there are lots of other ways we can develop.”
There will be purely web-based content created similar to what has been done for other brands in the company, such as The Lawyer and Money Week. Potter said no new jobs were being created as result of the changes but that future growth was possible.
Centaur is due to release its interim report on 28 February. In a trading statement ahead of its interim results, the company said it expects to see group revenues rise by five per cent compared with the same period last year.
Advertising revenues are expected to be up seven per cent year on year. These increases, it said, were being led by ‘rapid growth in online advertising”.
Revenues from events and exhibitions are expected to be down, which Centaur said was due to the discontinuation of under-performing events.
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