News UK restructures marketing team to focus on individual titles

News UK is restructuring its customer and product marketing teams for its newspapers by turning them into title-focused teams.

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News UK is changing its commercial strategy by focusing on title-led teams and separating responsibilities for circulation revenue, subscription sales and marketing.

Chris Duncan, previously chief customer officer across all titles, has been named managing director of the Times and the Sunday Times, while David Robinson, who was director of betting and gaming, will become managing director for The Sun and The Sun on Sunday.

News UK says Duncan’s team will continue to grow sales and subscriptions of The Times and The Sunday Times in print and digital but will also seek out new revenue opportunities for the brands from the “loyal and premium” demographic that it reaches. He will be supported by Catherine Newman, who has been appointed chief marketing officer for those titles. Meanwhile, Kate Bird has been appointed as chief marketing officer in Robinson’s team.

Duncan was included in this year’s Vision 100. In his previous role as CMO at the company he was responsible for growing digital subscriptions at The Times and The Sunday Times to more than 400,000 and increasing revenue from both print and digital readers.

Speaking on the media landscape’s challenges, he previously told Marketing Week: “The publishing industry is undergoing huge and unprecedented strategic shifts, as is the world of customer marketing. Running one within the other is a sizeable challenge.”

Commenting on the reshuffle, David Dinsmore, chief operating officer for News UK says: “The business models for our titles have evolved and are now clearly defined. It has become increasingly necessary to have separate leadership and to change the structure of my senior team and I am confident that these changes will enable us to focus on driving sustainable revenue streams for our titles in their respective markets.”

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