Voice of the Premium Publisher: Spotlight On… Karen Eccles

Published: 10 Mar 2025

Karen Eccles — who we are delighted to have as our new Chair of the Board — brings more than 30 years of publishing experience to the AOP. Today, she is Chief Commercial Officer at The Telegraph, which has been publishing news for 170 years.

Karen sat down with AOP’s Managing Director, Richard Reeves, to discuss the ups and downs of digital publishing, the challenges and opportunities it faces today, and the immense responsibility of keeping revenues flowing at such a storied news brand.

You’ve worked in and around publishing for more than 30 years, from print magazines to news brands, from radio to video and ad tech. How have things changed in the industry over your career?

I look back on what we thought was complicated and think, we had no idea how easy we had it. I started in commercial roles before digital was even a thing. At my first magazine job we launched CD-ROM editions which were tip-ons onto the title’s contents page. The content was wonderful when it worked, which was rarely. But we thought, “It’s digital, it’s groundbreaking!”

In 2007, I then left the industry - and the country - for a few years to raise a family, thinking (naively!) that not much would change. By my return in 2014, everything was different, and it was harder than I expected to get back on the ladder.

In many ways, things have improved since then. There’s more choice for advertisers. The right choices mean greater relevancy, less wastage, and more opportunities to reach audiences with the content they want, wherever they are. But now there’s also a vast gulf of ad tech separating advertisers, publishers, and our customers. I wonder what percentage of it is truly additive, and how much of it is being used effectively. Is it making things better for publishers, advertisers, or society?

The biggest change over the years has been the distribution of money and power. An overwhelmingly large proportion of ad spend is transacted with a tiny number of giant global corporations who are not held to account on their impact on society. We’ve seen some of them roll back on critical DEI commitments this year.

When I started out in advertising we would say “Well, we’re not saving lives”. And we’re still not, but advertising’s contribution is more important than I thought. Positively, it helps to fund publishers producing editorially independent journalism - whether it’s news or lifestyle or specialist content.

However, when so much of the ad investment is funnelled into a handful of giant platforms that have amassed disproportionate influence in society — more than any entity should have — that has real consequences.

You recently joined the AOP as our Chair of the Board. What does the AOP represent for you, and what do you hope to achieve in your new role?

I’ve always admired the AOP, and it has been a fantastic partner trade body for us at The Telegraph. Events like CRUNCH and the steering groups have relevancy and immediacy with the issues that we’re thinking and talking about in our teams. These issues are often industry-wide for journalism-based digital publishers, and the AOP provides a forum to solve challenges and seize opportunities collectively rather than individually. Also, because it is relatively small it is agile.

I’m proud that The Telegraph is a leading publisher in best practices for digital growth. We were early to challenge clicks as the ubiquitous measurement for performance; we built commercial products based on first-party data before there was a playbook to do so; we were the first UK publisher to commit to measuring engagement and attention.

The AOP allows us to share those best practices and gain knowledge from other publishers in return. Though it’s first and foremost a news brand, The Telegraph also has a strong pedigree in lifestyle journalism which we share with non-news brands. I appreciate being in one forum together with news peers and lifestyle publishers, and this fosters collaboration.

Then there’s ongoing format and platform diversification, which is a key priority for us and most other publishers. The Telegraph is a website and newspaper, but our flagship product is our app. We're investing in podcasts, video, newsletters, puzzles, and more. It’s immensely valuable to be able to learn from leaders in all areas of publishing – for example, Global, on audio strategy.

Being joined up to represent the industry’s interests in a changing big tech landscape is particularly important. The AOP is impactful in its ability to facilitate the right conversations with platforms and regulators. One of the motivators for me becoming Chair of the AOP Board was to be able to learn from and contribute to those conversations, because it's so important we get them right – both for The Telegraph and the wider industry.

Digital publishers have been instrumental in creating brand safe environments for advertisers and establishing standards to uplift the open web. Do you find it ironic — especially given social media’s lax content moderation — that digital publishers are the only ones held to such standards?

It’s absolutely right for news brands and any editorial businesses to be held to account. Our integrity with the public is upheld with fact-checking, codes of ethics, and regulations, so it’s not much of a leap to police ourselves when it comes to advertising as well. No quality news brand wants adverts appearing within a distressing news story. It’s not good for the reader, and it’s not good for the advertiser. We actively manage that proximity and will block all adverts against content which would be inappropriate to monetise.

Along with doing our due diligence, we must push back against the idea that news is somehow an unsafe environment for advertisers. Unless there’s a major crisis, the news cycle is highly engaging. Audiences come to news because they want real stories, not clickbait; they arrive switched on and attentive. They’re not opposed to complementary commercial partnerships to fund that content, either. Look at documentary sponsorships: no one would find it weird if a 4x4 brand sponsored a hard-hitting series on Discovery.

The issue is the advertisers who say all the right things — “we believe in quality publishing; we want journalism to thrive” — but then their spend tells a different story. There’s a creeping decline in the proportion of spend going to publishers vs platforms. Part of this is due to how effectively platforms have controlled the narrative around digital advertising: brands are measuring success based on metrics defined by the platforms themselves.

Top-tier publishers have worked hard to counter this, proving the ROI of our advertising products and fighting for our share of budgets. But what about the mid-tier and smaller players? They don’t have the resources or dedicated in-house teams to carry weight in these conversations, which are challenging even for those of us who do. In comparison to big tech platforms, we’re not deep-pocketed either.

Then, if all the money that does make it to the open web keeps going to the lowest-cost, lowest-quality inventory, then we’re in danger of being stuck in a race to the bottom, where made-for-advertising sites flourish while quality journalism struggles.

What impact do you expect AI will have on digital publishing?

As an industry, we need to keep thinking about how search and discoverability are going to evolve over the next three-to-five years. It feels like we’re on the cusp of one of those moments where the norm we’ve become used to suddenly pivots. It’s an intellectual puzzle we’re all involved in. How do we adapt? How do we make sure that quality, regulated journalism — which isn’t free or produced by an algorithm — doesn’t end up lost in the noise?

We need to take the lessons from the first wave of the internet and apply them now, collectively, as publishers. There are lessons for us in the past, which is why institutional knowledge, the kind that the AOP cultivates, is so important. Publishers that have already distanced themselves from reliance on high volume of open marketplace ads fuelled by search traffic will be the best equipped.

Ultimately, the question is: are these new technologies enabling editorial journalism to be valued properly? Because, at its core, this is the same conversation we’ve been having for years, just with a new set of tools.

In addition to your roles as CCO at The Telegraph and Chair of the Board at the AOP — both of which have you facing media’s dizzying complexity head on — you’ve also been a brand ambassador throughout The Telegraph’s sales process. Where do you find the energy?

Anna Jones, our CEO, said something to a group of agency judges for Campaign Media Week Awards Sales Team of the Year (which, by the way, we won!) that really stuck with me. She said that The Telegraph is bigger than us and will outlast us, but for now we are its custodians and until the sale is over, we must run it as if it’s our own.

I like to think all editorial-focused publishers think the same way. It’s in our DNA. No matter what the ownership or reporting structure is, we take accountability. We run our titles as if they are our own.

Within our commercial dept we have continued to focus on growth and to control what we can and let go of what we can’t. If we do our best, deliver on our targets, and solve the challenges that come our way, then that’s all anyone can ask of us. That’s what keeps me going.

That accountability is not just on the individual, it’s what defines a news publisher, and it’s why we will remain valuable — if not become more so — as consensus reality comes under strain. Platforms do not put their names on the content they host. We do. And we take that responsibility seriously.