Marketing Director at News Media Holding

Since 2020 I ran marketing and PR at News Media Holding — one of the country's largest private media holdings. I came in as its only marketing person, and in January 2022 I took charge of the whole function as director of marketing and PR — building out a large department and a cross-functional team.

Context and task

News Media Holding is one of Russia's largest private media groups — more than 20 media projects at federal and regional scale, Mash, SHOT and Super.ru among them. It's an ecosystem of digital media, special projects, production and branded content, where every asset has its own audience, its own tone and its own communication goals.

When I arrived in 2020, the holding's marketing rested on a single specialist — me. From there the remit grew with the holding: marketing, communications and PR across more than 20 assets, product positioning for every media brand, public communication for top management and the parent company. None of that can be run brand by brand, by hand — you need a system.

Marketing twenty brands begins where hands-on management ends.

Solution

The core of the solution is a cluster system for managing brands: assets are grouped by audience type and by task, and each group plays by its own rules. The system bought flexibility and speed — communications got more creative, and launching a new asset got faster and cheaper. Clusters gave the holding one logic of management without erasing the face of any single brand.

A separate track was PR and distribution. I rebuilt how the holding's assets land in the agenda and get cited by other media, and that pushed the citation index up by more than 300%. I reshaped the B2B product offering for the market's new formats — from special projects to native branded content.

How do you build marketing for 20 media brands?

The answer that worked for me — don't try to hold it all in one head and one system. Clusters by audience, a single PR distribution, and product positioning set at the holding level rather than per channel. Then twenty brands stop competing for resources inside and start reinforcing each other outside.