STV, Global Radio and The Scottish Sun bosses admit to interest in future media partnerships
Three of Scotland’s largest media brands, The Scottish Sun, STV and Global Radio have all expressed an interest in working together and agreeing future commercial partnerships.
Speaking at ‘Glasgow Talks’ an event held by Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, Rob Woodward, CEO OF stv, Paul Cooney, managing director of Global Radio and Andy Harries, editor of The Scottish Sun, each said that it made sense for their companies to work together in future.
Cooney, who highlighted a deal that would have seen a coming together of Scottish Radio Holdings and STV around a decade ago, said that he believed that had it happened it would have been ‘an interesting dynamic for Scotland’.
He continued by highlighting collaboration already taking place, such as last year’s STV Appeal, which he said he hoped Global would be involved with again.
“There is a logic to such partnerships between TV and radio and newspapers,” he added.
Harries agreed; “I think that is something we would be keen to work on. We explored commercial partnerships in terms of sponsorship of events and we worked with STV last year on Scotland’s Greatest Album which was a terrific success. It is part of a model that would suit the three of us although it might be more difficult to figure out who gets what out of it and I don’t think we settled that, although we were pretty close to it. I would like to see more of that because I love cross platform initiative and it was quite clear through interest in the paper, through the radio and on STV.”
Woodward claimed that he could see ‘a strong synergy’ between the three companies working together and said that while he was not looking for corporate relationships, he was interesting in finding commercial partnerships, which he would do with commercial radio stations and the tabloid newspapers in Scotland.
“It’s just a question of finding the right properties and getting behind them,” explained Woodward. “What I’m particularly keen on is to find brands that are sustainable such as the STV appeal, which we will run again this year. That saw media brands coming together to support that common endeavour and proved to be very successful.”