Everyone involved in publishing, advertising and the monetising of websites recognises that there are challenges being faced and a potential shift in the way the industry functions. Digital Sport’s Sport Publisher Summit on Monday 28th October will look to understand from experts in the industry how they are dealing with these new challenges, what the solutions are and try to evaluate what direction the industry is ultimately heading in.

Digital Sport is delighted to announce that William Miller, the owner of Crash Media, is one of our panellists for the evening. We had the pleasure of speaking with him ahead of the event as he enlightened us on his journey to Crash, the challenges of GDPR and his understanding of programmatic despite being predominantly in sales. However, before exploring the many areas of his work, we wanted to know a little more about Crash Media as a whole.

William explained: “Crash Media is a media-development hybrid.

“We’ve got the three sites: Crash, GolfMagic and Visordown, but we’ve also got our digital marketing/developing agency called Accelerate, which has two or three different products within it.

“Probably the biggest or the best known one is called PRM, which is an email marketing tool that is quite big within the motorsport industry. Red Bull F1, Williams F1, Formula E, Toyota Motorsport, F2 and F3 all use it, and we built it as a tool to make the job of the motorsport PR as painless as possible, given we are aware of what they go through on a race weekend.

“We’ve also got our own CMS which powers media sites across motorsport, the biggest one being Formula E. We’ve also built the accreditation system that F2 and F3 use, and we do some ad hoc dev work for clients, mostly in the motorsport arena.”

William went on to explain in more detail the journey that took him to Crash Media, including his background at a national newspaper.

“My background is in advertising, working on Todays Golfer, Golf World, Car magazine etc the niche brands that Bauer (then EMAP) had representation in London.

“I then moved on to working with FHM when it was still a thing, and still a good thing, in about 2007. Then I went to the Telegraph from FHM, which was a bit of an eye-opener, going to what I would deem as a real sales operation, because consumer magazines really weren’t but national press absolutely is.

“So I stayed at the Telegraph for about two and a half years then moved on to Factory Media to be their sales director in about 2011. I then left to take up the position with Crash.

“With Crash I started off as running the media side of Crash (which was just Crash back then). I didn’t have anything to do with the digital development side, but then I quickly became MD and now I’ve got a pretty big stake in it. The ownership structure is me and two others.”

Will has worked in various roles requiring different skills and responsibilities to be adopted, but he learnt more and more with each other and adapted to what was asked of him, despite his main attributes resting in sales.

“I’ve been with the business for about six years and in that time you do pick up quite a bit. I’m definitely not a developer, but I do understand a reasonable amount about the development process, and how complex or easy things are.

“My day-to-day role is managing the business but I’m pretty hands on with the programmatic end of the media sites. That’s probably the one thing I do more than anything. But also sales, I’m a sales guy, so I’m always keen to be generating as much revenue as possible.”

He’s adapted well but he’s faced problems in the industry as well, with the big one being GDPR for him.

“The biggest challenge of recent time has definitely been GDPR.”

“Let’s face it, everybody completely ignored it until the last minute, and then there was a mad scramble to get consent and consent management platforms in place. All in all it was a pretty interesting time, and we were only saved by the fact we had in-house dev resource that we could lean on. The people who didn’t have that, I don’t know what they would have done.”

You can hear William Miller, alongside other industry experts, discuss the future of the monetisation of publisher content at Digital Sport’s Sport Publisher Summit on the 28th. For more information on the upcoming event, click here, or purchase a ticket below.