Stefano Hatfield is keen to wax lyrical about his latest project High50, an online community for the 50-plus market that aims to ape the huge success Saga has had cornering over-65s, but the conversation inevitably drifts to his most recent role at Evgeny Lebedev’s London Live TV station.
Hatfield, the former editor of Lebedev’s cut price national the i, stepped down as editorial director of London Live just three weeks after launch.
He maintains that it was a planned exit - he started as editor-in-chief at High50 the day after officially finishing up at London Live - despite the station producing dreaded “zero ratings” for some of its shows in the opening weeks.
“There were a lot of cooks, that’s what I’d say,” he says diplomatically. “People don’t understand launches. There is a job to launch then a job beyond launch and they are not necessarily the same thing. There were a whole lot of people involved in the launch who then left because that’s what happens. It was an incredible opportunity to be involved with.”
London Live’s ratings have improved but the station continues to struggle; it recently cut a third of its staff, and late last year received permission from the broadcasting regulator Ofcom to cut back on local programming.
Nevertheless Hatfield still believes that it made sense for Lebedev to seize the opportunity to expand beyond his portfolio of newspapers, the Evening Standard, the Independent, the Independent on Sunday and the i.
“I think it was the right thing to do to go for the [local TV] licence,” he says. “They got it and if they hadn’t got the licence they’d have been open to rivals doing so and attacking them [commercially].”
Hatfield’s brief foray into TV followed the best part of a decade where he developed a reputation as the go-to journalist for launching newspapers.
“I became the launch guy somehow,” he says. “From 2004 onwards I launched Metro in New York, then came back and launched [Rupert Murdoch’s freesheet] the London Paper, then the i and London Live. And that doesn’t count the ones that don’t actually get launched, the things you work on that never actually appear.”
Despite being behind a string of such significant launches, Hatfield, a former editor of the UK ad bible Campaign, says perhaps surprisingly that he wasn’t comfortable as a newspaper man.
“I was never a traditional newspaper editor,” he says. “I didn’t come up through newspapers, I came from a magazine background. I’ve always been a bit of an outsider. I wasn’t one of the club. That might have held me back. A certain breed of editor would view me with suspicion.”
His move to High50 last year was born in part out of the frustrations of challenging the “oil tanker” mentality big media organisations develop, making them resistant to change. However, he admits the transition to the reality of startup life where you “can’t just call someone in IT” has been interesting.
“You can’t endlessly read and write about startups and not be intrigued,” he says. “The idea of doing it for yourself rather than for a Russian billionaire or an Australian billionaire. Plus on a personal level I was approaching 50.”
He spies huge commercial opportunity in 50 to 65 year olds, a market he feels is totally underserved by advertisers and under-targeted by media owners. And he says there are plenty of statistics to prove it: in 2020 41% of the UK population will be at least 50 and the 50-plus market already controls 79% of the country’s disposable wealth. Yet surveys show that 96% of those over the age of 50 do not think advertising is aimed at them.
“There is an incredible disconnect,” he says. “This is the biggest single trend in marketing and advertising yet the whole industry is looking in the wrong direction. What is this endless pursuit of millenials about? They’ve got no money. Newspapers are crazy, newspapers spend so much money chasing a market that is not really interested in them, young people, instead of nurturing the audience they’ve got, that is, 50 somethings. I think they are just beginning to wake up to that, just beginning to change.”
Asked to sum up in a nutshell what his job is, Hatfield, always ready with a soundbite, says it is to “lose three words from a six-word sentence: ‘you look fabulous … for your age’”.
Related: Why is advertising not aimed at the over-50s?
“We are not our parents at 50,” he adds. “[The casts] of Sex and the City and Friends are all turning 50, today’s 50-something is Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Yasmin Le Bon. You turn 50 and currently marketing lumps you together with 70. The silver surfer standing on the deck of a cruise ship looking at a sunset.”
While his lofty mission to change society’s perception of this market is all well and good, the question remains of how High50’s online community will actually make money from it.
Hatfield admits that to date the business has done “really well with PR”. Broadcaster Mariella Frostrup is a brand ambassador and High50 has had great mileage out of her very vocal views on crossing the 50-year mark.
And High50 was quick to exploit Salma Hayek’s comments at a recent London conference, arguing adland’s portrayal of 50 year olds being “finished” is out of date (“I am hot and I am smart”).
“You’ll never make money out of [online] advertising,” says Hatfield, scotching the suggestion he might look to follow the digital theory that if you get big, ad spend will follow. “Content, branded content, whatever the question is right now the answer seems to be branded content. There is so much potential.”
The company provides content to sites including AOL, Yahoo and Huffington Post, for its Huff/Post50 section, with one of the most popular recent articles “How to take your clothes off again in front of a man”.
“That is not the big ticket model though,” he says. “It’s the Saga business model but for people 20 years younger. Setting up a High50 brand in travel, financial services, those are the things that will make us. The site is just there to be a shop window, to get the message out.”
High50 secured its first significant investment of £1.5m in funding from Windward Prospects, which is led by Adstream founder Gerard Barron, and Hatfield hopes the company will be in a position to announce its first brand extension deal later this year.
“Nothing ever happens fast enough for me,” he says. “But creating our own brands, our own products, takes time.”
And does he think that Lebedev has enough time to build his under-pressure model and ensure the survival of his media portfolio?
“Yes, you have to be ever more nimble, ever more quick, and you’ve got to work out what the last man standing approach to the newspaper industry is as well as doing the land grab in digital,” he says.
“There’s a growing belief in the market that print’s not entirely dead, that’s just starting to seep out. A few people said that recently, including [WPP chief executive and ex-print naysayer] Martin Sorrell. Newspapers have engagement, that is the holy grail metric now isn’t it? If someone spends an hour reading the i for pleasure, what is the value you put on that?”
Curriculum vitae
Age 50
Education The John Fisher school, Purley, University of Exeter (English)
Career 1996 editor-in-chief, Campaign 2000 editorial director, Ad Age Global 2002 freelance, New York Post, Guardian, Advertising Age, TV Week 2003 launch editor, Metro New York, editor-in-chief, Metro USA 2005 launch editor, the London Paper 2009 director, Times Ventures 2010 launch editor, i newspaper; executive editor, the Independent 2013 editorial director, London Live 2014 editor-in-chief, High50, columnist, i, independent.co.uk