David Ball: "[We're trying] to change the wheels of the car while it’s moving"

At a recent NYU Publishing event students had the opportunity to meet a few of the publishing program’s advisors, including David Ball, the Vice President of Consumer Marketing at Meredith Corporation. Interestingly, Mr. Ball was the sole NYU Pub alum representing the board that day, having received a Certificate in Publishing from NYU 25 years ago.

First, a brief note about prerequisites for entering the publishing industry, then vs. now. In what seemed slightly too random to be coincidence, David Ball was the second NYU Publishing advisor to announce that he'd majored in urban planning in undergrad. That's right, two out of six successful publishing execs on the NYU board studied not English, not journalism, not marketing or business, but the integration of "land use planning and transport planning to improve the built and social environments of communities." Sure, times have changed, but it's food for thought. What kind of understanding of the world REALLY helps in your publishing career? Perhaps a degree in philosophy would come in handy . . .

Urban planning or no, after studying at NYU, David Ball went to work at Forbes magazine. He's been in circulation management pretty much ever since, working his way up from fulfillment manager to running the department at Meredith, a company that currently comprises 20 magazine brands, from Better Homes and Gardens to American Baby.

“My job description is that I make sure we make rate base," said Mr. Ball, "but what I actually do is try to change the wheels of the car while it’s moving. 80% of my time these days is spent on two projects." The first of these projects is migrating consumers to the Internet. According to David Ball, 15% of Meredith business comes through the Internet. He'd like that number to be 50-70%.

“Equally as interesting is the other project," he continued, "product development." In this arena, Ball explained that the depression in advertising sales in the magazine industry has been a hidden blessing. "Suddenly people are realizing that advertising isn’t going to come back again the way it was and that we need to build consumer revenue. So we’re spending a lot of time developing new products that we can sell directly to consumers.”

For David Ball, this push for product development and deployment, for out-of-the-box brand extensions, is just where his company needs to be, which gets him optimistic about the future.

So, what new revenue-generating ideas are the minds at Meredith concocting? What products precisely? For that, we'll have to wait and see. Or, better yet, invent them ourselves.