James Wildman
CEO, Hearst UK
Transforming the UK’s best-loved magazine brands into media platform businesses
James Wildman is CEO of Hearst UK. As the country’s largest premium magazine publisher, it has a circulation of 5.3 million and a digital footprint of over 20 million through magazines including Elle, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar. Appointed in 2017, James has harnessed their best-known brands to expand into new products and services such as content creation, events, hotels and homewares. In this in-depth interview, he talks us through his career including previous roles at Trinity Mirror, Yahoo and Virgin Media, discusses how Hearst competes for ad revenue against the “duopoly” of Facebook and Google, and reveals how a period of extraordinary growth has seen the publisher “get its swagger back”.