Welcome to a new year and a new decade.
The Moodie Davitt Report sends its warm regards to readers all over the globe today as we set forth into the third decade of the 21st century.
2020 marks The Moodie Davitt Report’s 18th anniversary, a key landmark for a title that began as a simple weekly pdf sent by email and grew into travel retail’s leading media company across digital, print, events and research platforms.
Since 2002, we have tracked the travel retail industry globally with a depth, breadth and immediacy that would have been impossible in the pre-digital age. Our initially whimsical tagline, ‘The website that never sleeps’ (coined in 2003), has become a reality, such is the constant stream of information that flows into and from our team of journalists.
Content will always be king in publishing but in an age of consumer impatience it must be brought to life with immediacy, allure and relevance as never before
Our pledge this year is to be better, smarter and more innovative than ever. We will continue to strengthen our writing, research and design efforts, building on key initiatives in 2019 when we created new roles in the form of a Senior Retail and Commercial Analyst, Min Yong Jung; a Design Director, Kiran Ghattaura; and a Fashion, Beauty & Social Media Editor, Hannah Tan-Gillies.
All three have made a tremendous difference to the way we do things, introducing new thinking and complementing the strengths of an already talented reporting, sales, design, technology, events and administrative team.
Just as our industry is constantly evolving, so media must not only keep pace with but anticipate change. We were travel retail’s original digital disrupter, launched as a pure digital publishing play (we have since added a market-leading print division) at a time when legacy publishing houses were resistant to embracing the digital world, for fear of losing their traditional advertising base.
The Moodie Davitt Report model – ‘Fast, Factual, Free’ – was openly dismissed as unsustainable by the owners of the then market leader. We followed our consumer – the reader – rather than the money. Build it and they will come. Our building blocks were quality of content and relationships, integrity, investment and innovation – and always, always, giving back.
But the construction is not over. You can expect new formats and enhanced quality from us in the 2020s and an accelerated fusion of the visual and the written word. Content will always be king in publishing – do not let the dumbing down of media worldwide, the ‘today’s news in sixty seconds’ approach that you see even on the world’s most distinguished websites, fool you – but in an age of consumer impatience it must be brought to life with immediacy, allure and relevance as never before.
Thank you for your readership and support of The Moodie Davitt Report through most of two decades. And so, boldly, we enter a third. – Martin Moodie, Founder & Chairman
