Yesterday I saw the announcement that UBM completed their annual reorganization and about three hours later got an email from Paul Miller that he was shown the door.
Miller was the CEO of the UBM Tech division that has been around for a couple of cycles at the ever-morphing British corporation, and has been a senior executive all the way back to the CMP days. He survived several putsches and has been central in redefining the organization from a "publishing" company to a "marketing" organization. That brought a great deal of derision his way but he is to be credited in at least keeping the journalism part of the organization alive even as it shrunk in importance to the UBM bottom line (the last I say, print and online advertising represented just 7 percent of the company revenues).
Under his direction, the division saw increased profitability and was beginning to coalesce into something that might be easily defined. This new reorganization throws all that definition into a cocked hat. UBM Tech, UBM Medica, UBM Canon (explaining why Rich Nass left for Open Systems Media), UBM Mexico and UBM Connect (the division that covered everything NOT tech) have been merged and will soon be joined by UBM Brazil as a single entity. That means another CEO is about to go. That would be Jean-François Quentin who was named CEO just in March. Sally Shankland, the CEO of UBM Connect replaces them all.
What does this mean? With the DesignWest/EmbeddedSystems/EELive (or whatever it called this week) conference in decline along with all the other high-end, electronic focused conferences UBM sponsors, we can probably expect the publishing arms of the organization focused more and more on the consumer side of the business. Marketing and advertising budgets continue to shrink and large corporations are investing more of those srhinking budgets into being their own publishers. They aren't doing it very well, but they are investing in it.
I'll have more later. but this is a very interesting evolution.