The Digital Chief is a digital marketing intelligence publication for senior, commercially accountable digital leaders. The site opens on Monday 5 October 2026 and the State of Leadership Report lands with the main launch on Monday 30 November. The first three founding seats are £1,500. After that the rate is £4,500.
Those are the three things a media kit normally sells. None of them are in this one, because none of them exist yet. What follows instead is a position, a price and a set of dates.
Every media buy you make this quarter rents attention somebody else built, at the price of attention that already exists. This is the other kind of spend: funding the build, at the price of the build, in exchange for being the only company in your category attached to it while it happens.
The audience this publication is built for is deliberately narrow. Chief Digital Officers, Digital Directors, and Heads of Digital, Growth, Ecommerce, CRM, Performance, Search, MarTech and Data. CMOs and VPs of Marketing. Senior agency and consultancy leaders. Director and above, or head-of with budget authority, in organisations above £10m revenue. People who are held to a number.
If that is your ideal customer, the useful question is not how many of them read us today. It is what it costs to hold the category position while that list is assembled, and what the same position costs once it has been.
£4,500 is £375 a month, and it is close to the entire operating cost of this publication for a year. That is the honest description of what your money does in year one: it funds the build. That is a different relationship from buying impressions, and it is priced accordingly.
The first three seats are £1,500. Those three are bought against a plan and a date, with nothing published. The fourth is bought against eight weeks of live archive and a report that has landed. Same seat, different risk — and that is the whole of the difference in the price.
A publication with no audience is a weak thing to be pitched by, so here is the whole position rather than a flattering slice of it. Everything below is the position as it stands, and we update it as the numbers move.
The editorial standards, the evidence architecture and the research instrument are designed and documented. The engine is being built now. The audience does not exist. What follows is the plan all of it was designed against, with its dates — so you can judge the trajectory rather than take a promise.
Senior digital leaders are drowning in undifferentiated marketing content and starved of verified, decision-ready intelligence. Trade press optimises for volume and speed. Newsletters optimise for entertainment and reach. Neither reliably separates a primary source from a vendor press release, and neither tells a director what to do on Monday morning.
The product is not content. It is filtering, verification, judgement and action. Founder-operated, UK-first, globally relevant, built to hold professional cadence without a newsroom.
The founding cohort is capped at thirteen — one for each desk we cover. The desks are the accountability map, so a partner category that did not map to one would be arbitrary. A category holds one partner for twelve months.
You sell to senior digital leaders, and their attention is scarcer than their budget.
You hold a brand or thought-leadership budget, not only a performance one.
You value category position and association over this quarter's volume.
You would rather set the terms of a title's first year than negotiate into its third.
You could survive being covered critically, because at some point you will be.
You need volume, leads or pipeline this quarter. There is none to give you.
You measure only on last-click attribution.
You want coverage, favourable treatment, or sight of editorial before it runs.
Your category is already taken. Thirteen slots, and we will tell you plainly.
You operate in gambling, adult, high-cost short-term credit, crypto speculation or MLM.
Twelve months from 30 November 2026, whenever you sign, paid annually in advance. Thirteen categories, one for each desk. The package below is identical at both prices — the only thing the first three seats buy is the earlier, riskier position.
No input into the thesis, the questions, the panel, the findings or the conclusions of the report. It is authored by Dan Martins for The Digital Chief and would be written identically without a sponsor. That is what makes the association worth having.
Renewal at the founding rate plus 20% — £1,800 on the first three seats, £5,400 thereafter — rather than the tier active at the time. That option is the quiet part of the value.
The whole card ships with the site at the soft opening. Nothing is held back behind an audience threshold, and nothing is sold as a promise of one. These are founding rates: they hold until the first threshold is crossed, and a contract keeps the rate at signature for its full term. The Digital Chief is not VAT registered, so no VAT is charged.
Founding Partners already hold two primary slots each, scheduled to their own calendar.
All labelled as an advertisement feature, produced to full publication standard. We retain creative rejection rights, and no partner-written material is ever presented as independent journalism.
A desk is a whole subject area, not a slot — one of thirteen. Display is sold as flat-rate sponsorship of a position for a fixed period, not against an impression forecast. Actual delivery is reported to partners quarterly rather than promised in advance.
Podcast sponsorship is sold from first broadcast. Sponsorship never influences guest selection, questions or editorial conclusions.
No listing fee. The Stack directory opens with the main launch on 30 November, not at the soft opening. Every affiliate relationship carries an upfront identifier on the page, and the explainer is editorially separated from the commercial relationship.
There is no locked inventory and no waiting list — everything above is available from 5 October. What changes is the price, and it changes against a published mechanism rather than a negotiation. Thresholds are verified subscribers: work-email-verified records with a completed professional profile. A tier activates only once its threshold has held for two consecutive months, every tier change is logged with the date and the count that triggered it, and a signed contract keeps its rate for the full term.
The founding column below is the standing rate of £4,500. The three seats at £1,500 sit before it and are the first thing waiting costs you. Tier 4 is the rate card this publication was designed against — where an annual partnership costs £50,000 and up.
None of the following is available at any price, to any partner, in any tier. If they were, the association you are buying would be worth nothing.
We say this before you sign, not after. We will always come to you for comment before publishing anything critical, and if we are ever asked to breach the editorial firewall, the relationship ends and unused fees are returned pro rata.
Every piece is machine-assisted and human-verified against primary sources, with named human approval before anything publishes. The editorial standards, the evidence tiers and the correction log are published, and the approval standard is published with them. All commercial content is labelled, always, and that is not negotiable. Creative is supplied to spec five working days before flight and we retain rejection rights.
Thirteen slots, one company in each, and no waiting list. Three of them are £1,500. If the category is gone, we will say so in the first reply rather than the fourth meeting.
Two minutes: your category, who you sell to, and whether you want the lead position on the report. You will get a straight answer on availability within one working day.