McGraw Hill Professional
NYSE-listed global education and professional information business, majority-owned by Platinum Equity.
Medical and professional education publishing — content, data and learning tools for medical faculty and students.
The challenge
This was The Shift. MHP’s marketing and sales function held genuine brand equity and near-universal awareness among the faculty and students it serves, but that equity was not converting into first-choice preference, and AI was moving faster than the function’s ability to respond to it with a coherent plan.
The market signalled the problem before internal debate caught up with it. MHP’s own brand tracking found faculty preference for the portfolio sitting at roughly half the level of its two largest competitors, with one in four faculty and students naming no preferred brand at all.
On AI specifically, the gap was starker still: only 1% of medical students named McGraw Hill as the education company they associate with AI, against 41% for a single AI-native rival. Individual marketers were already using tools like ChatGPT and Claude in their day-to-day work, but without a shared framework, governance, or a link back to what the business was actually trying to achieve commercially. The risk was not unwillingness to adopt AI. It was adopting it without a strategy behind it.
Our approach
We ran the engagement as a structured, five-stage programme over twelve weeks: discovery and diagnosis, research and audience insight, content and channel strategy design, operating model and AI readiness, and a roadmap stage to align leadership on what to do next.
The discovery stage alone reviewed 21 existing artefacts, from brand tracking data and CMO summit outputs to sales strategy documents and internal workshop outbriefs, synthesising them into four themes: brand and audience intelligence, AI strategy and technology, commercial strategy and planning, and organisation and operating model. That review was tested against fresh, mixed-method research across five regions and MHP’s core product lines.
The findings reframed the brief. MHP did not have a tooling problem. Individuals across the marketing team were already experimenting with AI, and McGraw Hill’s own corporate AI position already existed at group level. What was missing was the translation of that position into a working strategy for the sales and marketing function specifically: which tools were approved for which tasks, what governance applied at what level of risk, how the function’s structure needed to change to use AI as a shared capability rather than one specialist’s job, and how all of this connected back to the commercial pressure the business was actually under, principally retention, in a market where cancellation rates had risen sharply and AI-native competitors were resetting buyer expectations.
That reframing produced three workstreams. The first addressed AI as a marketing capability: a governance framework tiering AI use by risk, an evaluation method for assessing any new tool before adoption, and a prioritised, task-mapped tool stack spanning research, planning and content production. The second addressed audience and content: a channel strategy rebuilt market by market around where MHP’s buyers and students actually pay attention, including channels the function had not previously tracked. The third addressed structure: a revised marketing operating model designed around how work needed to flow between marketing, sales, product and customer success, rather than the siloed structure stakeholder interviews had revealed, including a new role to own AI and MarTech capability centrally.
Without this work from Via Advisory, our global marketing capability and activity would be uncoordinated, inconsistent and ineffective in driving real commercial impact.”
The results
- Governance framework and a three-tier AI risk model agreed and signed off for the marketing function, aligned to McGraw Hill’s group AI position and to external frameworks including the EU AI Act and AAMC guidance.
- A prioritised, task-mapped tool stack and shared prompt library agreed as the function’s approved standard, replacing ungoverned individual tool use.
- A phased capability-building roadmap (audit, define, build, embed) sequenced across the three workstreams, with the first phase delivered in July 2026 and full rollout scheduled through December 2026.
- Marketing operating model redesigned, including a new AI & MarTech Manager role, moving the team from reactive to proactive use of AI.
- 40 marketers across the globe educated, inspired and equipped to bring AI into their marketing work, in support of the c.£111m ($150.1m) in annual revenue generated by McGraw Hill’s Global Professional segment in FY2026 (year ended 31 March 2026).
- The strategy recognised internally as the most advanced use of AI in marketing across all of McGraw Hill.
