Team of three now leads BurdaVerlag

Hubert Burda Media is reorganizing the management of BurdaVerlag with effect from December 1, 2022. Oliver Eckert remains in charge of BurdaForward (including FOCUS online, Chip.de, Bunte.de) as CEO and additionally moves up to the Management Board of BurdaVerlag.

The top management of Germany's biggest magazine publisher is made up of a newly formed trio of equal members: Elisabeth Varn, Manuela Kampp-Wirtz and Oliver Eckert. Each member of the management team assumes both vertical responsibility for individual product segments and horizontal responsibility for specific cross-publishing functions. 

In addition to her duties as CFO and COO of the publishing house, Elisabeth Varn is responsible for the product segments Women & Entertainment (including Lisa, Freizeit Revue) and Kids with the Stuttgart-based publisher Blue Ocean. Manuela Kampp-Wirtz continues to head the publishing divisions News (including Bunte, Focus) and Premium (including InStyle, Harper's Bazaar, Elle); she also assumes cross-publishing responsibility for marketing, brand communication and moving image/audio. Oliver Eckert, who in addition to his duties as CEO of the digital publisher BurdaForward, assumes responsibility on the management board of the publishing house, heads the product segments Food, Garden & Living, and Health. In addition, he is centrally responsible for digital revenue models, data strategy, e-commerce and new business.

BurdaVerlag and BurdaForward will continue to operate as independent companies. At the end of 2020, Burda had initiated the most important reorganization of its publishing business since the 1990s and integrated all national publishing activities into a newly created BurdaVerlag. BurdaVerlag owns around 150 print and digital media products on the German market, reaching almost 39 million people over the age of 14 every month.

Johanna Schallehn

BurdaForward Communications

For more than eight years I have been writing texts about our company and our brands, organising trade fairs, talking to journalists and being chronically in far too many meetings. Whether at home or in the office - it doesn't get boring and sometimes I just put out the fire. If not, then I am most likely to be met in the mountains, with my daughter on the Isar or in my home country and the most beautiful city in the world: Hamburg.