This week the COI will unveil So British, a magazine produced for Visit Britain by the Illustrated London News Group. The title, which will have a distribution of 240,000, will aim to attract affluent tourists to the UK and will be backed by an ad campaign in the US in November.
The creation of the roster will provide a major boost to the customer publishing industry, after research from River Publishing highlighted a worrying lack of knowledge among marketing directors about how magazines can be used in their campaigns.
The survey of 422 UK marketing directors, half of whom do not use customer magazines, revealed that magazines are viewed as being too generic and costly, with low perceived customer value and no way of measuring return on investment.
River Publishing managing director Nicola Murphy described the results as 'frustrating'.
'The industry is not communicating the power (of customer magazines) clearly enough and we are being let down by industry bodies such as the Association of Publishing Agencies (APA),' she said.
APA director Julia Hutchison said its effectiveness research programme aims to address these issues by providing marketers with hard evidence that magazines work.
The initiative is aimed at developing a standard by which brands can measure the effectiveness of their customer magazines that would rate them against rival media (Marketing, 23 June).
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