Andy Taylor
Trading Director, Aegis Media UK
I don’t think media owners still get the fact that the magazine brand is bigger than the print product.
It’s about buying into a brand community, where the reader of Grazia can engage with Grazia TV or go to a Grazia pop-up shop in Bond Street specialising in swimwear, or go to a Grazia exhibition at Excel on the weekend.
That’s the currency we’re trading off in the future. It’s not good enough to just talk about circulation figures.
We are screaming to get our hands on more granular research such as, ‘The Grazia reader spent ten minutes reading this particular section of the magazine, then they went on Grazia TV and clicked through to buy some Nivea spot cream’. Some major media owners are doing just that.
Vanessa Clifford
Head of Press, Mindshare
It would be easy to avoid for a while longer having a discussion about how we should measure engagement of brands across numerous platforms, but it’s good we’re doing it now. We need to have an open discussion about what’s useful for publishers and advertisers. A magazine or newspaper is another thing to the iPad, which is different to online, so we can’t treat them all exactly the same. To add them all together doesn’t seem right but to keep them separate and pretend there isn’t a brand running through there doesn’t seem right either.
Amy King
Head of Press, MPG Media Contacts
I firmly believe printed magazines will be here in years to come. Magazines are brands and brands need to evolve with the times but the printed product is the bread and butter of these brands.
This year is going to be trial and error really. Lots of titles are going to be launching apps or tablet versions of magazines, and it’s going to be a real learning curve for both the agencies and the publishers over what works and what doesn’t work.
There’s lots of different ad models they have out there at the moment and content wise it will be a sharp learning curve as well, as the publishers don’t know what works and what doesn’t work and what consumers want at the moment.
However important tablets are they are still only going to contribute a small percentage of a publisher’s net profit, so they will still have to concentrate on the print product – they need to get the balance right.
Magazines offer a unique environment to advertisers and it has been proven time and time again that they work.
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