ABCs: What’s Cooking This Time Around?

Ahead of MediaTel Group’s ‘Future of Consumer Magazines’ seminar this week, James Papworth, group marketing and strategy manager at IPC Media, dissects the market post-ABCs and looks at what’s on the menu for the future…

If there’s one subject that over the years has graced more pages of more magazines than any other then I suspect its recipes – family meals, seasonal cuisine, evening entertaining and my personal favourite, the step by step guide to ‘meals in minutes’.

Well I’ve got my own recipe, and it’s a media one. It’s a simple dish whereby you mix together an increase in TV channels with a plethora of web sites, stir in expanding digital interactivity and social networking and add dash of reduced leisure time.

Whack it in the ABC blender and what you should get is a glass, half-empty, of ABC decreases. But what you seem to get is a glass half-full whereby good performances across a variety of sectors indicate a vibrant overall market.

Now I can’t say what Greg Wallace and John Torode would make of it all, but for my money it’s all down to the quality of ingredients.

At the moment there are 3,445 magazine varieties being published, so there is no shortage of choice. And for their readers, each is providing emotional value as a friend, a badge, and a sense of community, and the functional benefits of advice, fun, entertainment and a rewarding value-for-money and value-for-time experience.

Of course tastes change and ABCs reflect that. Flavour of the month at the moment is women’s home interest and general interest posting increases of +1.1% year on year and +0.6% year on year respectively. Surprising some and proving that within this mix, traditional titles can be reinvented and come back with vigour – Essentials, She and Woman and Home for example, up 29%, 16% and 6% year on year respectively. The publishing equivalent of Gary Rhodes’ bread and butter pudding.

Also, tastes evolve and ABCs reflect that. In his autobiography, Gordon Ramsay says that a restaurant menu should be led not by what the chef can cook, but by what the local market wants to eat.

In men’s lifestyle terms that means delivering the same type of content but on a different plate – a digital one. So while paper versions may face tough market conditions, the core “brands” are going from strength to strength, with multi-platform delivery giving access-point choice to the consumer and contact-point choice to advertisers.

For example, Nuts (one of the few magazines actually named after a food) circulates 270,000 paper copies a week and has 945,000 users a month at nuts.co.uk, up 50% since June 2007.

And NME, the master of multi-media, turns 64,000 copies a week into 1.8 million monthly users of nme.com.

And what of women’s weeklies, often regarded as the staple diet of the UK magazine industry?

Well, as usual, within the ABC there have been winners and losers. Also as usual, it’s a pay-off between titles. So while Best and Love It! may be down (2.9%) and (8.3%) respectively this period on period, Chat is up 1.5% and Woman’s Own up 1.3%.

And, as the reach of the digital magazine brand ‘experience’ extends from early adopting lads to their mums, and their grandmas, you are increasing likely to find them flicking through the pages of Pick Me Up one minute and logging on to goodtoknow.co.uk the next.

And other sectors which should, in the light of expanding digital penetration, be performing badly seem to be doing alright.

TV magazines, predicted to give-up the ghost several times, have dropped just 1%. Their mix of behind the scenes, sneak previews and thorough programme listings, still sell almost five million copies a week.

And the sector of startling irony, Internet, has seen paper based Web User and .Net magazine increase circulation by 2.6% and 38% respectively year on year.

In short then, and in contrast to the simple media recipe served up in paragraph two, the magazine industry is a complex concoction, convoluted and often contradictory. Some publishers will be tightening their belts, others will be having a slap-up meal, on expenses.

The end result is a media still matching the nation’s tastes, which will be serving up recipe ideas for a long time to come.