Feature: Publishers Move Towards “Media-Neutral” Brands
IPC Media last week signaled a shift in its operations to concentrate on brands and core markets, rather than individual magazine titles. The move follows a very similar reorganisation late last year by rival publisher Emap, which set up dedicated community networks to focus its media on key audience groups rather than bundling them by format, as is traditional. IPC has identified five core markets within the company: Women, TV, Home and Garden, Leisure and Men’s Lifestyle & Entertainment. Similarly, Emap created focus areas of lifestyle, automotive, health and music.
The moves by both companies are illustrative of the growing need to become more media-neutral in the digital age, where brands can be extended beyond the format in which they were originally conceived. Emap, for example, has already launched KissMix and QTV, taking the group’s radio and music magazine brands onto a digital television platform. In fact Emap has been at the forefront of spanning media with its brands, having created the UK’s first multimedia launch in Escape Routes. The travel brand was launched in September last year as both monthly magazine and e-commerce-enabled website.
Even prior to the company’s media-neutral refocus, IPC had already been keenly extending its music and men’s flagship magazines – NME and Loaded. Weekly inkie NME has made forays into television and radio, as well as the nme.com website. Loaded has developed masthead television programmes with cable and satellite channel Bravo and has a sister website at uploaded.com.
According to Emap the brands approach is proving beneficial for advertisers, which can now buy cross-media packages that target particular segments of consumers. Emap has recently sold a one million pound ad deal to BT, reaching the youth market across a number of the group’s brands. A spokesperson for the company said that a year ago – prior to the new network structure – such a deal would not have been possible.
As with traditional consumer magazine publishing, the two key areas for multimedia brands are still men’s and women’s lifestyle. In the men’s lifestyle magazine market Emap has a substantial lead, according to the July-December 1999 ABC figures, with a 45% market share; IPC takes around 16% of this market. The women’s market, however, is IPC’s strength with the group commanding approximately 40% of sales compared to Emap’s 16%. IPC is attempting to capitalise on this with the development of women’s site, beme.com. In each of the lifestyle sectors IPC and Emap are the top two publishers.