Revenue growth at a time of unprecedented economic uncertainty is no mean feat - especially in magazine publishing. Yet this is just what IPC Media has achieved in recent months, thanks, in quite some considerable part, to a re-structuring of the business' commercial operation twelve months ago which culminated in a major overhaul of IPC's advertising division last spring (2011).
Creative Media
The first step was to roll all of the different creative solutions services IPC previously offered separately into a single, creative proposition for commercial partners called Creative Media. The company has developed a wide array of revenue-generating activities around its brands in recent years: event creation and management for Look magazine's Look Show, for example, and licensing - for the same title it has developed the Look Beauty cosmetics range.
Since the re-structure, such expertise and more has been offered to third party brand owners as part of a more coherent, streamlined proposition.
"Because we have a lot of brands, one of the things we had been hearing from agencies was that we needed to improve our ease of access," explains IPC Advertising managing director Charlie Meredith. "Bringing together creative services into a single proposition was a significant step towards ensuring that and driving quality."
The second step was to re-orientate its commercial proposition around the three core audiences IPC's broad portfolio of more than 60 brands reach: mass market women, upmarket women and young men. Next, the company restructured its advertising division with the combination of its previously separate divisional trading teams into a single, central unit - another move, Meredith says, designed to make IPC Advertising easier for its commercial partners to navigate.
IPC Advertising also introduced a strategic business development proposition last year. This involved the recruitment of three ad agency planners who now sit within the new IPC Advertising structure to instigate discussions with clients and their agencies at the earliest stage of the campaign development process about opportunities for third party brands to work with any IPC brand in a broad range of different ways.
Then, in January 2012, the Creative Media structure was completed with the arrival of Jon Tickner as creative development director. Tickner, who joined the business from Telegraph Media Group where he was head of creative solutions, reports to Creative Media director Matt Downs who in turn, reports to Meredith. And it is this structure - a dedicated resource for creating innovative commercial solutions for clients - that IPC hopes will now provide fresh impetus for revenue growth moving forward.
Broad experience
Meredith, who took up his current role in December 2010, is a living embodiment of IPC's new approach - a former newspaper journalist who moved into magazines where he undertook "most editorial jobs up to deputy editor" before crossing over into publishing. He joined IPC's TV and entertainment division in 1992 working across a range of departments including circulation, production, marketing, licensing and syndication. He took on the role of publishing director of What's On TV in 1994 and in the years since then has extended a number of IPC brands into digital. A former publishing director of IPC's mass-market women's portfolio, Meredith was appointed to the IPC Media board in 2009.
"I bring to this role a mix of experience from across the company which is important when you consider where we now want to go with our business: leveraging the whole of IPC across all relevant skill sets - editorial, advertising, production, digital, licensing, marketing - to create compelling opportunities for our commercial partners," he believes.
"The new structure means there are now lots of different routes into IPC's business for clients and agency planners. At the core of IPC's commercial proposition is its audience and consumer insight provides a powerful way for the business to open a conversation."
Advertising on premium sites
To prove this point, Meredith cites AdPACE, IPC's just-launched study into 'premium audience content engagement', which shows 50% of consumers think advertising on premium content sites is well-matched to the content of the sites compared to portal sites (28%) and social networking sites (30%). The study also found high levels of trust amongst consumers visiting premium sites with 84% stating they trust the ads they see on the sites and 86% that they trust the brands that advertise on the sites.
Research out of the US - where tablet uptake is growing faster than in the UK - from IPC parent Time Inc, meanwhile, is providing deeper insight into advertising engagement which, he says, is proving "invaluable".
The upshot of all this restructuring and re-focusing over the last year is that IPC has become better positioned to respond to growing demand from advertisers for 'creative media solutions', Meredith claims: "We developed creative content for our commercial partners previously, but it's working far better now and the new structure is also enabling us to improve the quality of that content."
Recent examples include TK Maxx Front Row, a cross-platform 'content solution' IPC developed for the high street retailer with Marie Claire, Living and InStyle. This involved bringing together a panel of experts to discuss key fashion trends for winter 2011. The content generated from this ran in the magazines' print and digital editions as well as on TK Maxx's website. TK Maxx also used the content to drive Likes on its Facebook page and moving forward, it will use it in e-marketing programs as well as distributing it under license to third party online destinations.
Another recent campaign is Last of the Summer Vibes developed by IPC for Ford in partnership with InStyle, Marie Claire, Look and Now. The aim was to position the Ford Fiesta as a cool car for younger drivers. IPC created content around opinion formers' definition of what is cool, then encouraged readers to join the debate via a bespoke website - building advocacy and encouraging content sharing through social networks.
"There is a clear trend in demand for these kinds of solutions," Meredith says. And a recent shift has been in the number of different platforms commercial partners now expect campaigns to run across. "Not so long ago, the norm was for campaigns to run across a couple of platforms but now the most successful, award-winning campaigns are more likely to use as many as nine," he adds. "Which is an indication of how our approach must continue to evolve."
Moving forward, the greatest challenge IPC faces is balancing how best to evolve its offering against the need to maintain the editorial / reader relationship on which the business was built, he believes.
"IPC has always been about its editorial relationship with readers which drives the engagement advertisers value and the same pattern is also clear online. Where content is high quality, engagement is carried cross-platform," Meredith says. Indeed, IPC printed products now reach almost two thirds of UK women and 42% of UK men - in total, an estimated 26 million adults - while its websites collectively reach more than 20 million UK users every month (Source: Omniture).
"The greatest challenge, however, is to capitalise on this by making content relevant to each medium," he adds. "It's got to be about balancing the complementarity of different platforms while at the same time maintaining the core values of the brands themselves to drive interest and excitement."
Digital is enjoying the fastest revenue growth within the business at present, and it has provided a focus for IPC's new product development in recent months. Today, the company has more than half of its titles available on tablets in Zinio and in November launched its first optimised monthly iPad app - for Wallpaper. Another iPad app, for Marie Claire, will be available in February 2012 coinciding with the print debut of Marie Claire Runway, a new bi-annual title. Thirty two of its brands, meanwhile, have mobile-optimised sites.
Print revitalised
But product innovation goes right across the board. As exciting, Meredith stresses, is how digital technologies are revitalising print. He cites how a number of IPC titles have successfully used QR codes to allow smartphone users to scan print pages with their mobiles to access additional rich content. This is an opportunity commercial partners such as Armani are now starting to grasp - and just one reason why Meredith believes the current distinction many in publishing still draw between digital and print revenues is fast becoming obsolete.
"Increasingly, the discussions we are having with our commercial partners are about extending opportunities across the whole portfolio of our skill set rather than either or - how best to combine creative opportunities across different platforms," he says. "The conversation is less about standard ad formats, more about flexibility across both digital and print."
Such thinking has driven the recent introduction by IPC of a 'portrait-style' digital ad format rolled out across all of the company's premium content sites late last year (2011). This ad panel provides the reader with a variety of different ways to experience and interact with a brand - packaging an image and strap line, video or a social media dimension, and a promotional mechanic into a single, digital ad.
The proposition is underpinned by consumer research showing a greater propensity for readers to interact with portrait ads (65%) which were felt to be less intrusive and more compelling than other ad formats, and more in-keeping with other content on the sites where they are found (Source: AdPACE). And it is indicative of the service culture the new-look IPC Advertising structure is intended to deliver.
"Where IPC comes from as a business is a position of huge strength with mass reach and longstanding relationships with our readers," Meredith says. "But even so, the challenge we face moving forward is the same as it is for many: how best to unlock our strengths in the digital arena and ensure we exploit those strengths to the max."
