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Advertising: Delish Magazine, Sold Only at Walmart, Performs Remarkably Well

February 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Instead, the magazine, Delish, did well enough with its first issue in November, according to its publisher, Hearst Magazines, that it is being expanded this year to quarterly frequency. It will publish issues dated February, May, August and November.

Delish’s performance was cited as a high point of last year in an annual review by Hearst Magazines’s parent company, the Hearst Corporation. David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, mentioned Delish twice in a letter to employees outlining plans for 2013.

As the name signals, Delish is a food magazine: the print version of a Web site, Delish.com, that Hearst operates with the MSN unit of Microsoft. (If some readers hear an echo, that is because PGOA Media, owned by Bain Capital Ventures, publishes a magazine about food called Relish, which is distributed with newspapers.)

The food category is doing better than many others in publishing as marketers of packaged foods seek to reach budget-conscious consumers who are eating at home rather than dining out. Examples include Food Network Magazine, recently introduced by Hearst as a joint venture with Scripps Networks Interactive, and Dash, a newspaper-distributed magazine and Web site in the Parade Publications division of Advance Publications.

The Meredith Corporation, which competes in the food category with magazines like Family Circle and Ladies’ Home Journal, has started a food Web site, Recipe.com; acquired a second, Allrecipes.com; and bought two food magazines, EatingWell and Every Day With Rachael Ray.

In addition to being part of a trend, there may be another reason Delish is in demand: it is free to any Walmart shopper who buys one of six Hearst magazines — Country Living; Good Housekeeping; House Beautiful; O, the Oprah Magazine; Redbook; or Woman’s Day — at the regular single-copy price. Delish accompanies each magazine in a plastic wrapper festooned with the words “Free!” and “For Walmart shoppers!”

Sales of the November issues of the six magazines with Delish piggybacked rose an average of 22 percent, said Michael A. Clinton, president for marketing and publishing director at Hearst Magazines in New York.

“It’s part of a larger Hearst strategy we call pop-up edit,” Mr. Clinton said, using the industry shorthand for editorial content. “Across our portfolio, we’re looking for different ways to inject value for the reader.” Other examples he gave included sections of Food Network Magazine devoted to children, men and travel, and a 40-page supplement to the April issue of Cosmopolitan that will be devoted to “Lean In,” a new book by Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook.

The first issue of Delish was 48 pages, and the second was 32 pages. Subsequent issues will be 48 to 60 pages, Mr. Clinton said. The first two issues carried advertising pages from more than two dozen blue-chip marketers, including Campbell Soup, Del Monte, Johnson Johnson, Kellogg, Kraft, McCormick, Nestlé, Procter Gamble, J. M. Smucker and Unilever.

Ads for Delish are being sold separately from ads for the six other magazines, said Carol E. Campbell, group strategic director for digital at Hearst Magazines. A typical ad page in Delish costs $18,000, she said, compared with $150,000 in Woman’s Day. About 510,000 copies of each issue of Delish are being printed; by comparison, the rate base, or circulation guaranteed to advertisers, for Woman’s Day is 3.25 million.

Walmart makes sense as a home for Delish, Ms. Campbell said, not only because it is America’s largest seller of magazines but also because Walmart shoppers visit Delish.com more than the national average.

Also, said Elizabeth Shepard, general manager for food and home and digital media at Hearst Magazines, “Walmart has been one of the most active advertisers on Delish.com,” both before and since the introduction of the print version.

Playing off the industry term “added value,” for something extra offered to consumers or advertisers, Ms. Shepard, who is also executive director and editor in chief of Delish, called the magazine “valuable value.”

There is a precedent for a magazine that can be found solely in Walmart stores. Since 2004, the Time Inc. division of Time Warner has published All You, which covers food, fashion, crafts, home decorating and so-called smart shopping, or deal-hunting. All You began with a rate base of 500,000, which, after 10 increases in eight years, now stands at 1.5 million. With a cover price of $2.99, it sells the most single copies of any monthly magazine at Walmart.

“I’m really proud of what All You has pioneered and accomplished” in reaching “mainstream American women,” said Suzanne Quint, publisher at All You in New York.

“Back in 2004, people weren’t dying to talk to a value-conscious shopper who shops at Walmart,” she said. “It’s a whole different world today.”

As Delish enters Walmart, All You is expanding beyond it. Starting with the June issue, Ms. Quint said, All You plans to “test distribution across several retailers” in addition to Walmart, which “will continue to be an important outlet for us.” (All You is also available by subscription.)

The concept of magazines available only at a single retailer dates to at least 1931, when Woman’s Day began as a menu sheet at supermarkets owned by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/delish-magazine-sold-only-at-walmart-performs-remarkably-well.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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In Venture With NBC, Esquire Expands Into Television

February 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

On Monday, NBCUniversal will announce that it has concluded a deal with Hearst Magazines to rebrand one of NBC’s existing cable properties, the G4 network, as a new entity, the Esquire Network. The purpose: to refashion a cable channel that has been devoted to video gaming and devices into what NBC’s top cable executive described as “an upscale Bravo for men.”

Only last week, that executive, Bonnie Hammer, added Bravo — the network of “Real Housewives” and other female-centric lifestyle programming — to the portfolio of cable networks she oversees, so the juxtaposition is well timed. The Esquire Network will have its debut on April 22. It will be available in 62 million homes with cable or satellite service.

Neither side would discuss the specific financial arrangements, but said the renamed channel was not a joint venture. “We own G4,” Ms. Hammer said. “There are no ownership issues here.” David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, the publisher of Esquire, said, “We have a strong interest in this succeeding.”

For viewers of the G4 network, the change will mean a sharp shift from the gaming-centered programming that attracted some men to shows that will draw an audience that NBC executives are persuaded Esquire stands for: “The modern man, what being a man today is all about,” as Adam Stotsky, the general manager of the new network, said.

Specifically, NBC is hoping to capture a more educated, affluent, sophisticated male viewer, who is not being served, as its research concluded, by the male-oriented, nonsports programming on cable channels like Discovery and Spike. “Much of today’s programming targets men in a one-dimensional way,” Mr. Stotsky said, with what he called “down-market shows” about “tattoos or pawn shops or storage lockers or axes or hillbillies.”

The Esquire Network will offer shows aimed at capturing other areas of interest, like cars, politics, world affairs, travel, fashion and cooking. David Granger, Esquire’s editor in chief, said he expected the programming to be “not duplicative of what readers find in the magazine, but in the same wheelhouse.”

Still, he said, there could be some crossovers. For example, “Funny Joke From a Beautiful Woman,” a feature Esquire has included on its Web site, could work as a piece between series, Mr. Granger said.

But Mr. Stotsky said his development staff would generate the program ideas. One of the network’s first original series is “Knife Fight,” a reality competition about “after-hours cook-offs” among young chefs.

The other original series is a travel show featuring celebrities called “The Getaway.”

Neither of those ideas originated in an editorial meeting at Esquire, but as Mr. Carey said, “This is not the magazine on TV; that would not work. The idea is to capture the essence of the magazine.”

Ms. Hammer called that the magazine’s brand. She said NBC had been aware of the limits of G4’s programming niche.

“Realistically, guys who are into gaming are not necessarily watching television,” she said. “If this was going to come under my portfolio, I’m a little brand crazy, so I said, let’s create a real brand, define a space, understand who we are programming for.”

Mr. Stotsky was responsible for seeking potential partners, and after some early discussions with Mr. Carey and Mr. Granger, an alliance with Esquire quickly gained traction.

Mr. Carey said that Hearst Magazines was “very focused on partnerships.” He pointed to its success in creating magazines tied to cable channels like the Food Network and HGTV.

Beyond the two original shows to be announced on Monday, the new channel will be filled in the short run with acquired programs — many, Mr. Stotsky said, from the library owned by NBCUniversal.

Two comedies that will appear are in the category of more sophisticated recent comedies, he said. One, “Parks and Recreation,” is owned by NBC and still on the broadcast network. It will get its first cable exposure on the Esquire Network.

The other, “Party Down,” about young caterers, achieved some cult status when it played on the cable network Starz three years ago.

That may mean that the actor Adam Scott, who stars in both shows, is something of the ideal for the Esquire Network. Mr. Stotsky said the channel is hoping to rely on the magazine’s “80 years of insight into what makes men tick.” He added, “When you look at Esquire as a print magazine, it’s really about a point of view, a way of life, telling intelligent witty stories.”

Mr. Granger said the magazine had survived both the media shift from print to digital and the recent recession, even managing to increase its circulation figure, to about 725,000 a month, in December. This was accomplished, he said, by creatively expanding onto digital platforms including Web site and tablet applications. The median age of the magazine’s reader in the last several years falls in the range of 38 to 40 years old, he said.

Mr. Carey said current circulation figures alone should not reflect the brand’s value. “It’s a funny thing about magazines,” he said. “The population of people who know and respect and see a particular magazine brand as an authority is usually much bigger than the audience of the actual magazine. I believe NBC saw the opportunity that the built-in awareness and respect for Esquire was multiples of the actual magazine audience.”

Mr. Carey said he “absolutely saw only an upside” for Esquire. “As we’ve seen from our other ventures, when you have both print and television working together, it clearly lifts all boats.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/business/media/in-venture-with-nbc-esquire-expands-into-television.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Hearst and HGTV Enter a New Magazine in a Murky Market

September 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Yet Hearst Magazines is betting that there are enough people out there looking for just that kind of advice, presented in a sensible and recession-friendly manner.

Hearst and HGTV have become partners in a new magazine — called simply enough, HGTV Magazine — that will make its debut on newsstands at the beginning of October. It is one of the only major consumer magazines brought to market in the last few years, and the first since 2008 from one of the country’s top three magazine publishers, which all shed jobs and closed publications during the last recession.

“If you try to time the market, maybe on occasion you’ll get lucky,” said David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines. “But that’s a very difficult thing to do. We operate our business in good times and bad.”

In fact, when it comes to starting a magazine, you might say Hearst has a knack for pretty lousy timing.

SmartMoney, which it started with Dow Jones in 1992, hit newsstands in the thick of the early 1990s economic slump. The Food Network Magazine was introduced at the end of 2008, when the economy and stock market were in free fall, and the publishing world was in retreat.

For the record, both are still in business and doing quite well. Dow Jones bought out Hearst’s half of SmartMoney last year.

And the Food Network Magazine is one of the strongest-performing magazines in the business today, with ad pages and newsstand sales on the rise. It is now the third best-selling magazine by single copies for Hearst, behind only Cosmopolitan and O, The Oprah Magazine. Hearst will raise the magazine’s rate base, the circulation publishers guarantee to advertisers, next year to 1.4 million from 1.3 million.

Very much mindful that lightning may not strike twice, Hearst is forgoing the route of a traditional introduction for HGTV Magazine. Instead, it is careful to describe the rollout as a test — not an official debut — and has committed to only two issues.

The company said it was seeing encouraging signs. About 24,000 people have subscribed at a price of $15 for 10 issues. And while advertisers in the first issue were given space free, some appear to be on board with Hearst’s pitch that it has identified a new magazine category — something that offers tips for both home and lifestyle and is not so aspirational that it is out of reach.

“Despite economic pressure, I think there’s great advertising and marketing opportunities for many clients,” said Robin Steinberg, an executive vice president for MediaVest, a leading ad buyer.

Hearst has been successful before in taking a popular television brand like Oprah and Food Network and translating it into a magazine. Such joint ventures are a staple of the company’s growth strategy, allowing it to split costs and share in the profits. But whether that success can be replicated with HGTV, Ms. Steinberg said, remains to be seen.

“The challenge is benchmarking success against properties like Oprah and the Food Network,” she added. “Is HGTV popular enough to deliver the same consumer demand and scale? Scale isn’t necessarily everything, but it’s something.”

The challenge in convincing advertisers to sign on once the test phase is complete is something Hearst acknowledges will take some doing.

“I think advertisers want a little more facts behind things before you launch,” said Michael Clinton, Hearst’s marketing president and publishing director. “I think that’s changed over the last few years. In the go-go years of the early 2000s, a lot of advertisers would take a lot of fliers on a lot of new things. Now in a post-recessionary world, they scrutinize their budgets a lot more.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f70083815d7e67fc9d75dc74b09b3c25

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Advertising: Diamond Maker and Hearst Unite to Reach Consumers

September 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Instead of hiring a traditional advertising agency, the company has collaborated with an in-house creative team at Hearst Magazines for a new campaign with customized messages in digital and print ads. The company says it also hopes to increase awareness of its brands by building a social media community.

The campaign will be rooted in 82 print spreads that will run in seven Hearst magazines over 16 months. One of the main goals is “to show the power of print and how it moves consumers into the funnel and brings them all the way down to the purchase,” said Michael A. Clinton, the president, marketing and publishing director of Hearst Magazines.

The content of the print ads will vary slightly in each magazine based on its target audience. For younger fashion-conscious readers of Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Redbook, ads will highlight lower-priced items. The more affluent readers of Harper’s Bazaar, O, The Oprah Magazine and Town Country will see higher-priced items.

“It’s not unusual for someone from Town Country to pick up the phone and buy a $32,000 piece,” Judith Bookbinder, the vice president of creative communications at Hearst, said, referring to readers of the magazine.

Male readers of Esquire will be encouraged to buy diamonds for the women in their lives. The campaign also seeks to entice women to purchase items like diamond hoop earrings or pendants for necklaces for themselves.

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Before the new Hearst campaign, Ms. Bookbinder described previous ads by Hearts On Fire as “very traditional, everything you’ve ever seen in a jewelry ad.” Instead of featuring a simple image of the product, Ms. Bookbinder said, the new ads show real quotations from the brand’s Facebook page describing jewelry as “bling-tastic” and “a menagerie of twinkles.”

The ads showcase quotations about the jewelry from two fashion bloggers, Christine Cameron of My Style Pill and Stephanie Johnson of SJ’s Style Compass. They also will write about the diamonds on their blogs.

Each month, users who “like” the Hearts On Fire Facebook page will be entered in a contest to win a piece of diamond jewelry. And users who need a little guidance before committing to a jewelry purchase can call one of the company’s “Perfection Stylists” to help them select the right bauble. In anticipation of the campaign, the company expects to expand the number of phone agents on call to about 25, from three, and will counsel customers seven days a week. In addition to aiding potential consumers with diamond purchases, the stylists can also act “as a platform to let people tell us what they’d like to be seeing in terms of products and price points,” said Caryl Capeci, the vice president of marketing for Hearts On Fire.

The ads will also feature Web addresses linking each ad to its corresponding publication (HeartsOnFire.com/Esquire) and Quick Response, or QR, codes that consumers can use to go to HeartsOnFire.com. Once on the site, the users will be asked to share their own diamond stories and will be entered into a contest to be featured in one of the ads.

The use of QR codes and specific Web addresses will allow the company to learn more about its customers. “We can see who’s coming, what are they buying,” Ms. Capeci said. “We can optimize media and designs. It gives us an opportunity to really look more closely at our consumers.”

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Consumers who may not have all of the money for a diamond purchase up front can enroll in the company’s payment plan, which asks for a 35 percent down payment and six monthly installments.

“We wanted to be competitive in the payment plan area,” said Glenn Rothman, the founder of Hearts On Fire. “If we can give people an opportunity to get into the brand with a down payment through the payment plan, then that would add to the success of the program.”

Another feature of the campaign is a revenue sharing model where Hearst will get a percentage of the sales generated through the campaign, though representatives from Hearts On Fire and Hearst declined to say what the terms would be. The model could represent a new revenue stream for the publisher.

“That’s part of it,” Mr. Clinton said. He was the chief creator behind, “The Power of Print” a recent advertising campaign that extolling the virtues of print over digital content. The campaign was supported by Hearst, Time Inc., Condé Nast, Meredith, Wenner Media and the Association of Magazine Media.

The Hearst team says it hopes the Hearts On Fire campaign will drive home the point that print is still a major consumer vehicle, even if that consumer ultimately ends up on the Web. “Effective creative in print today needs to have a lot of digital enablers,” Mr. Clinton said, referring to advertising.

According to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, Hearts On Fire spent $3.8 million on advertising last year. For the first quarter of 2011, it spent $1.6 million, Kantar reported.

The partnership between Hearst and Hearts On Fire also represents a small evolution in the way brands interact with agencies. The Hearst Creative Communications team is handling all aspects of media planning and buying in addition to producing the creative elements of the campaign. Traditionally, those tasks would have been handled by several companies.

“Marketers are interested in partnering with us in much more and different ways,” Ms. Bookbinder said. “We’ve known the power of print. This is just a way of really making sure how that manifests.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=952dcb2b603e6626dee0681aaa5cbe22

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Media Decoder: Publisher Brings Digital Shopping to Its Magazines

June 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Hearst will make it easier to buy the products on its publications’ Web sites.

The photos and quizzes in Hearst’s online magazines are about to get a digital upgrade.

On Monday, Hearst Magazines Digital Media will announce two new features for its online publications that will make it easier for readers to buy the products they see on the page. Kristine Welker, chief revenue officer for Hearst Digital, said the publication wants its magazines to be a “shoppable experience” for users.

One partnership with Pixazza, a Mountain View, Calif., company that makes images interactive, will allow readers to click on photos and get more information about the products featured in the image. The first brand to use the technology will be Glidden Paint, an Akzo Nobel Paints brand.

Users who visit the Web site for House Beautiful will be able to scroll over the images in photo galleries on the site and see a selection of paint colors similar to the ones in the photo, the name of the paint color they saw in the photo and the paint’s price. From there, users will be able to go the brand’s Web site and, perhaps, make a purchase.

“We look for those marketing opportunities that are disruptive, unexpected and true to the brand voice,” said Rob Horton, vice president for marketing for Akzo Nobel Paints in an e-mail. “At the same time, though, any advertising medium must work toward getting do-it-yourselfers going by moving them from inspiration to action.”

Hearst began testing the technology with Redbook on redbookmag.com, where users could click on photos of models wearing various outfits to learn more about the items the model was wearing. “Why drive them somewhere else to make a purchase?” Ms. Welker said.

Hearst will also announce the next phase of their partnership with Buddy Media, a company that helps brands build and manage their Facebook applications. The new digital applications, called “sapplets” or social media applications, will let consumers engage with multiple publications and brands in three new ways.

Users will be able to vote on multimedia content like videos, take personality quizzes that will recommend products to them based on the quiz results, and earn badges for doing things like posting a comment on an advertiser’s page. Hearst expects the feature to be introduced to all of its digital magazine properties over the next few months, including Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping and Seventeen.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2278e679bc07e62592ad4291ed0d7756

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