Aimed specifically at 18-21 year-old female students, Cosmo on Campus will be a free 56-page improved newsprint magazine and will be the first brand extension of its kind with 250,000 copies being distributed ‘brand to hand’ by brand ambassadors.
Campuses at 65 of the key universities across the UK including London Met, Leeds, Manchester, Wales and Edinburgh will be abuzz with activity as the ‘Cosmopolitan Brand Ambassadors’ engage with their respective female students and ensure the magazine is put in the hands of relevant readers. It is expected that it will get a great ‘pass on’ value to the nation’s 750,000 female students.
A great amount of time and effort by the in-house Cosmopolitan team has ensured that the content talks directly to the student population - giving them all the intimate, fun and honest advice they can get from Cosmopolitan on a monthly basis, but tailored specifically to their lifestyle and needs.
Content will therefore include current Cosmopolitan franchises such as:
You You You – Your life - sexy, single and sorted
Confessions – The funniest confessions from Fresher’s Week
High Street Hit List and Beauty Lust List – Celeb looks and styles on a budget
Man Manual – Student man-tribes decoded
Cosmosutra – Advice from the ‘sex and relationships’ bible
A dedicated channel within Cosmopolitan.co.uk (Cosmopolitan.co.uk/campus) will complement the free magazine and will feature additional content, offers and competitions such as a City guide for key university campuses detailing where’s hot to go out, the key gigs to attend, etc. Another important part of the channel will be ‘Style Wars’ – modelled on our very successful ‘Boyfriend Wars’, we’ll be asking users to vote for their most stylish student with some fantastic high street outfits up for grabs for the winners.
There will also be links and drivers to the November issue of Cosmopolitan and subscriptions to both the Zinio digital version of the magazine and the paper product. The brand extension will also exist on Cosmopolitan’s Facebook page and its Twitter feed.
The initiative has proved incredibly popular with advertisers who want to target the student market directly. Key brands that will be present cross-platform (in print and online) include Arcadia, Clinique and Lipsy. In print advertisers include New Look, Accessorize, and Misguided and we have reader offers from fashion and beauty labels Office, Next, Batiste and Amplified Clothing.
Cosmo on Campus is a long-term strategy, which acts as an introduction to the monthly paid-for glossy - in some instances even introducing readers to the print medium. It’s all about bringing relevant content to the right audience and engaging female students in order to build loyalty to Cosmopolitan. We’ve been experts at this for the past 38 years in the UK and believe the opportunity to extend Cosmo on Campus in the future is huge. As a starting point, we aim to publish Cosmo on Campus in line with term times.
We’re looking forward to the response from the student population and the industry to what we believe is a media first.
