Launch Strategies

In April of this year, Brooklands launched Popworld Pulp, a new weekly magazine designed to bridge the gap between the NME and what used to be called the teenage market. Although, as we all know, pioneers are dead men with arrows in their backs, this was not in itself a foolish thing to do. The people behind it were experienced, albeit not at launches in this market. They had done their homework for over a year and they had the thing that boards of directors most often ask for, an association with a successful TV programme from a major terrestrial broadcaster. Ten years ago, this would have been considered a belt and braces launch.

Brooklands put out over 100,000 copies. They sold just 4,000. Just as the second issue was going into distribution, they made the wise decision to close it. I'm told that the total advertising revenue for both issues was just £2,000. In one of the very few candid statements ever made by a senior executive in the wake of a launch, Brooklands chief executive Darren Styles said "to be perfectly frank, the magazine has bombed in a way nobody connected with it could ever have envisaged."

Experienced onlookers could probably have predicted that the magazine would find the job of establishing itself harder than anticipated, but not even the most pessimistic among the team or the most gleeful of the competitors could have predicted that a new magazine in this day and age, in a crammed landscape where we are mediated up to the eyeballs and beyond, could find it so hard to attract that commodity upon which all launches have traditionally been predicated - basic human interest in The New.

Media Overload

There was a time, and it's not that long ago, when if you launched any halfway professionally produced magazine into a busy sector you would at least sample existing readers. Excited by sheer novelty and nudged into action by a nice cover gift, they would give you a shot. They might reject you afterwards, but they would nonetheless try you in the first place. Not any more. We have built a world in which everybody has all the entertainment and information they could possibly want. It should not surprise us if they no longer welcome with open arms somebody who's decided to provide just a little bit more because, well, it's in the interests of taking a company forward, increasing market share or boosting its share price.

The magazines that used to be launched regularly because some passionate editorial soul simply wanted to have something to read for themselves are fewer and further between. The cultish interest that they used to feed on is now sated by websites, blogs, podcasts, targeted programmes on digital TV and free supplements with the newspapers. The elbow room is simply not there any more. When Tyler Brulé launched his stylish, pan European interiors magazine Wallpaper* in 1996, even people who weren't anywhere near the epicentre of his universe felt they ought to try it in order to just know about it. Earlier this year, he launched his world affairs and business magazine Monocle and the world just shrugged.

Changing Priorities

The days of the majors putting out six launches a year (one big, a few small and one flying punt) just in order to see what stuck have gone. Companies like Emap and IPC are concentrating on two things: trying to migrate as much of the ad revenue in their specialist magazines online in the still unproven belief that brands that work on the newsstand have the same pull in the digital world; when they focus on print and paper, it's to battle for market share in the areas that are booming: that tends to mean the young women's weeklies.

The young women's weeklies sector - and here I mean Heat, Closer, Now and their legions of imitators - has gone from revolution to rigidity in double quick time. In fact if, ten years ago, you had even used the expression "young women's weekly" it would have been laughed off as a contradiction in terms. Young women bought glossy monthlies and yearned to be supermodels. Today's young women, a category that begins at 13 and goes right through to 40, buy weeklies and yearn to be photographed on a red carpet with some good looking but disreputable celebrity.

Charles Handy said: "Each generation perceives itself as justifiably different from its predecessor and yet plans as if its successor will be the same as itself." Hence, the women’s weekly market has seen the most frantic bout of "saming" since Avis and Hertz. In this area, there's not much room for editorial flair. Instead, it's a vicious, bare knuckle weekly battle fought around a hard understanding of what works. Efforts to move the template on, such as Emap's First, come up against the difficulty of selling a slower idea to a market which has been over stimulated to the point of mania. Once you don't make the numbers you change the editor, bring in somebody from an established success, adopt a bit of best practice, see a little improvement but then find that your magazine is healthier but it's no longer differentiated. Which then calls into question why you did it in the first place. Was it just to stop your market share from sinking?

To be fair, IPC's Look, which I thought had arrived too late at the party when it was launched earlier this year and would consequently struggle, appears to be establishing itself, even with an occasionally green logo that flies in the face of years of accumulated wisdom. Grazia has become a success – if you believe the chattering classes, a massive success - by giving its high end advertisers permission to reach a popular market and allowing its university educated readers to buy the same gossip as the girl at the checkout in the secure belief that this time it's all done in what Kenny Everett would have called the best possible taste, while energetically crossing his legs. Truly, gossip has done more to dissolve class barriers in this country than reform of the House of Lords.

Nuts & Zoo: Lessons to Learn

Elsewhere in the race to weekliness that has gripped the marketplace in the last five years, Emap and IPC's battle over the lads’ weeklies Nuts and Zoo could be taught in business schools as an object lesson in the cost of corporate short sightedness. They both had the same idea at the same time, each unaccountably went and poached an editor from the other, then launched magazines that were so alike even their own editors would have difficulty telling them apart and then energetically tried to out-trivialise each other, deflating their own cover prices in the process and taking what was left of the popular men's monthly market in their wake. According to the last set of ABCs, they were both going backwards and this was just at the point in their lives that they should have been flicking on the afterburners. Will we see a future in which publishers will settle for launching titles with shorter life expectancies, hoping to make hay while the sun shines with little thought to how fast they spend the brand? (Interestingly, a couple of weeks after Popworld Pulp closed, Channel 4 announced they were canning the show on which it was based, which goes to show there's no permanence anywhere.)

The Subs Channel

Next to this, the monthly market seems to be moving at a jurassic pace. New launches here are fewer and are increasingly likely to be more grounded in subscription than before. Condé Nast's Easy Living, which does Good Housekeeping for those who are too busy working to do much actual housekeeping, has already built a strong subs base. Psychologies, from Hachette, seems to have tapped successfully into therapy culture but needs to swiftly turn its newsstand buyers into subscribers. As we've found with our own title, the Word, you're better off trying to turn your frequent buyers into every issue buyers (by making a collectable CD part of the package) and then turning as many of them into subscribers than you are spending your money trying to drive busy people in the direction of the newsagents at a frequency they don't naturally think in any more.

In the future, the launches that will prosper at the newsstand will be those, not surprisingly, with a high appeal to people who go shopping for fun. They will also be the ones, like Glamour, that benefit from the fact that far below the iron clad categories of the newsagent, the tectonic plates of wider society are shifting all the time.

Publishers in the traditional men's interest areas are a little gunshy at the moment, worried that a lot of the passions that used to drive growth - cars, music, cameras - are being served by the internet. While this period of stasis will pass, things will never go back to the way they were before. All media have to co-exist. Some of the old information needs can no longer be fulfilled by a magazine. But all media have to seek traction, engagement and involvement. Magazine publishers know more about this than most media do. Some of this will be via related activities such as websites, streaming radio and podcasts, with the magazine at the centre of the relationship like a membership benefit.

In the multi media future, nobody can assume that the virtues of their medium will remain self evident. People love magazines just as much as they ever did, but they do not wish to do many of the things involved in getting their hands on them. The challenge for the whole industry is to promote the unique pleasure of the magazine reading experience and find new ways of delivering it to people.