Open Door Policy For IPC
A major restructuring of ad marketing and sales teams at magazine publisher IPC hopes to make the lives of advertisers and agencies far easier.
The reorganisation, overseen by IPC advertising managing director Caroline McDevitt, and accompanied by increased investment in data provision, has been dubbed Access All Areas as it aims to simplify the whole media buying process across all of IPC’s brands.
Says McDevitt, who joined IPC a year ago: “This restructure is all about utilising our pre-eminent brand expertise while ensuring we make the right people available to speak to our clients and agency partners. IPC Access All Areas is about ensuring ease of access, and ease of understanding – both of the potential of magazines as a medium, and of our fantastic portfolio of brands and their relationship with their millions of readers.”
Key to the move is the combining of the sales teams for two divisions – Connect, with titles such as Now and Woman, and tx, with television-brands including TVTimes and Soaplife, into one unit to be called IPC Weeklies. This will give a single initial point of contact for clients wanting to access readers of 11 of IPC’s top weekly titles.
IPC Weeklies will be headed up by group advertisement director Kate Mackenzie, who says: “Weekly magazines provide access to the nation’s purse strings, and with the creation of IPC Weeklies we can now offer a one stop shop to reach over nine million weekly readers. With huge brands like What’s on TV, TVTimes, Pick Me Up, Woman and Woman’s Own, IPC Weeklies provides a larger composition of female main shoppers than ITV1, GMTV or the tabloids – and this new structure makes it easier for our clients to engage them.”
Along with the restructuring, IPC has focused on investing in resources and data to enable clients to improve the targeting of advertising. To this end, a new marketing and strategy department has been set up to pull together all relevant data sources and make accessing this information simpler. Leading the team is James Papworth, who moves over from the position of ad marketing manager. Alongside Papworth’s team is a new customer insight department lead by Amanda Wiggington, as well as IPC’s advertising website, which has been relaunched.
According to Neil Perkin, group advertisement director for marketing and strategy, the two new departments are pivotal: “We’ve listened to our clients who tell us that great consumer and medium insight has never been more important. These teams will enable us to deliver more value through our understanding of how they can best use the magazine medium to communicate in a meaningful way with their consumers.”
These new appointments follow hard on the heels of the creation of two new posts last month: Keith Yonish who joined IPC as director of creative solutions, focusing on advertorials and sponsorship; and Ian Tournes who was appointed group trading director with responsibility for overseeing relationships with agencies.
IPC Media: 0870 4445000 www.ipcmedia.com