Mediawatch Targets Women’s Weeklies

IPC magazines announced this week that it is launching a £9 million marketing initiative aimed at boosting the profiles of magazines in its women’s weeklies sector. IPC titles in this sector include Now, Women’s Own and Women’s Realm.

The women’s weekly magazine sector is the largest single sector in the magazine industry in terms of sales volume. In the last ABC period, women’s weekly magazines accounted for a total of over 8 million sales.

Despite this, the circulation of the majority of titles dropped from the previous year, according to Jan-Jun ’98 ABC figures. IPC’s Woman’s Own dropped 8.3%, giving it a total circulation of 653,432. Northern & Shell’s OK magazine was the exception however, gaining a huge 50.4% in circulation, taking it up to a total of 214,162. The title with the highest circulation is Bauer’s Take A Break, which in the last ABC period had sales of 1.2 million.

Note: The circulation figure given for Bella is taken from the publisher’s own audit and not from the ABC.

The size of the women’s magazine market generally is illustrated starkly by the discrepancies between adspend on men and women’s magazines. The top men’s advertiser, Rover Group, spent £584,000 in a twelve-month period on men’s magazines. In contrast, L’Oreal, which was the top spender in women’s advertising over the same 12 month period, spent a total of £4.8 million on women’s magazines.

In the same period, women’s magazines printed over 32,000 pages of advertising, compared to 9,500 pages of advertising printed in the men’s magazine sector, according to figures from MMS.

IPC is the market leader in the women’s weeklies sector, with a share of over 40% claimed by its six titles, despite the closure of its title Eva last month. Cabal Communications is planning to launch a first onto the women’s weeklies market – a title based on real and fiction crime stories. Cabal’s MD, Andy Sutcliffe, claims that “its content and high production values will differentiate it from the traditional women’s weeklies.”

Mediawatch appears every Friday in the Media section of The Times