NewsLine Column: Men’s Weeklies Make It Big
The latest consumer ABC results showed IPC’s Nuts and Emap’s rival Zoo sending shockwaves through the magazine market. Nik Vyas, group press director at ZenithOptimedia, explains how both titles have helped ensure the medium retains its place on advertisers’ media schedules…
Last Thursday saw the bi-annual release of magazine audit figures. It’s an event that’s always eagerly anticipated by agencies and publishers, providing as it does a health check on how specific magazines are faring, thereby forming the basis for trading advertising space.
Quite often the data is also of interest to a much wider franchise than a London-centric media industry as analysis of the figures can reveal (amongst other things) demographic changes in our society and which particular trends are waxing and which are on the wane. This time round interest and headlines in the national media were inevitably focused on the men’s market with the arrival of Nuts and Zoo. Pseudo-intellectual commentary from Radio 4 to the Sunday Telegraph lamented what’s become of our youth that they are drawn every week in their hundreds of thousands to a diet of Jordan and kickboxing orang-utans.
Such comments are overbearing and judgemental. If men want to read about mafia gang wars and see Big Brother‘s Shell in her favourite undies why not let them? If they want a more intellectual weekly read there’s always The Economist, Spectator or New Scientist. I’m sure that Nuts and Zoo readers must lament the fact that the aforementioned commentators appear unable to have a laugh or appreciate a nice pair of norks when they see them. People are different and the fact is that there is a massive amount of variety in consumer magazines and readers have a choice. Choice for all consumers that is, not just AB men.
What I continue to find most surprising every time the magazine ABCs are released is how resilient and innovative the medium still is. In this multi-media age when access to all types of information is both easy and free the preferred format for millions of people continues to be paper. And why not? Magazines are portable, easy to navigate, have high production values and (most importantly) they connect strongly with their audience. Readers actively spend a large amount of money on magazines when they could effortlessly be entertained or informed for free via the web, multi-channel TV or radio. Magazines are different because your choice of title says a lot about who and what you are. It’s much like wearing a badge of membership.
Of course every audit period there are casualties as some titles fail to move with the times and get usurped while other decent magazines just have to take their hats of to a better organised opposition. But here again is a cause for optimism as healthy competition is good for the market and good for consumers. You can bet your bottom dollar that the editorial team at Zoo are in over-drive figuring out how to close the gap with Nuts while the latter will be working on tactics for staying on top as well as fending off existing and future competition.
The magazine ABCs have once again shown the vitality that exists in the medium. The constant refreshing, re-inventing and launches ensuring that it retains its own distinctive place on an advertisers’ media schedule. Let’s hope publishers give the chattering classes something else to lament at the time of the next magazine audits.
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