The Braben View

What a week it was and there is still more to come from the second screen crack stream that is #Leveson.

I won’t comment on the content, there has been acres of stuff written on that. More on the absolutely compulsive nature of the stream to track and follow these fascinating events as they unfold live each day of the enquiry.

Ian Hislop castigated Nadine Dorries MP on Have I Got News For You, when she claimed that she didn’t watch the enquiry as she was working, she just followed it on Twitter. Is that possible? Is there anything more tempting to tear you away from the day-job than the thoughts, insights, questions and rants of the Twitter world on #Leveson?! Is Twitter a valid excuse for not completing the action list?!

We’ve had a quick poll here in the Braben office and these, in our view, are the best Tweeters to follow to get the very best from #Leveson.

Tom Watson MP, @tom_watson
Ben Fenton, FT @benfenton
Dan Sabbagh, Guardian @dansabbagh
Josh Halliday, Guardian @JoshHalliday
Alan Rusbridger, Guardian, @arusbridger
Adam Boulton, Sky @adamboultonSKY
Andrew Neil @afneil
Tom Latchem @theboylatch
Roy Greenslade @GreensladeR
Tom Bradby, ITV @tombradby
Steve Hewlett @steve_hewlett
Guido Fawkes @guidoFawkes

And for revelations on Friday:
George Michael ? @GeorgeMichael

There may be some more surprises coming from the celebrity quarter. Who would bet against a Joey Barton tweet to take an MP or two down over the coming weeks?!

The one knock-on effect is the loss of space and time for many of the media business journalists to cover other stories. Clearly it’s the most essential story in British media right now and fascinatingly addictive stuff, but we’re also looking forward to a time when the enquiry’s finished.

Please feel free to add more recommendations on Tweeters to follow!

Publishing +, the PPA’s annual conference, takes place tomorrow bringing together the great and the good of the magazine industry.

Here are five things to keep an eye out for as the day unfolds:

1. Lord Hunt, Chair of the PCC, talking about his vision for a free, self-regulating press

2. Brand new insight on payment models for media businesses from Wessenden Marketing

3. The role of the brand in publishing including the thoughts of Andrew Rashbass, Chief Executive of The Economist Group

4. Tips on turning data into engaging content from Simon Rogers, editor of The Guardian’s Datablog and Datastore

5. Creative thought leadership from top execs from BBC Worldwide, IPC, Bauer Media and UBM

Plus, a sneak preview of new ITV show The Exclusives – featuring six wannabe magazine journalists -which goes on-air later this month

Get more details on the conference here and follow all the day’s events using #ppaconf

Written by Sarah Locke, Founder and CEO

Passion, entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to tell great stories on behalf of clients is what fuels our industry.  So having the opportunity to be part of the Books For Breakfast event this morning and to be with the authors of Velocity, Ajaz Ahmed, Founder of AKQA and Stefan Olander Vice President of Digital Sport at Nike, and listening to their story gave me lots of food for thought.

Velocity – The Seven New Laws For a World Gone Digital has been created over a 12 year period as the authors have worked together and experienced the rapid changes in digital technology and how their businesses have had to evolve and thrive from a brand and agency perspective.  It was refreshing to hear how a client and agency has gone through these changes together to the point of writing a book and sharing that knowledge to the wider industry.

The speed at which we are all having to adapt and change as technology drives our businesses forward breaths new dynamics into the way we need to work and ultimately innovate, grow and change our businesses.

To innovate and change any business you have to understand who you are changing the business for so some of the key points from the book include:

1. Velocity does not care who you are and how good you were yesterday, it’s coming for you anyway, so don’t be a sitting duck.  Find the pain points, see patterns taking shape and evolve immediately
2. Think about communications in a different way – instead of interrupting serve your audience and make them feel something
3. If we ask why whatever product or service we create will make people’s lives easier, better or more fun, rather than how it might contribute to the bottom line
4. Velocity needs you to be streamlined.  Obsess over important details and edit ferociously
5. Respect human nature, digital is the means not the end. Don’t forget at the far end of an App, Tweet or anything is a person
6. No good joke survives a committee of six – if you sand down all the edges and desiccate all the juicy stuff, something terrible will happen – Nothing!
7. The most powerful force is not technology but imagination

As we head-off for our long weekend break perhaps you might find some inspiration from Velocity from the bookshop, on your iPad or Kindle.  Happy reading!

Written by Emma Thomas, Senior Account Executive

Since the first magazine hit a newsagent’s shelf, front covers have been designed to capture our attention and urge us to dip inside for more…

The PPA has just launched its ‘Front Cover of the Year’ category, ahead of the PPA Awards.  In less than a week, it has already received an impressive number of votes for the favourites from 2011. The award has got the Twittersphere buzzing with the #coveroftheyear hashtag reaching more than 2 million Twitter accounts in less than five days.

15 magazine front covers are competing against each other for the title, decided by the great British public. The shortlisted magazines include HELLO! magazine’s Royal Wedding cover, BAZAAR’s supermodel reunion, Men’s Health replacing the usual toned front cover torso with comedy’s Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, Shortlist’s missing cover, Stylist’s sticky Nigella Lawson edition and Sport magazine featuring Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne.

Each of the 15 titles were whittled down by the PPA’s judging panel using the below criteria.

• A high standard of imaginative design, photography and/or illustration
• How the cover fits with the overall brand positioning
• Cover lines that brilliantly sell the content
• How the cover appeals to both new and core readers

I also want to share you with another thought-provoking stat about magazines…. Research from the PPA, The Professional Publishers Association’s through its National Readership Survey found a whopping 79% of the UK read a magazine. To put that into context, that’s more than those reading a national newspaper, listening to commercial radio, tweeting, is three times the number of individuals owning a smart phone or the number of people who watch Downton Abbey, EastEnders, Coronation Street, X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent all together!

More than three quarters of us enjoy reading a magazine whether for escapism, to learn or simply because the content is great and we enjoy the way it’s written and the way it looks.

So, one last question remains, who will you vote for to win Front Cover of the Year?

Join the discussion on Twitter using #coveroftheyear

Contributed by James Matheson, Director

Another week, another spate of new magazine launches. In amongst the obligatory ‘digital-first’ headlines from most new magazine launches, Bauer Media have this week launched a new magazine that proudly has a ‘print-first’ strategy. Called LandScape, the magazine spent a year being researched and is aimed at women aged 35 and upwards, with a keen interest in the countryside and nature. The magazine, published on high quality, glossy paper, will have a print circulation of 170,000

“The magazine is a haven from the pressures of modern living; a chance to slow down,” commented LandScape’s editor, Sheena Harvey. ‘‘It’s a calm and relaxing read and an escape from the stresses of everyday life. It’s also a unique opportunity for advertisers to reach a passionate and discerning group of consumers.”

Research from the PPA, the Professional Publisher’s Association, seems to back up Harvey’s claim. A National Readership Survey shows that 3 million more UK women read a printed magazine than go online. In advertising terms that means that a campaign which used the internet and not printed magazines would FAIL TO REACH the equivalent of the entire female population of Denmark. There you go.

Obviously there are numerous brilliant tablet incarnations of magazines, and more will arrive by the day, but the fact is we’re a country that still loves print magazines. Today’s Deloitte’s sixth annual State of the Media Survey featured in Press Gazette of people who read magazine content in 2011 preferred to do so in print, unchanged since 2010. And 2011 was a good year for magazine subscriptions, with 35% of respondents saying they subscribed to at least one magazine, up from 29% in 2010.

So for all the digital-first headlines, PRs should make sure print magazines continue to be high up on their radar for years to come yet. The PPA suggests that every man, woman and child flicks their way through 20 copies a year and in doing so they spend around £2bn in cover price. So don’t feel old-fashioned in putting your smartphone down for a while and indulging yourself in print. The medium’s well and truly here to stay!

Congrats to the team at Thinkbox who delivered yet another fantastic event this am and I would recommend anyone in the media, advertising and technology world checks out the thinkbox.tv site when they have a moment.

The event at BAFTA was entitled – Fads, Fashion and Effectiveness: how brands really grow. As always it was filled with great nuggets of wisdom and challenging debate to media trends, fads, hype and buzzwords and where they sit again the status quo.

In particular, the buzzword ‘engagement’ was, metaphorically speaking, taken outside into the car-park and given a good kicking by Martin Wiegel, Head of Planning from Weiden+Kennedy Amsterdam.  Engagement, it was argued, is not a metric and not a useful term.  Instead, the audience were encouraged to consider that brands will grow by targeting people who don’t know you, don’t buy you, don’t care about you and aren’t even looking for you i.e. not fans, people who Like you or +1 you.  It was a refreshing perspective backed by insights from the author of How Brands Grow, Professor Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of South Australia.

Professor Sharp tagged marketers who focus on fans/friends as ‘shy’ marketers and that real growth will come from targeting the people that buy your rival brands and, indeed, can come from people outside the category you operate in.  He challenged marketers to strike up conversations with people who don’t know you, indeed maybe even don’t like you…

Jon Goldstone, former Group Marketing Director of Premier Foods and the marketer behind the famous Hovis campaign said that in simple terms a campaign for growth was about increasing mental and physical availability i.e. think about me more and be available to me in more places.

In this brief summary of a great thought-provoking event, I will leave you with the words of Dan Wieden, founder of Widen and Kennedy, who asked the question ‘are you a good storyteller or a bad storyteller?’ and explained that people have always wanted great stories since the days of sitting around a campfire.  His call-to-action of ‘Move me, dude’ was a great reminder of what sits at the heart of every brilliant communications campaign, a story that moves people.

Contributed by Richard Lambert, Account Director.

Social media presents an exciting opportunity to extend a debate beyond a venue’s four walls to a global audience – before, during and after.

We’re regularly involved in events on behalf of our clients so we’ve drawn together a series of tips on how to ensure you make an event as social as possible and connect the offline experience with the online world…

1. Promote speaker Twitter handles on all marketing collateral such as the e-invite and website as well at the venue on hand-outs so can people engage directly or even if they can’t be there in person

2. Direct audiences to the event’s online home, be that a website or LinkedIn group to boost traffic to video, written content and extend the life of the event

3. Set a hashtag and promote it from the start across all materials

4. Recruit two or three social media influencers to build buzz around the event

5. Enlist all partners to support the event including the speakers, moderators, media partners, trade bodies even the venue

6. Make sure your venue has WIFI, communicate the password, check it works and promote it on screens or notices around the room

7. Have the official hashtag read out to the audience during the introduction and make it visible within the room

8. Social media at its best is conversational so try to create debate online and not just make statements

9. Twitter walls are largely viewed as a distraction so need to be used on a case by case basis

10. Remember, having 10 really relevant, influential people is far more powerful than thousands of random followers

Enjoy your event!

Contributed by Byron McCaughey:

Whatever you want to call it, iPad 3, iPad HD or the ‘new model’ as Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook did at this week’s unveiling, the latest iPad brings with it a huge opportunity for a number of industries, not least within publishing.

What happens when you combine seriously enhanced digital resolution, slash the price of the iPad 2, have the Apple PR machine in full swing and an impressive figure of 3.62 million people owning a tablet device in the UK (73% Apple share in the domestic market) – well it’s simple, you get more publishers investing in tablet editions of their magazines, more users downloads, greater engagement and with that, in come the advertiser £££!

Marketing Magazine wrote an interesting article - How the ‘new iPad’ will change marketing? – I’ve taken a few of the nuggets from the contributors:

Chris Lawson, Guardian News & Media: “It looks like a two-horse race with Amazon Fire. The challenge is where you focus your development and marketing investment.”

Jamie Jouning, Condé Nast Digital UK: “The huge anticipation for modest, incremental performance improvements speaks volumes as to Apple’s current hold on the tablet market.”

Clare Baker, Absolute Radio: “Content generators and brands need to have a focus on post-PC devices, utilising the screen quality and the high-speed, long-term evolution as the perfect way for consumers to interact with them.”

The product launch is another step towards all content being digital, which will allow communications practitioners to have greater tangible analytics of where/when/how people are consuming their client’s content – bring it on!

If you want a quick run-down of the specs see the Guardian’s video here

Contributed by Byron McCaughey to The Braben View:

This week saw three of Bauer Media’s editors – Lucie Cave from Heat, James McMahon from Kerrang! & Alison Perry from more! – join a panel with Twitter’s UK head of sales, Bruce Daisley and Carat’s head of social media, Ben Ayers for a topical debate about the relationship journalists and magazines have with social media. The Big Bauer Debate was held during Carat’s press week.

Trade media press coverage following the recent ABCs has been dominated by talk of magazine tablet editions and whether the brands are fully utilising digital platforms as a whole. As Alasdair Reid put it in his Campaign article this week, tablets have given publishers a second chance to make amends after the “land-grab” mentality of magazine websites that basically gave away content for free – see the full article here… Campaign – Magazine tablet editions

Before I hand the mic over to Mr Ray Snoddy – the debate’s chairperson – to fill you in on the panel, my top 3 takeaways were:

1. Social media lets us find our readers, rather than them having to come to us – Kerrang editor, James McMahon

2. Magazines need to get better at packaging up their commercial offering to give brands 360 penetration, including print, online, tablets & social media. In addition, brands want to work with editors – who naturally know their audiences – to create campaigns that are fully integrated and targeted – Ben Ayers, head of social media, Carat

3. The print magazine is the mothership – everything else compliments that, including social media – Heat editor, Lucie Cave

And now over to Ray for an interesting take on proceedings … MediaTel – Should magazines embrace social media?

Contributed by Emma Thomas, Senior Account Executive:

As London’s biannual Fashion Week draws to a close, Bauer Media’s Grazia magazine, is celebrating the success of its big fashion collector’s issue. So, what was the difference between this issue to any other… this time it was Live!

Grazia’s editorial team decided to open its doors to the Grazia HQ in an innovative and somewhat bold decision to co-publish the issue with the help of its readers to produce a whopping 264 pages of content in a mere week timeframe.

Supported by a daily online documentary series, ‘Grazia’s Fashion Issue…Live!, every second of the drama and deliberation was captured as the editorial team went about creating the spring London Fashion Week issue.

Recognised for being the first truly interactive social experiment ever undertaken by a print product, readers were provided with exclusive behind-the-scenes access as the magazine handed over the editing reins to fans and followers. They were given the chance to comment, influence and vote on the editorial selection process in a live, social publishing event, across all Grazia’s platforms, including graziadaily.co.uk, YouTube, it’s 24,479 Facebook fans and 97, 870 @Grazia_Live Twitter followers.

As publishers continue to face the challenge of maintaining full engagement between their brands and audiences through one print platform, they are starting to seek new ways of interaction through multi-platforms. Social publishing can provide a solution to this with the added benefit of instant reader feedback and the consequent ability to use this information as first hand research to improve content and increase engagement levels, whilst building a loyal community on and offline.

Social publishing can be seen as making publishing a two-way street, providing the reader with a direct channel to the writer to offer feedback, voice opinions and influence in a way we would not be capable of without social media.

Although we’re already witnessing this two way communication model in practice on the internet, via comment sections, survey’s and ‘email the editor’ links, the trend is set to see more magazine publishers like Bauer Media experiment with the many benefits it presents to print titles. Grazia’s YouTube channel has already reached an impressive 4,662,991 video views.

Abby Carvosso, managing director of Bauer Magazines lifestyle, shares her thoughts on the benefits: “London Fashion Week is a big event in the calendar of fashion-conscious upscale women and Grazia is celebrating it with a collector’s issue with a twist. The LG Mobile sponsored ‘Grazia’s Fashion Issue…Live!’ series gives our readers an additional level of exclusive content and demonstrates the depth of interaction advertisers can have with their audiences through Bauer’s influential brands.”

As individuals, we have become familiar in sharing our opinions and feelings with the world. Whether this is through our Facebook status updates, Tweets or blogs, we constantly have the opportunity to communicate directly on many more levels and platforms than was once possible. As our social media network generation continues to grow, social publishing can be seen as a logical progression from traditional publishing, providing a solution to the industry’s need to operate across multi-platforms to fully engage with audiences and attract advertisers to their brands.

We are both excited and eager to see how the level of interaction between brands and their audiences change as magazine publishers continue to look for more ways to fully engage and capitalise on the many advertising opportunities presented by the adoption of social publishing.

More information on Grazia can be found here: Braben PR Press Office