Your Street, Your Style

Street style is booming.  It is beginning to define the fashion industry and designers are starting to look to the streets for inspiration for their clothing lines.  Many people look in magazines for inspiration in their everyday style, only to find outfits that have been styled by professionals and sometimes, at very high prices.  What if there was a magazine that showed you real street style on real people?  Would that inspire you?

That’s where Street comes in.  This will be a magazine which will be published monthly on newsstands, along with a digital edition and an online platform that will be updated daily called streetmagazine.com.

Street will be a magazine for young women and men who are looking for inspiration in their everyday style.  The magazine has a commitment to be a platform to showcase real street style from around the world, purely based on high street fashion.

Street will be 60 pages, saddle stitched and contemporary in look and appeal.  Quality photography and content is the constant goal.

There is a gap in the market for Street.  Not one magazine is currently out there that is dedicated purely to street style, based entirely on high street fashion.

My target market includes men and women aged 16-28 who have an interest in fashion, trends and style.  They only buy high street labels and want to live a stylish lifestyle.  This target audience have increased their consumption and demand for magazines in line with their rising standards of living.

I believe there is a big audience out there who are ready to consume this content.  So many outfits in fashion magazines are put together by a stylist.  People are waiting for a refreshing idea that shows them how people put clothes together themselves, just like you and me.

So get ready for an innovative, versatile magazine that will answer all your questions about style.  Just remember, it’s your street and it’s your style.

Click here for more information.

Holly Sutton

VICE From Lads Mag to Vertically Integrated Global Digital Brand

 Vertical and lateral integrations have propelled VICE from a free magazine to an international multi-platform, vertically integrated brand with revenue of $100 million dollars in 2011 and estimated worth of $1 billion dollars in 2013 with only around 3% of that coming from the magazine itself.

VICE has always been a free magazine, however they have a controlled audience in that the magazine can only been found in highly vetted select boutiques, cafes and bars.  This ensures that the magazine has a 100% pick up rate by the target demographic of young urban trendsetters with disposable incomes.

The magazine is available globally and VICE have used their online platform to gain an in-depth knowledge of their target demographic. As VICE have a cult following internationally they have recognised that there are common features amongst this demographic.  This accumulation of knowledge production is where the value lies.

VICE have vertically integrated into advertising. Their agency Virtue produces content for big brand advertisers. They have a digital distribution advertising network, AdVice, that allows brands to connect with consumers on many other online platforms outside the VICE domain. But most interestingly they have radically integrated laterally by offering entertainment solutions and digital platforms for big name brands.  A current example of this is The Creators Project in partnership with Intel, which provides a digital arts and culture channel. This allows Intel to stay in touch with their core demographic of creatives.

VICE are adept at generating maximum profit from their content with successful moves into book publishing, music production and management and video production. Currently in the process of creating their own video player, which will ensure that their online video production will have a long tail whilst being embedded into host sites and advertising revenue will be split.

Vice continue to grow with incremental horizontal integrations and are producing many new niche channels.  Their success is tantamount to the interest the brand has received from other huge media companies.

You can view my presentation here http://prezi.com/4g34oryjxa4q/edit/#1_24309637

For Better Or Worse: An Analysis Of Digital Publishing

It’s been 550 years since Johannes Gutenberg pioneered a new printing technique and began to publish on a mass scale for the first time. With the dawn of digital publishing a new frontier revealing itself to us. Digital is being promoted as the future of the publishing industry and as tablet computers and e-books become increasingly widespread the ways in which we devour our media is changing faster than ever before.

While this is only a brief analysis of the arena of digital publishing and it wouldn't surprise anyone if this information is rendered irrelevant in 6 months, looking at the industry as it stands provides an interesting view.

Political

As digital generated content and Internet access is becoming increasingly widespread there is a new generation of writers from all backgrounds on an international scale. These new writers can create followings and generate interest in their pursuits, whether they are political or creative. With a wider field of reporting and the repercussions of coverage can be felt in political institutions across the world. The recent Arab Spring was accelerating by the use of digital communications and localized revolutionary reporting. The flip side of this is that those with an extreme agenda have the same soapbox from which to speak.

Economic

There are a series of new revenue streams that digital publishing presents for the industry in general, which goes some way to explaining why the leaders of publishing companies are fiercely pursuing it. While 40% of tablet owners have purchased a magazine app and 25% regularly read magazines on their device, there are still considerable gains to be made in that market. Advertising has been deemed more effective if it is seen to be interactive. With companies such as Facebook have been quick to adopt purchasing software such as Synapse and Alvenda buying direct from a digital magazine can hardly be light-years away.

Social

There is an increasingly social side to the way digital content is created and eventually published. Publishing efforts from 37 Signals have pioneered the use of blogs to release parts of their book over time and in order to engage with their readers to see how they were being received.  Wayne Gladstone’s book Notes From The Internet Apocalypse was originally a serialized novella published on Cracked.com but will soon be published by Thomas Dunne books.

Technological

The reading experience has been enhanced by the dawn of this new technology. The time spent reading magazines rises with digital publications, the average number of minutes spent on Vanity Fair rose from 65 minutes to 200 when the audience used a digital copy. Since their release in 2010 over 100 million iPads have been sold worldwide and this is a considerable audience for any publisher.

Legal

With digital content being so easily exploited, copied and reproduced there are a number of legal issues revolving around the rights of digital content. Acknowledging the right of workers and professionals is one key aspect of this but also the rights of the purchaser. Looking at the widely reported story that Bruce Willis was to sue Apple in order to leave his considerable digital music collection to his daughters raises an interesting question, who actually owns downloaded content? In reality customers never actually buy a lot of digital content, rather they purchase the license to use it. The same is as true for ebooks and magazines as it is for music. There may be a digital artifact on your kindle but we cannot say that you “own” it in the traditional sense of the word. As such that feeling of “buying” something may be misplaced.

Environmental

A great deal has been made about the benefits of digital readers to the environment. If there are less trees being felled for magazine paper then there will be a positive impact. However, the natural resources that have to be harvested and mined for the creation of tablets and various e-readers could have a negative impact on the environment. Books and magazines are easily recyclable whereas technology is particularly hard to dispose of and can lead to terrible amounts of waste and landfill.

Even this blog (which was meant to come in at a tidy 300 words) cannot fully incorporate every aspect of the burgeoning digital publishing industry, but hopefully it has demonstrated that in this relatively infant medium there is plenty of potential for great success.

Looking At The Bigger Picture - A PEST Analysis on the Media Industry

Businesses in the media industry have straight forward value chains.  However, the digital revolution is allowing them to reconstruct.  This process is allowing businesses to become more innovative.  But how do they do this? 

Publishing digitally is growing.  Different platforms and devices are being introduced constantly, providing consumers with a new way of reading.  Communities are being created online, allowing people to engage through books, magazines, blogs and long-form journalism. 

The digital distribution of books creates engagement with readers.  Books can reach a much larger audience, which brings in more revenue. 

Inevitably, the continuing growth of the e-book (for example, Amazon's kindle) in this industry will mean the death of the printed book.  The threat lies in innovation – how do publishers think of new ways to attract readers?  Publishing houses are consolidating to reduce operation costs, but if the money still isn’t growing, more rationalising has to take place.

In the music industry, CD sales are decreasing.  People are looking for ways to share music, which allows businesses to be innovative and create new ways for this to happen.  However, they also need to find a way to attract people and make money.  If there is no new talent, there is no money.

Newspapers have also realised how beneficial an online presence is.  This provides them with an opportunity to carry a range of content to appeal to a range of readers.  The key, again, is innovation.  Simply, if there are fewer advertisements, there are fewer pages in the newspaper; therefore making it less value for money and less attractive to readers. 

Then we have magazines.  People spend an equal amount of time reading print as they do online.  They have endless opportunities to expand.  However, there is still one major downfall.  If the internet is ever growing, what does this mean for magazine sales? 

For international businesses, their problem is the decline in print advertisement revenue.  In order to compete, they would need to build on their online advertisement revenue and their content revenue. 

Digital is taking over.  There’s no stopping it.  Businesses need to be innovative and aware in order to build, grow and succeed.

Holly Sutton 

Digital Innovations Do Not Spell the End for Magazines

Technology has been the biggest driving force of change in the publishing sector. The Internet and invention of the smart phone and tablet have revolutionized how people gain access to information.  When the first tablet, Apple’s Ipad, was launched in 2010 many predicted the end for print media.

Jonas Bonnier, CEO of Bonniers international multi-channel media company, says that, “magazine publishers can survive if they are able to monetize a variety of revenue streams and operate on different mediums.”

The tablet meant that many magazines brought out apps to allow readers to download issues to read onscreen. This has been successful but online subscriptions still only account for a fraction of any magazines total sales. Most people would still prefer to have a magazine in hard copy, to touch, hold, smell and enjoy at their leisure.

However, it is important for magazines to have a strong online presence to retain customer brand loyalty. Therefore, all content written for the magazine must serve a function, the content should not be the same on all levels. For example it is important that there is material specifically produced for the app, which works well on the platform incorporating interactive elements.

Magazines need revenue from print advertisements and having a website only cannot supplant this. Many magazines, such as Teen People or Seventeen in the USA, made a mistake in moving to digital only format.  According to Fipp Research this spells death for the magazine, because if you can’t make it in print you won’t in digital. The problem lies not with the medium but the magazine.

Conglomerates tend to control distribution systems and retail outlets, so by cutting out the middle men and selling directly to the public online, independent publishers are able to operate more easily. Independent magazine publishers, such as Stack magazines, have a page on the Internet where subscribers sign up for monthly delivery of magazines, which cannot be found in shops.

So, instead of the Internet killing magazines off, it is actually helping them to thrive. The future of magazines looks promising as long as they continue to move with the times and have a strong presence on many platforms.

Marketing - ROI and Social Media

In the past 15 years the web has become a massive platform for advertising and naturally companies want to be able to prove its effectiveness (though none would deny it works to some extent). On the one hand the internet provides better analysis of this than say a traditional billboard, since web analytics, the most famous of these being Google Analytics, can tell you how many people have seen an ad on a page, and how many people have clicked it, whereas it would be more difficult to count how many people had walked past a billboard. This measurement however becomes more difficult when we try and measure the impact of social media since it is more difficult to know if a conversation on twitter for example results in a sale. However, many have argued, and I would agree, that social media has highlighted a division in the word marketing between sales or ‘getting the message out there’ (depending on how you define it) and the concept of ‘communication’. While still undoubtedly marketing to some extent, social media allows you to build a community around your brand. It is interesting to come to this from the point of view of magazines, since above all products they have been built upon community and conversation, with their inclusion of letter pages, competitions, reader Q & As etc, so it is fascinating to see these types of communities being built up around more traditional products for example the Starbucks Facebook page etc.

Innovation

For product innovation, magazines, particularly business to business titles are now branching out to create brand extensions. For example many now have industry awards, networking events, and seminars. This has also led to position innovation in that magazine publishers now consider themselves as ‘brands’ rather than a magazine plus extra bits.

Spotify is an example of quite explicit process innovation in that it completely changed the way music was delivered, by drawing on file-sharing developments but adding limitations to keep the music producers happy.

A good example of almost ‘backtracked’ position innovation is the kindle cover in the style of book sleeve. It managed to steer the kindle away from being a high tech gadget to being something you can still curl up with, having it resting in your palm. And essential context move particularly for older consumers.

As Bessant & Tidd point out, the internet and technology are a great catalyst for paradigm innovation and one assumes most organisations today would like to think they are ‘changing the way we do things’, even if some are really still rather stuck. Perhaps the most essential change in mental models today’s technology is its social and interconnected nature. People are desperate to share and connect which has led for example to innovations in ebooks to allow sharing of passages and even temporary lending of books between ebooks.

Overall it seems that digital provides massive potential for position and paradigm innovation. We know now that product innovation will happen insanely fast and effectively – our technology and skill levels make this relatively easy. What is more difficult is knowing what to do with more abstract concepts of what all these potential developments mean in terms of how they could change our culture and day to day lives.