On this week’s episode of The Publisher podcast we hear from Alex White, Group Managing Director for Immediate Media’s Knowledge portfolio which includes BBC Gardeners’ World, BBC History and Immediate’s parenting business, MadeForMums.
We spoke about the benefits that come from the company’s focus on publishing verticals, how the magazine publisher is bringing a culture of innovation into the business by giving staff the space to innovate and how she believes encouraging an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ is crucial to compete.
Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity:
The value of ‘flagship’ print issues
[The May issue of Gardeners’ World] is this long-running campaign, it’s in its 31st year of 2-for-1 gardens. It provides incredible value for our audience and has become a bit of a calendar moment for the gardening community throughout the year. They look forward to it, they watch out for it, and it’s a really important cornerstone of our magazine publishing model.
It drives incredible performance for us as a business; it’s priced at a premium price point and delivers incredible value for users. It’s really great because it taps into a slightly different aspect of our audience than the traditional practical gardening… It’s a bit more, visiting the experience of a beautiful garden, garden tourism. That’s actually quite a broad market that we get to tap into for that moment in the year.
The TV weeklies are another comparison. For say, Radio Times Christmas, that is huge. Again, it’s a whole different audience that buys into that magazine versus the weekly through the rest of the year. That’s a really helpful thing because it helps drive our value proposition overall. We tie it into our subscriptions proposition, but it drives a hell of a lot of good performance on the newsstand as well.
[Gardeners’ World May] sells approaching 140,000 copies on the newsstand, So it really supports the whole gardening sector market for magazines.
Fostering a genuine culture of innovation
What we’ve been really trying to do as a business at Immediate Media is bring a culture of innovation right into our business and feel like, we’ve got the ideas, we’re going to make the space to innovate. We’re going to give people permission to innovate.
We’ve created an innovation fund where people can come and pitch for a bit of money to explore an idea – no idea is a bad idea. We’ve really tried to foster that culture as a business, and it’s paid dividends because I think people now feel like they’re being encouraged to do that, and it’s helped us make massive strides forward rather than a pyramid of approvals, or committees – we’re trying to dispense with as much of that as possible.
The guardrails are known and understood from the team. We wouldn’t want that culture of permission to be our prevailing one, because the entrepreneurial spirit has got to win out for us if we’re going to be able to compete.
Driving digital subscription success
We’ve got an excellent marketing team, which helps a lot. We acquired Nutracheck a few years ago, and that’s brought loads of learnings into our business about how to do digital subs effectively. But essentially it comes down to that strong customer proposition, and really driving the acquisitions, then the ongoing value, and really looking after the retention.
In terms of the back-end systems, there’s been a lot of work that we’re doing there to really understand our customer, and have a single view of our customer across all platforms so we can serve them an appropriate message.
There’s a lot we’ve been able to learn from the wider thrust toward digital subscriptions that we see in our society today – it’s actually become a much more prevailing norm. That’s played to our strengths because we already had very strong, engaged audiences around our content verticals, so we’re seeing a lot of progress with it. It’s fantastic to see our subscription businesses in growth thanks to these new digital products that we’ve been able to launch.
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