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Immediate Media: rethinking the publishing process to maximise ROI

Alex White, Group Managing Director for Immediate Media’s Knowledge portfolio, says the central challenge for any modern media business is to maximise the ROI on every piece of content they create, and that means innovating across the whole publishing process.

For the last few years, Immediate Media has been organised around three key verticals – Entertainment, Food and Knowledge. Alex White is Group Managing Director of Immediate’s  Knowledge portfolio, which includes BBC Gardeners World Magazine, BBC History and the parenting advice and recommendations site MadeForMums.

Alex believes that one of the central challenges for any modern media business is to maximise the ROI on every piece of content they create. “That is absolutely the nut to crack for media companies,” she tells this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast. “How to make the absolute most of the fantastic assets that we have, incredible archives, incredible talent.”

She says if there is any formula for success it rests on being able to reach consumers with content in the formats that they want most. “How do we get really efficient about reworking, reusing and commissioning, being really smart about it so that we can feed the hungry mouths of these platforms.”

Alex says that concentrating on specific verticals allows Immediate to focus efforts on areas where the company is already strong and that focus is key in serving established audiences. However, she says it also helps when it comes to stretching brands to attract customers outside their traditional audience.

She describes a customer-led approach that considers how to address audiences within a vertical rather than just the established customer base. “It’s how we really address the needs of that vertical, the audiences in that vertical, but not be completely constrained by the brand and who we’ve historically spoken to.”

Knowledge sharing

Organising around narrow verticals also facilitates knowledge sharing across the group. If one of the brands in the portfolio experiments on a new platform, trying out a new article format or introducing a new type of event, the whole group learns.

Alex says: “It’s a way of just trying to move faster and innovate quicker, rather than everyone spinning their wheels, trying to do the same things in parallel. We think ‘this brand will really lend itself to that platform, let’s test it there and try and work out what that playbook looks like’. Then we can roll out that best practice and the other brands can more quickly get on board and benefit from the experience.”

She highlights BBC History magazine’s award-winning audio presence through its History Extra podcast. “We’ve got a lot of audio material and we’re thinking now, how does that translate? How do we create more video assets at the point where we’re creating that podcast?”

This has led to the History team creating longer form features, Q&As and quizzes for distribution across a range of platforms from a single piece of content.

Doing this has required a ‘bit of a shift’ in how the team thinks about content production processes; seeing ‘content campaigns’ rather than individual pieces of content. “It’s made us think about roles and responsibilities in our team’s ways of working, putting resources in the right places, rather than a siloed approach. We tend to have content creators that work across multiple formats… really thinking about how [content] serves all of those different platforms.”

Innovation across platforms

With a much loved TV tie-in, high profile national events and a range of digital activities, BBC Gardeners’ World magazine is one of Immediate’s most multiplatform brands.

Every May issue for the last 30 years, the title has run its 2-for-1 Gardens campaign, bundling the magazine with a guidebook and a discount card that can save readers up to £35 on a visit to one of almost 400 gardens in the UK and Ireland.

Priced at £9.99 and selling 140,000 copies on the newsstand, the issue is the gardening world’s equivalent of fashion’s September issues, generating the highest revenue of any UK monthly for the past 15 years. Alex describes the 2-for-1 Gardens issue as a ‘calendar moment’ for the gardening community. “They look forward to it, they watch out for it, and it’s a really important cornerstone of our magazine publishing model.”

With less emphasis on seasonal, practical gardening advice, the May issue also attracts a broader audience. “It taps into a slightly different aspect of our audience,” explains Alex. “This is more going out to gardens, visiting, the experience of garden tourism. That’s actually quite a broad market that we get to tap into for that moment in the year.”

Circling back to Immediate’s customer-led approach to innovation, Alex explains that the Gardeners’ World team has launched a companion app with this year’s 2-for-1 Gardens issue in response to feedback from readers. The app is free for anyone to download but the digital card can only be purchased using the activation code in the 2-for-1 Gardens guide.

Explaining the thinking behind the app, Alex says: “It’s easy to lose a card. It’s easy to forget it’s not in your wallet when you come to visit the garden. So we’re launching a brand new app so people will be able to see garden listings on their phone and they will be able to download the digital card to the wallet on their phone.”

For Alex, Immediate’s drive to democratise innovation is all about modernising the offering. “We like magazines. We also love our phones. It’s not either or. These are modern consumers… we just need to make sure that we’re responding to changing expectations and really delivering great experiences.”

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