Sky and supermarkets rule contract publishing roost
ABCs: Sky’s customer magazines: Sky, Sky Sports and Sky Movies take up the top three spots in terms of consumer magazine circulation, showing the rise of branded content in the magazine industry.
Seven of the Top 10 spots are taken up by customer magazines while a third of the top 100 consumer titles by circulation are branded customer magazines from retailers, car marques and
Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s in-house publications fall inside the Top 10, while Morrisons’ title, which is published by Result Marketing and launched a year ago, falls just outside in 11th place. Tesco and Sainsbury’s Fresh Ideas magazines saw year on year gains of 1.9% and 0.4% respectively to 2,055,391 and 1,499,244.
Sainsbury’s magazines are published by Seven Squared.
Daniel Davey, Tesco director of account management at Cedar, says Tesco has improved the distribution process and increased the magazine’s prominence in store, which it says is reflected in the improved figures.
Asda’s magazine holds fifth place despite shedding 36.4% of its circulation year on year, and dropping 26.3% in the second half of the year.
Asos.com, the online fashion retailer, has seen circulation of its customer magazine, published by Seven Squared, rise 0.6% year on year to 449,971 and creep to the second spot in the Women’s Lifestyle sector ahead of Cosmopolitan.
The top four women’s interest cookery titles come from the “big four” supermarkets, each outperforming the BBC’s four food titles, BBC Good Food, Olive, Easy Cook and Easy Cook Home Cooking.
Julia Hutchison, COO of the Association of Publishing Agencies, says: “Without a doubt recent months have been tough for the media industry as a whole and whilst they will certainly continue to be so for sometime, the consistent circulations of customer publications proves that marketers are aware of the positive impact that editorialised branded content strategies have on their business.”
