GQ - Audience & Industries blog tasks
Audience
1) How does the media kit introduction describe GQ?
Entering a new era of leadership and influence under Adam Baidawi, GQ explores the powerful and progressive new forces shaping culture, society and commerce in Britain. Building on a 33-year legacy of print excellence across journalism, photography and design, British GQ is today also a digital, social, video and experiential
powerhouse – a community where people gather to be inspired and exchange ideas around style, creativity and culture.
2) What does the media kit suggest about masculinity?
As masculinity evolves and men's fashion has moved to the centre of the global pop-culture conversation, GQ's authority has never been broader or stronger.
3) Pick out three statistics from the data on page 2 and explain what they suggest about the GQ audience.
£7.7K
AVERAGE ANNUAL
SPEND ON FASHION
middle/higher class
£1.2K
AVERAGE ANNUAL
SPEND ON BEAUTY
large income available to be spent on beauty considering it is a male based audience
1.8M
SOCIAL FOLLOWERS
Large platform built which suggest audience are aspirers
4) Look at page 3 - brand highlights. What special editions do GQ run and what do these suggest about the GQ audience?
GQ HEROES: ISSUE & EVENT From the idyllic setting of Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire comes GQ’s first flagship event of the year. GQ Heroes is a festival of ideas that brings together gamechangers, creative radicals, deep thinkers and cultural icons for three days of panels and live performances.
GQ HYPE GQ Hype spotlights the stars who are moving culture forward: The actors, musicians, athletes, designers and innovators who are changing the way we think, live and experience. Each week, Hype will be promoted across the full range of GQ’s channels featuring an in-depth profile of a star who's peaking now.
MEN OF THE YEAR In 2021, the iconic British GQ Men of the Year Awards reached a truly global audience, with more than 3,200 news articles generating over 9.8 billion views. This November, the event will coincide with other GQ markets as Men of the Year creates a truly global moment around the world. MOTY 2022 will be bigger than ever uniting our IRL & digital successes with live red carpet coverage, multiple cover stars, high-profile video content, and massive social coverage.
TENTPOLE VIDEO AND SOCIAL SERIES British GQ’s video series drew more than 45 million views in 2021 – with viewers watching more than 10 million hours of content. In 2022, globally-renowned GQ franchises including Actually Me, 10 Essentials and Iconic Characters launch in the UK, joining local series like Action Replay to create our most dynamic lineup of video, ever. That video programming will also hit all of British GQ’s social channels, where audiences have grown more than 30% in the past year to top 2 million.
5) Still on page 3, what does the video and social series section suggest about how magazine audiences are changing?
British GQ’s video series drew more than 45 million views in 2021 – with viewers watching more than 10 million hours of content. In 2022, globally-renowned GQ franchises including Actually Me, 10 Essentials and Iconic Characters launch in the UK, joining local series like Action Replay to create our most dynamic lineup of video, ever. That video programming will also hit all of British GQ’s social channels, where audiences have grown more than 30% in the past year to top 2 million.
Media Magazine feature: GQ
1) What are the elements that go into choosing a cover stars for GQ?
Choosing covers is, by turns, the most rewarding and most infuriating part of the job of working on a glossy magazine. In the UK, getting the cover right is paramount – at GQ especially, most sales of the magazine are retail rather than subscription, so the cover has a huge impact on sales (for whatever reason, this is flipped in America, where the majority of sales come from subscription, meaning you can screw up the odd cover without too much consequence).
2) How is the magazine constructed to serve the target audience?
We were certainly always thinking if a cover star is a ‘GQ cover’, while also trying not to let ourselves to become
too restricted by it. Put another way: just because the standard GQ cover would be a cool actor in his mid- 30s experiencing a career spike, we would never only feature that type of cover, as the magazine would become predictable and boring very quickly. At the same time, a huge part of GQ is aspiration, and we often found that we go too young or too old we would lose that crucial aspiration factor. Young men in their early 20s in superhero films often didn’t sell as well as we’d imagine, and the same went for silver- screen legends in their 60s and 70s.
3) What does the article suggest about GQ's advertisers and sponsorships - and what in turn does this tell us about the GQ audience?
I suppose the obvious answer, in terms of advertisers, is brands that want to promote themselves in the sphere
of male, high-end, luxury lifestyle. So ,everything from top-tier tailoring to the latest sports cars. These brands are
often heritage brands, so the names wouldn’t change much from month to month, or year to year. Sponsors tend to be a little more fluid. These will often be the brands who, for instance, sponsor individual categories at the Men of the Year awards, or partner with GQ’s live talks event, GQ Heroes. These won’t necessarily be fashion brands, but crucially the goal will be to align their brand with the GQ one – a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer with a new luxury phone, for instance, may want to sponsor a Men of the Year award as GQ readers would be their target market, and the winner of the award
4) What is GQ Hype - and how does it reflect the impact of digital media on traditional print media?
So, GQ Hype was launched as a perfect middle-ground. With only one per week it still came with prestige,
it was still a GQ cover, designed as one, and so that fact alone meant it would get more attention both on
Instagram and Twitter than other online-only stories.
5) Finally, what does the article say about additional revenue streams for print magazines like GQ?
Extra revenue streams are vital to the magazine business these days – it’s almost impossible to survive without them. It’s about deciding the key areas in which the brand is strong and focussing on those, rather than expanding into areas you are not associated with. So, along with the annual Men of the Year awards – using GQ’s unparalleled celebrity contacts – GQ also had an annual car awards, and a food and drink awards. All subjects
covered in the magazine, but crucially focussing on high-end and luxury, as the magazine does. GQ’s most recent innovation was the GQ Heroes event, where revenue is generated by both ticket prices and sponsorship.
Industries
Your industries contexts are divided into three areas - Conde Nast, GQ's website and social media content and the impact of digital media on print industries.
2) What happened to the 'lads' mag' boom magazines such as Nuts, Maxim and Loaded?
Jones has distanced himself from the “lads’ mag” boom of the 1990s, saying it “denigrated our culture”, but he continued to argue that a successful magazine needs “a libido, whether you are French Vogue or Vanity Fair”. He also survived criticism in 2008 for his book Cameron on Cameron, a fly-on-the-wall appreciation of the prospective Conservative prime minister, which contained flattering statements such as “I think you acquitted yourself very well on Jonathan Ross,” and “you seem more confident than you’ve ever been”.
3) What changes have been taking place at Condé Nast in recent years and why?
Jones will join a growing list of Condé Nast editors to leave the publishing house recently as the company streamlines operations. According to the chief executive officer Roger Lynch, the aim is a stable of magazines that stay “digital-first and globally local with everything we do”. Jones, the most recognisable British departure from Condé Nast for a while, is not expected to be the last. The company says it will “continue to bring together our European business” and is “entering into a collective consultation process to evolve some of our teams, roles and capabilities”.
1) What does the article suggest about Condé Nast's recent strategy?
Last year Conde Nast merged the global editorial teams at several of its international magazine brands including GQ, Wired, Vogue and Conde Nast Traveller under a new digital-first strategy designed to produce less duplication of content. The changes also involved a new focus on digital income streams over print advertising revenue, with about 25% of the company’s revenues over the next four years invested into prioritising the expansion of video and digital content to boost online subscriptions and e-commerce.GQ deputy global editorial director Adam Baidawi told Press Gazette that despite the digital-first switch print magazines had not been significantly affected. GQ, he said, was “as good as it’s ever been” as he reported a 77% year-on-year increase in its newsstand sales for its March 2022 edition .He added that there was a “romanticised” vision of print-centred magazines that was becoming “less and less sensical” in the age of the internet.
2) How does chief executive Roger Lynch describe Condé Nast and why?
Last month, chief executive Roger Lynch told the New York Times the digital-first changes meant Conde Nast was “no longer a magazine company,” saying it has “70 million people who read our magazines, but we have 300 something million that interact with our websites every month and 450 million that interact with us on social media”.
3) What does Adam Baidawi say about Condé Nast, GQ and culture?
Baidawi told Press Gazette: “Conde Nast, as much as anything else, is in the business of shaping and reflecting culture. Culture moves, and we have to move with it “If you take GQ, for instance, I don’t think we were in a position to shape and reflect culture with 21 siloed businesses around the world centred around print products. He added: “I think our previous model worked really well for a very, very long time. I also think it was very romanticised and that over years it became less and less sensical in a globalised world.” Baidawi went on: “I grew up with Conde Nast magazines. I’m the sucker who paid 22 Australian dollars to buy British GQ in Melbourne, Australia at the newsstand… I still think we’re making comfortably the best print magazines on Earth.”He said print subscriptions are “actually up” across the Conde Nast portfolio this year but that “print for us is just one focus. It’s one product in a portfolio that we’re really proud of”.
Read this FIPP feature on Condé Nast diversifying into video and streaming content. Answer the following questions:
1) How is Condé Nast moving away from traditional print products?
channels for 2021-2022, capitalising on huge growth in streaming in the past year. Its brands will focus on shoppable series and reaching incremental viewers via new programmes and “supercharged” relaunches of some of its most exclusive events.
2) What examples are provided of Condé Nast's video and streaming content?
During its annual NewFront presentation today (4 May) which took place online, audiences heard about Vogue’s expansion into wellness, GQ Sports’ 2022 Super Bowl lineup, and Vanity Fair’s expansion into audio. The company also launched Condé Nast Shoppable, a new video capability that provides buyable opportunities for viewers in real time.
3) What does the end of the article suggest modern media audiences want?
“Audiences want to be participants, not just passive viewers – and of course, they want content 100 per cent personalised for them,” said Chu.
GQ website, video and social media content
Visit the GQ website, Instagram and YouTube channel. Note that some of these may be blocked in school. Once you have looked over GQ's online content, answer the following questions:
1) What similarities do you notice between the website and the print edition of the magazine?
they both talk about the issues regrading men and fashion and also promotes the product .
2) Analyse the top menu of the GQ website (e.g. Fashion / Grooming / Culture). What do the menu items suggest about GQ's audience?
It give the audience an idea on how to present themselves from day to day life around others and gives fashion ideas for the audience.
3) What does GQ's Instagram feed suggest about the GQ brand? Is this appealing to a similar audience to the print version of the magazine?
It targets the male audience including Lgbt+ community and gives a different perspective of masculinity making the audience feel more acceptable as a man and comfortable.
4) In your opinion, is GQ's social media content designed to sell the print magazine or build a digital audience? Why?
I believe that GQ is focusing on more digital audience as there has been an increase in digital audience which would mean they would be more likely to focus on the digital side rather than print
5) Evaluate the success of the GQ brand online. Does it successfully communicate with its target audience? Will the digital platforms eventually replace the print magazine completely?
I think that Digital platforms will eventually replace print magazines as less people are using print, there is an increase in social media activity which is seen by the promotion of GQs Instagram. I still believe that there will be a print around for that other audience who would prefer print over digital platforms. However, I do believe it would izaan quite a lot. I also believe that GQ successfully promotes their products and brands to their preferred audiences
The impact of digital media on the print magazines industry
Read this Guardian feature on the struggled of the UK print magazine industry and answer the following questions:
1) What statistics are provided to demonstrate the decline in the print magazines industry between 2010 and 2017? What about the percentage decline from 2000?
Sales of the top 100 actively purchased print titles in the UK – those that readers buy or subscribe to – fell by 42% from 23.8m to 13.9m between 2010 and 2017. Since the start of the internet era in 2000, the decline is 55% from 30.8m, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Similarly, advertising in consumer titles will have more than halved from £512m in 2010 to £250m by the end of this year, according to Group M, a media buying agency.
2) What percentage of ad revenue is taken by Google and Facebook?
Google and Facebook account for 65% of the $6.5bn (£4.7bn) UK digital display ad market. They are also strangling attempts by magazine and newspaper publishers to build their digital ad revenues by taking about 90% of all new spend. This is without the added competition for readers traditional publishers face online from digital media startups such as BuzzFeed.
3) What strategies can magazine publishers use to remain in business in the digital age?
Specialist magazines, catering for more niche audiences with interests ranging from shooting to model railways and ponies, are likely to always have a print fanbase. Wildman says for magazines to survive they must build a brand beyond the core print publication. “It is overly simplistic to say it is just digital versus print,” he says. “Magazine businesses are much more diverse. We ran 100 events related to our magazines last year – [a] Harper’s Bazaar [event] sold out in hours at £600 a head.“Endorsement, accreditation and licensing are increasingly lucrative. DFS sell House Beautiful and Country Living [named after titles] range sofas. And the bestselling premium home gym at Argos is branded after our Men’s Health magazine.” Nevertheless, mounting pressure on the traditional print magazine business, which still drives most revenues, is forcing consolidation as publishers seek scale to survive.
4) What examples from the Guardian article are provided to demonstrate how magazines are finding new revenue streams?Time Inc in the US, which publishes People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, has just been sold to rival Meredith for $1.8bn; the UK arm was picked up by Epiris.Last year, Immediate Media, which publishes 60 titles including Radio Times and Top Gear, was sold to the German publisher Hubert Burda, owner of Your Home and HomeStyle, for £270m.Despite the gloom, magazine publishers, like their newspaper counterparts, sense an opportunity as brand safety and measurement issues have prompted advertisers to closely scrutinise the once unquestionable value of investing in digital media such as YouTube and Facebook.
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