Magazines break the internet in Cannes
Paper magazine founder Drew Elliot, Chief Creative Officer, has revealed how the brand’s now infamous nude Kim Kardashian cover helped it expand its reach exponentially.
Speaking at Cannes Lions, Elliot said that since the Kardashian issue was published in November 2014, Paper’s reach has soared. After all the images were released, 50 million people visited the Paper Magazine website – 1% of all US internet traffic on that day went to the Paper Magazine website.
“We had 2,790,000 unique visitors versus 30,000 normally, and we called our tech folks to ask them whether our site would be able to handle 10 million uniques,” Elliot said.
“What people who visited the site didn’t know was that the best was yet to come – we didn’t have an idea about the kind of memes that would follow. Even brands jumped on to it.”
The Kardashian cover also helped boost the brand’s social media presence.
Instagram following grew by 326% Tumblr increased by 125%, Facebook grew by 34% and Twitter increased 24%.
“A lot of the success was attributed to Kim Kardashian and that’s why we succeeded,” Elliot added.
“We built equity with the celeb together and we had a strategic plan.”