Ben Chesters, MD Clients at Hearst UK on why they’re doubling down on the unique relationship with their audiences.

It struck me during the agency planners’ session at this year’s PPA Festival how important it is for publishers to ‘seize the moment’ and build deeper connections with a generation perhaps less au fait with magazine brands.

I’m a firm believer that magazines have always had the power to start conversations. They inspire, bring joy and connect with passionate audiences wherever they are. Magazines are world-class brands which have spent decades building up trust. The Good Housekeeping Institute turns 100 this year and continues to deliver trusted recommendations to intergenerational women every day; ELLE UK has been celebrating big ideas, compelling voices and inspiring fashion for almost 40 years; and Red has been supporting women to be better, happier version of themselves for 25 years.

It certainly won’t come as any surprise that this generation of media planners live and breathe social. Comments from the panel such as ‘I need a reason not to spend there’, ‘the platforms deliver against my client’s KPIs’ or ‘the reporting immediately validates the spend’ certainly provides a challenge for publishers like us. However, this is where I believe magazine media has an opportunity to bring brands back to the fore.

At Hearst UK we’re doubling down on brand primacy and ensuring everything we do stays true to each brand’s unique strategy. After all, the brands and their relationships with consumers are the very reason that planners come to us in the first place. With the continual push for a ‘cookieless’ media landscape, trust and context are clearly paramount and top of the agenda for marketeers. Known and engaged audiences will have an increased value, and Hearst UK’s membership drive is continuing at pace with subscriber bases continuing to show year-on-year growth.

Having qualified 1^st party data at our disposal to provide unique insights and editorial intelligence to produce the most engaging content for our audiences will continue to be our focus, and we’re excited by the potential to develop long-standing partnerships between our brands and valued clients.

We’ve organised ourselves around key clients (advertisers) with each Client Partner responsible for every relationship to do with that account – whether clients, media agencies, PR or experiential agencies. The ability to better understand the advertiser’s challenge and produce brand-first solutions, centred around our passionate audiences, certainly married with the panel’s recognition that magazine media very much has a role to play.

It’s now in our gift to shout louder about the brilliant brands at our disposal, which deliver audiences who are truly engaged and spend, and how they should be intrinsic to any client marketing plan.