About IPC
IPC
(The International Publishing Corporations ltd) was formed in 1963 after the
merge of three of the UK's leading publishers: George Newnes, Odhams Press, and
Fleetway Publications. With all three publishers having originated from the
early 1880's, they were rich in illustrious history.
In
1965 IPC set up a management development department that would rationalize it's holdings, ensuring that it's various
subsidiaries would not be at competition with one another for the same
markets.
This
lead to a reorganization of the group in 1968 into six divisions:
• IPC
Books- all book publishing (headed by by Paul Hamlyn, whose personal company
had been taken by IPC)
• IPC
Magazines- consumer magazines and comics
• IPC
Newspapers- including the People and the Sun (which was soon sold on) as well
as the Daily Mirror and Sunday Pictorial
• IPC
New Products- launching pad for products which used new technology (headed by
Alistair MacIntosh)
• IPC
Trade and Technical- specialist magazines
In
2000, IPC Magazines is renamed IPC Media, a new start to coincide on a
strategy of them soon being a brand-centric business. Then
in January 2010, IPC Media restructured around three key audience groups:
Connect - mass-market women, SouthBank - up-market women, and Inspire - men.
The Audience Groups
IPC
Connect: IPC Media's mass market women's division with a
range of brands. Connect's magazines are read by 9.4 million mass market women,
equating to 49% of all mass market women, while its digital brands reach over
5.3 million unique users and deliver 35 million page impressions every month.
Connect's audience is incredibly valuable and responsive, responsible for a
large majority of UK purchasing decisions.
IPC
Connect caters to it's consumers specifically through various components:
celebrity and fashion, lifestyle, traditional, TV and entertainment, real life
and casual gaming.
Examples
of IPC connect:, Woman's Weekly, Now, GoodToKnow and Tv Easy.
IPC
Southbank: IPC Southbank is the higher-of-class women's
section, focused on the three key markets of Fashion, Women's Lifestyle and
Home Interest. Southbank is home to some of the most iconic magazine
brands in publishing including Marie
Claire, woman&home, Look and Ideal Home.
Southbank has
a magazine for large varieties of interests in a woman's life, from the aesthetically
conscious, to home owning, to getting the best lifestyle possible. It's titles
reach a readership base of over ten million and go unchallenged by other
magazines.
IPC
Inspire: IPC Inspire is IPC's men's section. It has a large
portfolio of 38 brands, which cover a huge spectrum of interests, such as
Marine, Equestrian, Country, Music, Shooting, Mens Lifestyle and Technology.
IPC Inspire magazines include familiar names from Country
Life and The Field, to Nuts and NME.
In
April 2012 IPC Media won an award for 'Best Production Team of the Year' at
the Professional Publishers Association Production and Environment
Awards 2012. As well as now having reached an extremely vast portfolio,
shifting over 350 million copies of their magazines each year.
QUESTIONS ON IPC
Having
looked into IPC Media and creating a factual case study, I'm enabled to answer
questions and give my personal opinion on the company.
1. What types of magazine and target audiences has
IPC been associated with over the years?
IPC media has been associated with a variety of
niche audiences, which range from common/working class females, middle-class
females, to a large mixed male audience. Their magazines range in topic, from home
owning, to fashion, to music and country life.
2. Why might IPC be an appropriate publisher for a
new music magazine?
IPC Media do not publish music magazines and look
into that medium as much as they could. They only publish one music magazine,
NME, which is credited as one the most successful music magazines. If they put
their focus into the music industry they could potentially make a hit by
catering to a variety of musical interests as they do with their other
audiences, potentially coming up with something very different to that of other
publishers.
3. What sort of genres of music/types of magazines
might they be likely to publish?
Statistically speaking, males are the prominent
consumers of music magazines. The Inspire section of IPC is aimed in my opinion
at a very mixed audience of men, though it claims to be leaning to the
middle-part of the social spectrum. I think that IPC would create a magazine
that looks at music quite seriously, producing something similar to the likes
of Q.
4. Why might alternative publishers like Bauer be
appropriate?
Bauer is also a publisher
with a large portfolio and has two main areas of interest, magazines and radio.
This means that they would have the two components necessary to create a
successful music magazine and so it would be logical to publish a magazine with
Bauer as you are guaranteed to get a credible outcome.
