Independent Digital Media

Two former “queens of print” put a new face on the digital arena

02/06/2009

“I’ve been here for about five months. It’s a very short period of time,” Marina Go (below) told Mediaweek. With a background in print, Go has spent the best part of the last two decades in women’s magazines.

“I started life – well certainly my career post-high school – as a journalist. I was a newspaper journalist and worked for News Limited on The Daily Mirror, before joining ACP and working my way through. I was editor of Dolly, editor of Elle, I was the launch editor of Australian Good Taste. I edited Sunday Life. The first 10 years of my career were in editorial, and then the past eight years or so I have been in management as a publisher. I worked for Pacific as a publishing director and then, until Emap was sold to ACP, I was publishing director of the women’s group.”

Now in her new role as publisher of the Independent Digital Media (IDM) online masthead Primped.com.au, Go explained that whilst the idea of switching to an all-digital arena was at first a little intimidating, the fundamentals of her role are essentially the same. “I’m in my 40s now, so I am really grateful that someone could see that a person over 40, with experience with the consumer base, actually has some value in new media.

“IDM is owned by Michael Hannan and his family,” she explained. “When they sold out of FPC Magazines, they decided to invest in digital assets. What we’re doing is developing an online portfolio of women’s sites and the reason that [CEO] Dave Burkett approached me was because of my knowledge of women – in any channel.

“At IDM we have a great CTO [Seth Yates] who comes from Fairfax Digital. He knows the technology, I know the customer.”

Primped is a beauty website that would probably be most analogous with the beauty sections of InStyle or marie claire, but with search functionality and the enormous advantage of video, the site is drawing in up to 67,000 UBs a month and 350,000 page impressions – that’s roughly five pages per reader.

Editor-in-chief Zoë Foster (above) explained to Mediaweek, “Primped is like an encyclopedia. You might love your monthly magazines, but you can’t choose what’s in them, whereas online you’re your own editor. You can find exactly what you want. Online is a particularly good medium for beauty. I remember in magazines it was so difficult to explain how to create a hairstyle or a smoky eye in words and with three dot-points. Video just makes sense and is part of the reason we created the site.”

Foster should know. As former beauty editor of Harper’s Bazaar and former beauty and lifestyle editor for Cosmopolitan, she admitted sometimes being made to feel like “the poor cousin” in traditional media circles. “Having worked under those mastheads, I could walk into a room and someone would ask where I’m from and I’d say, ‘Harper’s’ and they would immediately get it. You get more questions and have to do a bit of explaining. Yes, there’s still a bit of stigma there, but everyone knows that online is where things are heading. It’s the first thing they say. Even talking to our clients, everyone is aware that online is where it’s going. It’s still not quite there though. I think print is still seen as the glamourous choice.”

But the new media has also given the Primped team the freedom to think outside the box. Foster explained, “When I worked for Harper’s and Cosmo, because they’re such powerful brands that have been around for such a long time, you really had to always keep that in mind, whereas because we’re a baby we can pretty much do the wackiest, wildest things ever! With online we also feel kind of lucky that we can do, say, an online search for a model competition, and turn that around quite quickly.

“Twitter has been wonderful. We had a massive spike over Fashion Week. And it was the online kids who were really there and owning it, Tweeting, blogging, getting the information up there first. We saw an almost 30% increase in traffic during Fashion Week because of that.”

Go added: “Primped has been going about 9 months now and we have positioned the product

 as a premium website for beauty devotees. We say it’s ‘the go-to for the how-to in beauty’.”

 

SITE MAKEOVER

“We’ve recently had a redesign of the homepage, which saw an immediate and obvious spike in numbers,” said Foster. “We’ve launched a salon and services directory, which is Australia-wide and kind of like a Yellow Pages for beauty. After a massive reader survey we did recently, we’re also currently doing a redesign of our how-to section, which is really the crux of the website.”

 

SELLING PRIMPED

“We do a lot of cross-promotion,” Foster explained. “For example, we write and create videos for Fitness First. I write for The Sunday Telegraph. We’re doing massive marketing initiatives with cosmetic brands and I find that our point of difference there is that we have a lot of freedom.”

“We’re positioned in a very strong sense,” said Go. “Because we actually can fulfill customer expectations – and that’s a very strong tick in a business. My challenge is really about branding and positioning and getting that message out there.”

With magazine readerships contracting at rates that hover around the 10 per cent mark, Primped’s readership is increasing at a rate between 10 and 20 per cent each month.

By Rachael Bolton

MediaWeek