“2024 has been the start of a new beginning for us, and I feel very optimistic about where we’re going,” Jane Huxley, CEO of Are Media, told Mediaweek following the presentation of the media company’s offerings in 2025.
Are Media Ignite, held in Sydney on Thursday, outlined a roadmap for the company’s products, events, awards, and competitions in the new year.
“It’s been a challenging year for everybody, whether it be things that were outside our control or, in our case, completing that last step of our transformation,” she said.
Part of Are Media’s three-year-long transformation included a foundation of the business culture, people and technology — a process she noted was completed in August.
Are Media’s director of sales, Andrew Cook, also called 2024 challenging and transformative but highlighted green shoots of opportunity and developments in the business that will be “momentum builders” for 2025.
Among those opportunities he highlighted was the surge of magazines in the market, which saw Elle return to newsstands. “It did much better than we ever thought it would regarding our financials. We knocked that out of the park,” Cook said.
“In this world of people wanting to get off screens, those magazines are very stable.” He also welcomed other publishers bringing magazines back and launching their brands and added that it’s “great for the industry,”
“The fact that we’ve got those brands in print and the other connections to amplify in a trusted environment are things that nobody else has.“
Huxley noted that while the magazine category “is in decline, it is proving more resilient than we thought possible with our readership numbers continuing to increase.”
Are Media’s magazine offerings include The Australian Women’s Weekly, Girlfriend magazine, Who, TV Week and Gourmet Traveller. Huxley stressed that, despite an eventual decline in magazine readership, print will remain part of their format mix.
Huxley said that magazines will continue to be part of the formats available to readers despite the eventual decline in people reading magazines over time.
“There will still be a place for them to go to consume the brand and to read the content,” she said. “So we feel very bullish about a magazine.”
She added: “I am unapologetically in love with magazines. Maybe because I’m so busy and tired, like our readers, to sit down and read the magazines is a real moment. While people are still looking for ‘me time’, we’ll still do magazines.
“We’ll keep writing and printing as long as people keep buying.“
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