Audience
1) How does the media kit introduction describe GQ?
As the flagship of men’s fashion and style in Britain, to be GQ is to be forward-looking, progressive and cutting-edge. Entering a new era of leadership and influence under Adam Baidawi, GQ explores the powerful and progressive new forces shaping culture, society and commerce in Britain. Building on a 33-year legacy of print excellence across journalism, photography and design, British GQ is today also a digital, social, video and experiential powerhouse – a community where people gather to be inspired and exchange ideas around style, creativity and culture.
2) What does the media kit suggest about masculinity?
As masculinity evolves and men's fashion has moved to the centre of the global pop-culture conversation, GQ's authority has never been broader or stronger.
3) Pick out three statistics from the data on page 2 and explain what they suggest about the GQ
audience.
212K
READERSHIP
1.8M
SOCIAL FOLLOWERS - Their online following is what's mainly still keeping their magazine going.
5.3M
DIGITAL UNIQUES - Their digital media expand their variety and exposure to well known celebrities.
4) Look at page 3 - brand highlights. What special editions do GQ run and what do these suggest about the GQ audience?
GQ HEROES: ISSUE & EVENT From the idyllic setting of Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire comes GQ’s first flagship event of the year. GQ Heroes is a festival of ideas that brings together gamechangers, creative radicals, deep thinkers and cultural icons for three days of panels and live performances. In 2022, it will again be accompanied by a special July/August issue of British GQ, as well as a powerful array of social, digital and video programming.
GQ HYPE spotlights the stars who are moving culture forward: The actors, musicians, athletes, designers and innovators who are changing the way we think, live and experience. Each week, Hype will be promoted across the full range of GQ’s channels featuring an in-depth profile of a star who's peaking now.
MEN OF THE YEAR In 2021, the iconic British GQ Men of the Year Awards reached a truly global audience, with more than 3,200 news articles generating over 9.8 billion views. This November, the event will coincide with other GQ markets as Men of the Year creates a truly global moment around the world. MOTY 2022 will be bigger than ever, uniting our IRL & digital successes with live red carpet coverage, multiple cover stars, high-profile video content, and massive social coverage.
TENTPOLE VIDEO AND SOCIAL SERIES British GQ’s video series drew more than 45 million views in 2021 – with viewers watching more than 10 million hours of content.
5) Still on page 3, what does the video and social series section suggest about how magazine audiences are changing?
British GQ’s video series drew more than 45 million views in 2021 – with viewers watching more than 10 million hours of content. In 2022, globally-renowned GQ franchises including Actually Me, 10 Essentials and Iconic Characters launch in the UK, joining local series like Action Replay to create our most dynamic lineup of video, ever. That video programming will also hit all of British GQ’s social channels, where audiences have grown more than 30% in the past year to top 2 million.
Media Magazine feature: GQ
1) What are the elements that go into choosing a cover stars for GQ?
Choosing covers is, by turns, the most rewarding and most infuriating part of the job of working on a glossy magazine. In the UK, getting the cover right is paramount – at GQ especially, most sales of the magazine are retail rather than subscription, so the cover has a huge impact on sales . A ‘hook’ being a film/ TV show/ album etc they’re promoting, and hence the reason they would do the cover in the first place – but the reality is this often doesn’t work. It needs to be the right person at the right time – that always matters more than fame. A very famous person – Brad Pitt, say – who’s not in a particularly interesting stage in their career/ life will often not sell.The idea behind a shoot always involves endless negotiations with the subject’s agent/ publicist. You want them to be the first to talk to that person about the very thing that makes them newsworthy.
2) How is the magazine constructed to serve the target audience?
Fundamentally, GQ is a men’s style magazine, and so GQ is always in service to that, both in print and online. Certainly, GQ wouldn’t consider itself just this – at its best, it’s also a brilliant forum for excellent profile writing and world-class photography and design, along with award-winning longform feature writing and sharp culture writing – but men’s style is the magazine’s core, and, along with high- end watch brands, is where the vast majority of the magazine’s advertising revenue comes from. This means nearly all shoots in the magazine – celebrities and otherwise – are done in tandem with the magazine’s style editors to showcase the best new men’s style on offer. And more simply, the service elements of the magazine aim to keep the reader up to date on the latest style trends.
3) What does the article suggest about GQ's advertisers and sponsorships - and what in turn does this tell us about the GQ audience?
I suppose the obvious answer, in terms of advertisers, is brands that want to promote themselves in the sphere of male, high-end, luxury lifestyle. So, everything from top-tier tailoring to the latest sports cars. These brands are often heritage brands, so the names wouldn’t change much from month to month, or year to year. Sponsors tend to be a little more fluid. These will often be the brands who, for instance, sponsor individual categories at the Men of the Year awards, or partner with GQ’s live talks event, GQ Heroes. These won’t necessarily be fashion brands, but crucially the goal will be to align their brand with the GQ one – a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer with a new luxury phone, for instance, may want to sponsor a Men of the Year award as GQ readers would be their target market, and the winner of the award will, of course, likely be a famous, aspirational individual. The only problem that potentially arises is if a brand feels that, by sponsoring an award, they have a say in who wins it – they don’t, and GQ could never guarantee any individual winner anyway, as there are so many factors involved.
4) What is GQ Hype - and how does it reflect the impact of digital media on traditional print media?
GQ Hype – a weekly, online-only cover. Celebrities – and their agents/publicists – naturally want a GQ print cover, but with only so many on offer, previously the drop-off from not getting a print cover could be drastic – simply offering them an online-only interview, say, which was understandably a less- than-exciting prospect for established celebrities. So, GQ Hype was launched as a perfect middle-ground. With only one per week it still came with prestige, it was still a GQ cover, designed as one, and so that fact alone meant it would get more attention both on Instagram and Twitter than other online-only stories.
5) Finally, what does the article say about additional revenue streams for print magazines like GQ?
Extra revenue streams are vital to the magazine business these days – it’s almost impossible to survive without them. It’s about deciding the key areas in which the brand is strong and focussing on those, rather than expanding into areas you are not associated with. So, along with the annual Men of the Year awards – using GQ’s unparalleled celebrity contacts – GQ also had an annual car awards, and a food and drink awards. All subjects covered in the magazine, but crucially, focussing on high-end and luxury, as the magazine does. GQ’s most recent innovation was the GQ Heroes event, where revenue is generated by both ticket prices and sponsorship. There is no set process for how these events and awards etc. have been decided, but all staff are invited to contribute ideas, and good ones will simply be explored with GQ’s
advertising department, to see if they are economically viable.
Industries
Condé Nast
1) Who was previously GQ editor for 22 years?
Dylan Jones
2) What happened to the 'lads' mag' boom magazines such as Nuts, Maxim and Loaded?
Lads' mag circulations faded dramatically through the 2000s. In the 2010s retailers, under pressure from campaign groups including Lose The Lads' Mags, started to demand that publishers tone down their front pages or cover them up. Already some had moved lads' mags on to their top shelves.
3) What changes have been taking place at Condé Nast in recent years and why?
After many attempts to find a way to expand and redesign the space to meet our needs, there were just too many challenges to be able to do so,” the email said. The seven-storey building, which is also the headquarters of brands including GQ and Tatler, was completed in 1958 and is owned by the Church of England. There has been a round of restructuring changes at Condé Nast, with brands such as Glamour focusing on a digital-only model.
1) What does the article suggest about Condé Nast's recent strategy?
Last year Conde Nast merged the global editorial teams at several of its international magazine brands including GQ, Wired, Vogue and Conde Nast Traveller under a new digital-first strategy designed to produce less duplication of content.The changes also involved a new focus on digital income streams over print advertising revenue, with about 25% of the company’s revenues over the next four years invested into prioritising the expansion of video and digital content to boost online subscriptions and e-commerce. GQ deputy global editorial director Adam Baidawi told Press Gazette that despite the digital-first switch print magazines had not been significantly affected. GQ, he said, was “as good as it’s ever been” as he reported a 77% year-on-year increase in its newsstand sales for its March 2022 edition.He added that there was a “romanticised” vision of print-centred magazines that was becoming “less and less sensical” in the age of the internet.Baidawi, who also serves as GQ UK’s head of editorial content, highlighted that across its titles, Conde Nast had seen more than 14 billion annual video views in 2021, up 18% from 2020, as well as a 38% overall increase in digital ad revenues.
2) How does chief executive Roger Lynch describe Condé Nast and why?
Last month, chief executive Roger Lynch told the New York Times the digital-first changes meant Conde Nast was “no longer a magazine company,” saying it has “70 million people who read our magazines, but we have 300 something million that interact with our websites every month and 450 million that interact with us on social media”.
3) What does Adam Baidawi say about Condé Nast, GQ and culture?
Baidawi told Press Gazette: “Conde Nast, as much as anything else, is in the business of shaping and reflecting culture. Culture moves, and we have to move with it. “If you take GQ, for instance, I don’t think we were in a position to shape and reflect culture with 21 siloed businesses around the world centred around print products.” He added: “I think our previous model worked really well for a very, very long time. I also think it was very romanticised and that over years it became less and less sensical in a globalised world.” Baidawi went on: “I grew up with Conde Nast magazines. I’m the sucker who paid 22 Australian dollars to buy British GQ in Melbourne, Australia at the newsstand… I still think we’re making comfortably the best print magazines on Earth.” He said print subscriptions are “actually up” across the Conde Nast portfolio this year but that “print for us is just one focus. It’s one product in a portfolio that we’re really proud of”.
1) How is Condé Nast moving away from traditional print products?
Condé Nast has announced 75 returning series and 50 new pilots across 17 brand channels for 2021-2022, capitalising on huge growth in streaming in the past year. Its brands will focus on shoppable series and reaching incremental viewers via new programmes and “supercharged” relaunches of some of its most exclusive events.
2) What examples are provided of Condé Nast's video and streaming content?
During its annual NewFront presentation today (4 May) which took place online, audiences heard about Vogue’s expansion into wellness, GQ Sports’ 2022 Super Bowl lineup, and Vanity Fair’s expansion into audio. The company also launched Condé Nast Shoppable, a new video capability that provides buyable opportunities for viewers in real time. The company has ambitions to be a top primetime destination, taking advantage of its exclusive access to relaunch the Met Gala with Vogue and Vanity Fair’s Oscars Party, which will return in 2022.
3) What does the end of the article suggest modern media audiences want?
“Audiences want to be participants, not just passive viewers – and of course, they want content 100 per cent personalised for them,” said Chu.
GQ website, video and social media content
1) What similarities do you notice between the website and the print edition of the magazine?
They both talk about the products themselves and it also advocates the ,main issues regarding men and fashion.
2) Analyse the top menu of the GQ website (e.g. Fashion / Grooming / Culture). What do the menu items suggest about GQ's audience?
It highlights the main aspects men look for in everyday life and in content in terms of how to present themselves around others.
3) What does GQ's Instagram feed suggest about the GQ brand? Is this appealing to a similar audience to the print version of the magazine?
I believe it directs to mainly all male audiences meaning transgender males and those who feel more masculine, helping them feel more accepted into the world of men and representation of men.
4) In your opinion, is GQ's social media content designed to sell the print magazine or build a digital audience? Why?
I believe it leans more towards the digital audience because nowadays social media has become a huge momentum into advocating any sort of information therefore by expanding their social media audience they are gaining insight and exposure from all angles.
5) Evaluate the success of the GQ brand online. Does it successfully communicate with its target audience? Will the digital platforms eventually replace the print magazine completely?
I believe it does successfully communicate with its target audience in terms of what products and brands they represent which are mainly referred as more male dominant items. In a way digital platforms will eventually replace the print magazine completely since it is much easier and cheaper to access these days.
The impact of digital media on the print magazines industry
1) What statistics are provided to demonstrate the decline in the print magazines industry between 2010 and 2017? What about the percentage decline from 2000?
Sales of the top 100 actively purchased print titles in the UK – those that readers buy or subscribe to – fell by 42% from 23.8m to 13.9m between 2010 and 2017. Since the start of the internet era in 2000, the decline is 55% from 30.8m, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Similarly, advertising in consumer titles will have more than halved from £512m in 2010 to £250m by the end of this year, according to Group M, a media buying agency.
2) What percentage of ad revenue is taken by Google and Facebook?
Google and Facebook account for 65% of the $6.5bn (£4.7bn) UK digital display ad market. They are also strangling attempts by magazine and newspaper publishers to build their digital ad revenues by taking about 90% of all new spend.
3) What strategies can magazine publishers use to remain in business in the digital age?
Specialist magazines, catering for more niche audiences with interests ranging from shooting to model railways and ponies, are likely to always have a print fanbase.
Wildman says for magazines to survive they must build a brand beyond the core print publication.“It is overly simplistic to say it is just digital versus print,” he says. “Magazine businesses are much more diverse. We ran 100 events related to our magazines last year – [a] Harper’s Bazaar [event] sold out in hours at £600 a head.“Endorsement, accreditation and licensing are increasingly lucrative. DFS sell House Beautiful and Country Living [named after titles] range sofas. And the bestselling premium home gym at Argos is branded after our Men’s Health magazine.”Nevertheless, mounting pressure on the traditional print magazine business, which still drives most revenues, is forcing consolidation as publishers seek scale to survive.
4) What examples from the Guardian article are provided to demonstrate how magazines are finding new revenue streams?
Time Inc in the US, which publishes People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, has just been sold to rival Meredith for $1.8bn; the UK arm was picked up by Epiris. Last year, Immediate Media, which publishes 60 titles including Radio Times and Top Gear, was sold to the German publisher Hubert Burda, owner of Your Home and HomeStyle, for £270m.Despite the gloom, magazine publishers, like their newspaper counterparts, sense an opportunity as brand safety and measurement issues have prompted advertisers to closely scrutinise the once unquestionable value of investing in digital media such as YouTube and Facebook.
5) Now think of the work you've done on GQ. How is GQ diversifying beyond print?
Its focusing on all sorts of audience, becoming more woke in the masculinity approach meaning representations of transgendered male audiences are becoming more valid in the media and so they show such representations through their social media pages and their cover fronts.
