IMC 2009: Leveraging the digital media

The session on ‘Digital Strategies for Magazines’ at the Indian Magazine Congress (IMC) 2009 discussed threadbare the future of magazines in a digital era, with a clear consensus emerging in the panel that an offline and online can co-exist and magazines can efficiently exploit digital to their advantage.

The two-day IMC 2009 is being held in the Capital on November 5-6. Worldwide Media is the presenting sponsor, while Chitralekha and Cannon are the associate sponsors. exchange4media Group (exchange4media.com, impact and Pitch) is the media partner.

The panel was moderated by Pradeep Gupta, Managing Director, Cybermedia, while the speakers included Kalli Purie, COO, India Today GROUP Online; Mike Lovell, Director of Investor Relations, Meredith; and Vinod Thadani, Senior Business Director, GroupM.

Opening the session Kalli Purie said, “The digital wave started in 2000, and now I can surely say it’s here to stay. We have content, community, now we only need commerce. We need to define online with the bottom-line and content and not just top line. In fact, marketers are preferring digital too due to it being a better engagement and retention media.”

Purie further said, “At India Today, we are trying to get our offline (print) advertisers to advertise online as well. If we can get 80 per cent of offline advertisers to advertise online as well, we are safely home.”

Mike Lovell revealed, “We are taking all our offline content online and offering them as exclusive packages. Meredith focuses a lot on specific areas like food, parenting, gardening, and outdoor entertainment segments in both offline and online space. So far, what we have found is that online content can’t stand on itself, it needs to have offline support too.”

He further informed that Meredith got roughly 20 million unique visitors a month with over 200 million page views. The group had made six acquisitions in the digital space in the recent past and had taken its digital revenues to $175 million from a mere $75 million just three years ago.

Bringing the business perspective of the digital space, which today boasts of roughly 45-50 million customers, Vinod Thadani pointed out, “The future is digital, and convergence is happening at the end of the day. With over 400 million subscribers already and growing at over 10 million a month, mobile will be the biggest phenomena. The revenue potential on mobile is far greater than the online platform.”

Talking about the growing social media phenomena, most of the speakers said they had done their bit on the medium, but still a lot more unexplored opportunities lay ahead. Purie said, “We use Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic to our main sites.” Thadani added that GroupM had also done several online and mobile activations like SMS and voice in conjunction with other four media for their clients.

Lovell, too, said Meredith was trying various things on the social media platforms, but admitted that they were still new and their durability needed to be further ascertained before being too gung ho about it.

Ending the session, moderator Gupta summed it up by saying, “68 people created YouTube in three years, today it has a valuation of over a billion. That’s the way dreams are made, so dream on.”