Puzzling observations

After three years stripping and rebuilding the once mighty but creaking publishing empire of the Packers, and then German giant Bauer Media, Are Media CEO Jane Huxley and her private equity owners Mercury Capital have their eye on the possibility that printed magazines have hit their natural floor in circulation and readership after a harrowing 15 years of relentless contraction.   

Huxley isn’t banking on a messianic return of print to revive Are Media’s fortunes but she says the readership growth in print titles across home, travel, beauty, fashion and lifestyle categories points to an underlying and ongoing shift in the consumer mood to break more from screens. 

“We are certainly seeing a lot of strength in terms of lifestyle, fashion, beauty, homes and our weeklies,” she told Mi3 after Are’s Upfronts showcase last week. Titles like Gourmet Traveller, The Australian Women’s Weekly, Belle, New Idea Food and Australian House & Garden are among those titles up in readership this year.

“You've heard me say this before and certainly others have, that magazines, more than ever are representing a downtime from the digital deluge that we talked about last year – we haven't seen that trend change. People still want an opportunity to stop and they still see magazines as really valuable there. The one thing with a magazine, of course, is that you are not multitasking other than drinking a coffee, maybe. So that's definitely what we're seeing in the numbers.”

Deloitte last week suggested younger Australians have cut back most sharply on digital channels like social in the last year, with time spent consuming content on other digital channels like streaming back significantly for the first time in 13 years.

Still, Huxley isn’t delusional. Overall, “print is in decline” she admits. “But is there a new stabilisation effect that’s happening? That’s the one I’m watching." Likewise, "is there a natural base to [print] magazines?” 

Maybe. Either way, there are strange breakouts in consumer demand – like the surge in puzzles, yes puzzles. “Puzzles are in growth, kids are growth, not so much for us but music is in growth with the Taylor Swift effect,” says Huxley. “Puzzles is a really interesting one for me because that is absolutely in growth, not just for us but for other publishers in the market as well. Again, it’s representing that switching off – I want to do something where it's not pinging and dinging. So there are definitely categories in growth but we are definitely seeing stabilisation in other categories, such as homes.”

Click and connect

Huxley has spent the best part of her first three years in a tech, systems and cultural overhaul of Are Media – customer data platforms (CDPs), content management systems and a rewiring of the business from a print publisher to omnichannel content and “full funnel commerce” are now rolling out – but it has taken longer than she hoped. On the editorial side, omnichannel editors with capabilities across print, websites and off network distribution across socials and affiliate partners are new benchmark requirements.

At Are’s Upfronts showcase last week for 2025, Sales Director Andrew Cook said Are Media had “contributed to over $50 million in retail sales” for brands “because the path to purchase is now embedded within relevant content to create more opportunities for conversion for our advertisers.”

He said 85 per cent of all consumers spend in Australia was “controlled by women. When she's shopping, we influence her intention. Cook touted 6 million Are Media unique magazine readers each month and 21 million users across social platforms.

“Every single touch point in our digital ecosystem has been designed to make shopping as seamless and intuitive as possible,” Cook said. “We now have established relationships with e-commerce technology platform partners, meaning we can easily set up brands to start selling products for our performance channels from tomorrow.”

Affiliate accelerator

Huxley cited Amazon and MG as examples of where the business was headed in "omnichannel content and commerce". Are Media produced 700 pieces of “shoppable content” to plug Amazon Prime Day along with 500,000 Amazon catalogue-wrapped mastheads embedded with QR codes across Women’s Day, New Idea, that’s life! and Take 5, and positioned at point-of-sale in 5,000 retailers. 

One of Huxley’s earliest acquisitions was a niche marketplace, mainly for the tech that came with it, but marketplaces and commerce have not fired yet although affiliate marketing is.

“Our affiliate platforms are the bridging between our media, our content and ecosystem and the retailer’s ecommerce platform,” Huxley said. “It’s the bit in the middle, it's a new way of acquiring a customer [for an advertiser] but it's a customer that's further down the decision making pipeline and ready to buy.”

Algo agility

Outside of the ad market returning to growth – Huxley expects it will next year but not to where it was – one of Are Media’s biggest challenges was “multinational partners”, or the tech platforms such as Google and Meta, for which Are Media’s “omnichannel future” is heavily reliant.

“The volatility is in the way that they do algorithm changes, as an example, with not a lot of warning and then significant impacts on publishers,” she said. “So that volatility will probably continue we've just got to make sure that we try and ride that wave and be able to move where we need to move really quickly. I don't anticipate that that [platform] volatility is going to change next year unless we see significant regulation out of the US or Europe.”

Mercury rising?

When asked if Are Media’s revenues were up or down on Mercury Capital’s acquisition in 2020 Huxley said: “The majority of our revenue is still in decline but where we need to be growing, we are growing. It's a classic transformation. I haven't reset the business based on a definite outcome in the future. We know that it's content commerce, we know that it's omnichannel – but what we need to do is to see where it lands, be ready for that and then be able to move fast enough to collect and capture what it looks like.”

Among the key initiatives outlined at the Are Media upfronts last week;

• Expanding Elle Magazine's publication frequency from two to four issues per year.
• Launching the Gourmet Traveler Hotel and Travel Awards.
• Initiating the ELLE Next Gen Awards and International Beauty Awards.
• Creating the Beauty Influencer Collective.
• Continuing popular events such as the Women of the Year awards, Sustainability Awards, and International Women's Day events for Marie Claire, and Gourmet Traveller Restaurant of the Year.
• Celebrating Home Beautiful's 100th anniversary.
• Expanding health, travel, and food content across Women's Day and New Idea.