Week commencing 8th January 2007
 Digital UK, the licence fee-funded body charged with delivering the government's switchover strategy, has restructured its marketing department and is dedicating £20m to raising awareness among the UK's most vulnerable groups. Digital UK has undertaken the restructure following an announcement in December by the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, which ring-fenced £600m to help over-75s, the blind and partially sighted and those with disabilities get digital TV. As a result a new estimated £20m-plus ad budget, to be spent across the switchover period from 2008 to 2012, has been created on top of the £200m marketing spend already committed to advertising the digital switchover to the general public. Source: Media Guardian
 Record PM, the afternoon 15p edition of The Daily Record launched last September, is to become a free commuter edition later this month. The distribution of the paper will also be extended to include Aberdeen and Dundee alongside its established territories of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The freesheet will average 44 pages and the total target number of copies distributed in the four cities will initially be between 15,000 and 20,000. The new editions will be hand-distributed between 5pm and 7pm each weekday evening. Editions will carry local news and sport relevant to each city and appropriate content from that day's edition of The Daily Record. All local and national advertising carried in the main paid-for edition of The Daily Record will be carried in the free afternoon version. Source: Media Week
Origin Publishing is to launch a monthly wedding magazine, Perfect Wedding, on 18 January. Perfect Wedding aims to cover all aspects of getting married, including beauty and fashion alongside coverage of real-life weddings and expert advice on planning the day. The magazine will be published in a 260 page super A5 format, priced £3.99. The first issue, a dress special with a wedding planner, will be promoted in WHSmith, Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and Waitrose, with a print run of 60,000. The magazine will be supported by a dedicated website, www.perfectweddingmag.com, which will host a directory of suppliers in every section of the wedding market. The site will also offer expert advice, a forum to share ideas and experiences and a photo gallery for brides able to upload and share wedding albums. Source: Media Week
Competition in the women's weekly magazines market is set to intensify this year with Emap, News Magazines and Northern & Shell all hiring senior staff with extensive experience in women's magazines to prepare further launches into the market. Emap is tipped to launch a younger companion to fashion weekly Grazia, which would compete with IPC's forthcoming high-street fashion magazine for 18 to 30-year-old women, Look. Source: Media Week
Trinity Mirror has closed down its magazine unit and is negotiating redundancies with some of its 39 staff. The closure of the unit, which produces the colour magazines for the group's newspapers, follows Trinity Mirror's failure to successfully launch a consumer magazine - part of the original justification of for the unit. The Sunday Mirror will now produce Celebs on Sunday while the Daily Mirror will produce We Love Telly!, which appears in the Mirror on Saturday. "This is about bringing all elements of the brands under the direction of the specific editors of our national newspapers in order to take full advantage of all the varying platforms," a Trinity Mirror spokesman said. Source: Media Guardian
City Lite, the free weekly launching in Leeds on Friday 12th January, has scored a distribution coup by gaining permission to be distributed inside the inner city apartment blocks of its affluent young target market. The new Johnston Press freesheet will be made available to the city's young professionals via distribution bins placed inside the lobbies of city centre luxury apartment blocks. The initial print run of 7,000 copies will also be distributed in some letterboxes. Johnston Press is targeting City Lite at young professionals that do not read the Yorkshire Evening Post. The free paper will publish on Friday afternoons and include features and entertainment stories from the Post, including the previous day's leisure supplement, Scene. It will also include recruitment advertising, news relevant to the lives of professionals in their 20s and 30s, focussed on entertainment, travel, sport and fitness and socialising. Distribution will increase as the building boom of upmarket central city apartment blocks in Leeds continues. Source: Media Guardian
 Channel 4 has teamed up with wireless network operator The Cloud to provide 4Radio programmes as podcasts over its wi-fi network. Launched today, users will be able to download shows to their PlayStation Portable, and other mobile devices that have wi-fi capability, free of charge for a two-month trial period. The aim of the partnership is to enable 4Radio to target morning commuters, creating a form of breakfast show for people who make use of The Cloud's network of 7,500 wifi hotspots located in high footfall places such as coffee shops, hotels and airports.As soon as users log on to the internet they will be automatically directed to a landing page with a link to a branded Cloud/4Radio portal where they will be able to download programmes such as Morning News, Celebrity Big Brother and music show SlashMusic. Nathalie Schwarz, director of Channel 4 Radio, believes the deal with Cloud will enable 4Radio to target listeners who want "bold and mischievous radio programming" but whose busy lifestyles mean they do not have time to tune in before they leave home. According to Niall Murphy, chief technology officer at The Cloud, wi-fi usage is starting to shift from business to consumer devices and by the end of this year 80% of wi-fi enabled devices are expected to be targeted at consumers. Source: Media Week
Emap is launching a website for its celebrity weekly Closer, closeronline.co.uk, featuring content exclusive to the site. The website will contain celebrity, lifestyle, real-life news and competitions and will provide an opportunity for readers to comment on individual stories, as well as talk to journalists and each other. Magazine sections such as Closer Gossip and Mr Showbiz will feature online and will be updated daily with original content. The site will also include a special competition section, incorporating closerbingo.com, which launched last year. The publisher is developing more fashion and beauty sections for the website, as well as daily horoscopes and puzzles. The site will also sit alongside subscription-based site closerdiets.com, launched in July last year. In the past, expensive photo reproduction costs for celebrity photos have inhibited the development of celebrity magazine websites. In November last year, Media Week revealed that Emap is also developing a website for Heat magazine, one of its other celebrity magazines, eight years after the print edition's launch. Advertising sales for closeronline.co.uk will be handled by the Emap Digital sales team. The magazine team is also cross-selling to the website. Source: Media Week
Commercial radio is close to signing a deal with music rights organisations allowing music to be included in podcasts. Stations will be able to podcast up to 30 seconds of music tracks in the deal with PPL, which collects royalties on behalf of artists and record labels. The one-year deal would cost commercial radio companies a total of around £100,000. Source: Media Guardian
 Ofcom is inviting applications for community radio licences in north and northeast England that will reach an adult population of less than 50,000. The areas concerned include the counties of Cumbria, Durham, North Yorkshire and Northumberland, and licences can air on either the FM or AM bands. Conditions attached to the licence award state that Ofcom may not license a community radio station if the measured coverage area of an existing service or that which is proposed overlaps by 50% or more in population terms with that of another service. The closing date for applications is 5pm on Tuesday, 27 March and the winning bidders will be awarded the licences for a maximum period of five years. Only two existing stations reach less than 50,000 people: BTN FM in Northallerton and Lakeland Radio in Kendal and Windermere. Source: Media Week
 CBS Outdoor UK has won the contract for Northern Rail from rival Titan Outdoor, worth a predicted £12m over five years. The contract, which covers the North West and North East of England, Yorkshire and Humberside, was worth between £500,000 and £1m a year under Titan, but only 37 of the 471 stations had advertising. CBS, formerly Viacom Outdoor, plans to invest a six-figure sum in developing the estate and hopes to achieve ad revenue of £2.5m a year. Andrew Oldham, chief operating officer of CBS Outdoor, said the company's rail footprint covered 10 of the country's 18 rail operators and 60% of all stations in the UK. "Over the past two years, we've taken over a series of underperforming contracts and turned them around," Oldham said. The Northern Rail contract includes stations in major cities such as Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester, but excludes those held by Titan under the separate Network Rail concession, such as Manchester Piccadilly. Oldham said the company would develop new poster sites and ad opportunities, including commuter packages for Leeds and Manchester Source: Media Week
Edited by Lizzie Thomas |
