Mamamia’s reach gets a healthy glow

Lara Sinclair
JUNE 30, 2014
THE AUSTRALIAN
THE Mamamia Network will launch a new brand tomorrow, health and beauty site The Glow, designed to be read on mobiles first.
The latest effort in her Mamamia expansion, which publisher Mia Freedman could take global, The Glow has chosen to be primarily a mobile-first site to connect with its target audience of women aged between 20 and 45 and the advertisers seeking to reach them.
Editor-in-chief Jamila Rizvi said the site aimed to specialise in what is achievable for its readers, rather than elusive, aspirational content and will focus on images over words, with content organised in short grabs interspersed with visuals.
“More than 50 per cent of our traffic is now coming on mobile,’’ Rizvi said.
“I used to read magazines in the bath, on the train, in bed. We’re seeing more and more traffic from tablets. But the phone is a very intimate device. No one sits in bed with a magazine any more.”
Magazine publishers Pacific and Bauer Media might take issue with that statement: while sales of print mastheads across all categories are challenged, magazine circulation is holding up better than continuing double-digit declines in advertising revenues might suggest. But with the rise of digital-only titles comes the chance fully to explore the social media networks that are essential to such sites reaching a large audience, including fast-growing visual social networks such as Instagram and Pinterest.
Health and beauty brands are taking note. All of The Glow’s advertisers — which at launch will include Clinique, Athlete’s Foot, Nissan and Dove — are encouraged to develop display ads for mobiles, desktops, native advertising formats, and the site’s four main social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.
Its content will also be cross-promoted to the existing 600,000 or so people reached by the company’s other sites on social media, including women’s site Mamamia itself.
“Health and beauty (content) lends itself to the visual,” Rizvi says. “Pinterest is a very visual ­medium. It’s probably the most ­financially lucrative because it’s so easy to buy.
“We’ll be doing Pinterest boards around each story that we run, especially where there’s a gallery. Our tutorials will be executed in a series of images.
“Then featured advertisers will be scattered throughout and there’s the opportunity for advertisers to buy an entire pinboard.”
Instagram will be prioritised over Twitter, although with some reservations.
“Instagram is still not allowing advertisers to hyperlink,” Rizvi says. “That’s a challenge for publishers.”
The Glow, which has already launched in beta, will be edited by Alyx Gorman, formerly of Elle and The Vine.
“You don’t say no to (Mamamia founder) Mia Freedman when she comes to you with a brilliant idea”, Gorman says, adding that she also missed the “urgency” and immediacy of pure-play digital publishing environments.
“We have visions of people using The Glow from the shop floor, asking ‘Which beauty product should I buy?’,” she says.
Originally published as Mamamia’s reach gets a healthy glow