Magazine Publishers of America
After 65 Years, Seventeen Still One of the Cool Kids
By Tony Case
Jayne Jamison, Vice President and Publisher of Hearst Magazines’ Seventeen, would like to take the opportunity to dispel a few misconceptions, mischaracterizations—and downright falsehoods—floating around out there about the magazine business, magazine advertising and magazine consumers, especially ones who happen to be young, female—and very much 21st century.
Despite the so-called conventional “wisdom,” teenage girls—while they are, incontrovertibly, incredibly voracious users of the Internet and other forms of digital media—at the same time remain devoted, even rabid fans of magazines (to the tune of 13 million readers per month).
And if there’s any question about magazines being a growth industry and about their ability to build vibrant, multimedia brands, Seventeen would like to submit that the possibilities for brand extensions are practically boundless—with Seventeen.com attracting a record 1.6 million unique visitors and over 42 million page views in the month of April, as the brand also has established a successful string of mobile products, books, events and branded retail merchandise (including a high-profile line of products at JC Penney stores).
Finally, even as some in the snark-o-sphere are reading magazines their last rites because of challenged times at the moment in the advertising market (which, admittedly, has affected the teen magazine market, just as it has impacted all other media out there), Jamison would just like to point out that Seventeen has picked up 40 new advertisers representing 85 print pages this year, among them, Adidas, Clearasil and Nivea, as well as luxury brands like Christian Dior and Nordstrom.
In other words, Seventeen—at 65-years-old and going strong—is among the magazine brands with more than a little good news to report, at a time when there’s so much doom and gloom being communicated about business in general.
The roster of new clients has been, in no small part, because of the creation of Seventeen’s own in-house, full-service agency, Seventeen Solutions, which provides research, creative and promotional support for clients. The agency was created about two years ago, just after Seventeen and all the other Hearst brands—which include storied magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Esquire, Cosmopolitan and O, The Oprah Magazine—moved into the gleaming new Hearst Tower at the corner of 57th Street and 8th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
Seventeen Solutions produced an impressive 50 pieces of creative last year, and this year projects that it will crank out as many as 70. Among this year’s projects are 13 advertorial units, with print, online and mobile components, for various Procter & Gamble brands, including Cover Girl, Tampax and Herbal Essence. The agency also partnered to execute an ambitious, integrated program for Johnson & Johnson’s Clean and Clear brand, in a tie-in with the CW hit “90210.” Meanwhile, Studio Seventeen managed all elements of a multimedia contest around an exclusive Seventeen client, Chattem’s Sun-In.
Says Jamison: “Eighty percent of our advertisers are asking us to come up with integrated programs. Of that, probably 25 percent will say, show us what you can do creative-wise. But almost everyone wants integration across multiple platforms. The fact that we have a robust website and can package that easily for advertisers obviously is a huge benefit for us.”
In these tough economic times for consumers, Seventeen and its clients have also found success with an old-fashioned form of promotion: coupons, via both the print edition of Seventeen and Seventeen.com. One client using coupons, Macy’s, found in its own research that more than 125,000 girls used the Macy's West coupon from Seventeen. The retailer Aeropostale reported that its Seventeen coupon this past spring contributed to an 11 percent bump in same-store sales.
As for consumers’ connection to Seventeen.com, the numbers have been nothing short of outstanding. Jamison—who points out that content on the site is fresh, not repurposed from the print product—boasts per-reader average page views of 26 pages and time spent on the site at 14 minutes, quite impressive for teen consumers who are always quick to move onto the next thing. “We have incredible stickiness on the site, and it’s because of how the magazine and the web site compliment each other,” says the publisher.
The web has not only been key to Seventeen’s advertising fortunes and consumer devotion, but also a remarkably successful means of attracting readers in print. In the last three years alone, Jamison reports, the brand has sold a whopping 1 million subscriptions via the site. (Recently, when the issue featuring the singer Katy Perry hit newsstands and got a mention on the MSN portal, Seventeen sold a staggering 27,000 subscriptions—IN ONE DAY!)
(So much for the notion that teenage girls aren’t into magazines.)
“What’s so interesting is that everyone asks, ‘Do teens still read,’ blah, blah, blah,” says Jamison. “In the first quarter of this year, the ‘Twilight’ series accounted for 16 percent of all books sold in America. Everybody talks about this stuff going in one direction—people think consumers gravitate to the web and never come back.”
Nothing, obviously, could be further from the truth, as Seventeen’s recent successes point to. As Jamison said in a presentation on Magazine Day back in April: “From the magazine to Seventeen.com to our Facebook and MySpace pages to our YouTube channel to Twitter to retail … it’s all one, big, continuous loop.”
