At the heart of the matter

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Perhaps you are reading for lifestyle tips. Maybe it is to see what television to watch this week. It could be to catch up on the latest celebrity gossip and real-life stories. You might be a sports fanatic, or a keen cyclist. Whatever the reason, there is a good chance you have encountered one of TI Media’s magazines.

The company, formerly Time Inc UK, publishes more than 40 media brands across print and online, including Marie Claire UK, Horse & Hound and Woman’s Own. It has also now become part of fellow publishing firm Future, through an acquisition completed earlier this year. With each title comes a dedicated audience and fertile ground for market research.

Richard Thomas is TI Media’s insight director, setting the strategic direction of the company’s research function. His role is, essentially, to integrate insight into all parts of the business, but predominantly to support the company’s commercial objectives and income.

Insight sits within a wider customer strategy team at TI Media, and the team has access to a broad array of data, such as subscriptions to third-party datasets, and also commissions its own research projects.

Thomas’s team consists of three others, the insight division – like many across industries – having shrunk in recent times, from a headcount of 11 when he first joined four years ago. Having fewer staff has resulted in some projects deemed non-essential being dropped in favour of those that more closely match the company’s objectives, he says.

“You really do have to be laser-focused,” Thomas explains. “We have an expertise that we truly think is valuable, and we can justify our existence, but we have to work with the business to make sure we are working on the right things and delivering a return.”

Heart of Britain

Last year, the team worked with insight consultancy Differentology on an analysis of one of TI Media’s core audiences – women aged 35 and over in social grades C2, D and E – for a project called ‘Heart of Britain’. Thomas says he wanted to get under the skin of one of the UK’s biggest demographics – one that drives a lot of revenue for the company – but also one that, he argues, has been neglected.

“We felt we needed to re-establish our authority and our own credentials, and have something fresh to say about them – but we also genuinely felt they were misunderstood and, quite often, ignored by the media planning and buying community,” Thomas says. “We felt advertisers were doing them a disservice to some degree, by either ignoring them or not tweaking or adjusting the way they spoke to them, as they were seen as less sophisticated.”

Part of Differentology’s work on the project consisted of 12 ethnographies with participants from across the UK (outside London). The ethnographies involved conversations in more relaxed settings, such as walks with participants, rather than more formal sit-down interviews.

Lizzie Gilthorpe, managing director at Differentology, says that the research aimed to get more of a sense of the importance of the audience within their communities, and the context in which they live. “One of the key things was that the audience are often seen as the ‘anchor’ within their neighbourhoods – so, rather than just doing in-depth interviews, we went for walks with them in their neighbourhoods.”

Differentology used artificial intelligence to analyse transcripts from the ethnography and discourse analysis to identify people’s emotions about different subjects. This was followed by quantitative work to make comparisons with the rest of the population.

The results identified four “key pillars of behaviour” across the sample, explains Thomas. The first was their strength in their role as care givers, and the second was economic power – described by Thomas as “the biggest in the country”.

Another theme highlighted by the research was the “savviness” of this particular audience – agile budgeters, they have a lot of control over household finances and spending decisions, from weekly shops to buying a car. Finally, the study pinpointed women’s role as influencers at the centre of families, friendship groups and wider communities.

“If you can influence this audience, they speak and influence others, and people go to them for advice on both a personal and commercial level,” says Thomas.

The findings have been used to influence editorial tone of voice across various TI Media magazines, specifically the ‘real life’ magazines often read by this audience. This includes Woman’s Weekly, Woman’s Own, TV Times, Pick Me Up, Woman, TV & Satellite Week, Chat, What’s on TV, and Good to Know.

“This was an audience that felt spoken down to by brands, generally,” Gilthorpe says. “So how could TI Media speak to them on their own level, rather than it seeming like a patronising tone of voice?”

The research has been repeated this year, with a few tweaks in light of the pandemic. One of the big changes is to include more video-research content, featuring edited interviews with the women in the study, which Thomas says lets them “tell their story more and be the star of the show”. The study will focus on the ‘savviness’ pillar identified in the first study, with budgeting a central element given the economic impact of Covid-19.

Collaborating

‘Heart of Britain’ is TI Media’s flagship study, but there is plenty of other insight work going on across a wide range of teams and publications, from the executive team to the advertising department to editorial.

“I try to put us where decisions are made, because that’s where I think genuine insight can benefit the business,” Thomas says. For example, the research has been used to help shape the company’s advertising strategy over 2019 and into the early part of 2020.

“Once a [magazine] brand sees how you can help them, and what you can do for them, they quickly become advocates of an insight-first approach – and you have a direct relationship, and conversations where they will come to people in my team as a first port of call,” Thomas says. “Editorial content and advertising are two obvious areas where we can help colleagues. Where you build a brand affinity and prove your worth, that’s a direct line for sharing information, and requests come back and forth.”

To assist with working across so many teams and titles, the company runs an internal research platform called the Lens, which allows it to quickly survey particular audiences. The Lens is used for smaller, topical pieces of research that are often aligned to specific challenges faced by the business, strategy projects that require consumer insight, and projects focused on advertising revenue. Information from the research is available to anyone in the business through a data platform. TI Media also conducts around 30 effectiveness studies a year to evaluate its titles.

Earlier this year, the Lens was used to run a weekly tracker on what the public were thinking and feeling during the pandemic. The research, which covered a 17-week period from the beginning of restrictions in March until the situation eased in the summer, was originally commissioned to help inform editorial content. However, results have also been used commercially by agencies and clients, at a time, Thomas says, when advertising spend was generally being withdrawn and media plans were being ripped up across the industry.

The insight team used findings from the tracker to develop a commercially led insight bulletin, Virus Britain, to create a narrative from the weekly data emerging from the tracker.

The publishing industry was badly hit by Covid-19, after a tricky few years for the sector, with falling readerships and advertising revenue. TI Media still gets a large amount of income from its weekly titles, many of which cater to the ‘Heart of Britain’ readership, and Thomas says the company remains print-focused from a revenue perspective. As with most other publishers, however, the print audience is falling, with new digital readers needed to ensure long-term success.

Making sure the company attracts digital readers without alienating its core print readership is the big challenge that lies ahead. “There is a tricky balancing act in supporting print revenue in, for example, our weekly titles. Our women’s, TV and ‘real life’ magazines have always been responsible for the majority of profit within TI Media, and a lot of that is in print and in the ‘Heart of Britain’ audience,” says Thomas.
“It is a good example of where an insight-led project has supported a lot of revenue.

“That’s where insight can play a vital role – it can support the here and now, but also take a step back and look at what we need to do, strategically, as a business.”

Tracking Christmas

TI Media conducted a research project to understand consumer sentiment about Christmas during a year dominated by the pandemic.

“This year, with so much uncertainty – and with ad revenue and planning being pulled or put on hold indefinitely – there was a feeling that Christmas is a fixed point when, whatever the state of the nation, people will spend and want to have a Christmas of some sort,” Thomas says.

In June, the company surveyed 1,019 participants, a fifth of whom were from the ‘Heart of Britain’ sample and an eighth from social grades A and B, while a quarter were millennials, aged between 25 and 40. The research found that 54% of respondents felt Christmas was the main thing they were looking forward to for the rest of the year, with 55% (rising to 63% of millennials) determined to make it bigger and better than ever.

Many of those surveyed reported that budgets would be tighter this Christmas, but a similar proportion claimed they would spend more than usual. A similar phenomenon was seen in the approach to advertising, with half wanting more sombre adverts this year, while 41% wanted to see all-out celebration.

Thomas explains that the findings will be used to support the company’s approach to Christmas 2020.

Some titles, for example Woman & Home and Goodtoknow.co.uk, will use the findings to direct their editorial content in the run-up to the festive period – such as whether to run articles promoting budget alternatives or target a more affluent demographic.

The project will continue in the weeks and months before Christmas, to support titles as they look to understand the perceptions of their readers and how they can meet their needs.

This article was first published in the October 2020 issue of Impact.