Magazine Street 2024: the highlights

The Magazine Street conference, organised by the International Magazine Centre, recently celebrated its third year in Edinburgh, Scotland. The annual event, designed to explore the world of independent magazine publishing through presentations, workshops and networking, brings together a wide range of international speakers, SME and independent publishers, and freelancers. Topics covered include magazine production, design, revenue generation, subscriptions, distribution and audience engagement.

Last year’s conference oriented very much around revenue, DEI and a love of print; the 2024 iteration focused much more on helping magazine makers get the best out of their products and give the very best to their readers.

The power of the personal brand

Anyone who uses social media for business will know: when it comes to business, the ‘personal touch’ is on the rise. It seems that audiences increasingly want to interact not just with a faceless brand, but with a real person. (This is especially apparent with the recent boom in newsletters, which offer a more personal connection that is ensuring reader loyalty like no other platform.)

Justice Williams, Founder of Black Business Magazine, demonstrated this during her keynote presentation. After her first magazine flopped, Justice spent the next 15 years building up her personal brand, and by the time she launched Black Business she had a strong network and willing investors. As a ‘career wing woman’, Laurie Macpherson was a passionate advocate for the power of a personal LinkedIn presence to boost magazine brand awareness and attract revenue opportunities.

But it’s about more than a face on the masthead or an occasional post on social: audiences are looking for authenticity in the brands they interact with. Holly Catford, art director and co-founder of Pit magazine, explained how staying true to their values not only helped them produce a well-received magazine, but also helped them partner lucratively with brands without ‘losing their soul’.

Meeting the reader where they are

No one in the publishing industry would survive without the audiences who read or consume our products. To be successful, publishers need to deeply understand their audience’s preferences, interests, and habits to create compelling and relevant content and drive reader engagement – and they need to do this across multiple platforms.

For Louise Ioannou, Marketing Director at National Geographic Kids, this demanded a hands-on approach to getting to know their customers. By merging marketing and customer services and consulting the latter in every single decision-making process – as well as regular surveys throughout each customer’s subscription period – her team has transformed the brand and significantly boosted consumer trust.

This deep knowledge is also becoming more pressing in the area of ad sales, said Azure’s Jacqueline Loch, where advertisers are looking for more innovative ways to engage with more specific audiences. However, she believes that magazine publishers already have the tools to deliver: “We know what matters to our readers. We know what matters to our audiences. We do it all the time in the editorial, we do it all the time in our products… [it’s] all of those things that we know how to do but forgot we knew how to do – because we were so busy chasing Meta and giving away our audiences.”

Learning from the big guys

Many publishers or magazine makers at Magazine Street simply don’t have the resources to compete with the bigger players – they don’t have the luxury of 10-person dedicated subscriptions teams, or the budget for extensive customer research. However, there are often lessons that can be learned from large publishing houses.

For example, Steve Price from Atlas encouraged delegates not to reinvent the wheel when it comes to subscriptions but to borrow ideas from bigger brands, such as clarifying your CVP (customer value proposition), playing the long game, and defining a clear customer journey. Crucially, he said, publishers have to be prepared to test… and to ‘fail’ occasionally: “I’ve worked with so many firms where the CMOs have said, ‘That failed, that was a waste of time.’ It’s never a waste of time. You learn more by failure than by success.”

Socially Talking’s Karen Slade argued that there is a way smaller publishers can stand toe-to-toe with larger publishers: through paid Meta ads. With 69% of adults using Facebook and almost 700 data points stored on each user, she explained, paid ads give publishers an incredible opportunity to reach the right people – without a huge budget. “You can compete without losing your brand identity… and target niche audiences.”

The abstract versus the actionable

There was an interesting contrast at the heart of Magazine Street 2024: the power of inspiration and creative thought combined with practical tools to reach audiences in new ways.

GQ Italy’s Art Director Federigo Gaballieri claimed that for creative success, it’s crucial to turn off your ego: “You never have to give 100%. Sometimes give 80%, or even 70%. You have to keep your mind and energy alive.” Linguist and comms specialist Eloise Leeson-Smith urged delegates to embrace lantern (creative, open-ended) thinking rather than spotlight (narrow focus) thinking, to make sure brands are differentiated in a ‘sea of sameness’.

Meanwhile, other workshops encouraged attendees to upskill: from using podcasts as a brand extension, to Canva making designers’ jobs easier; from using short video to engage new audiences, to defining your brand to generate endless content ideas.

Magazine Street 2024 underlined how creativity, community, professional development and deep customer knowledge – all of which smaller publishers are uniquely placed to leverage – will be critical for navigating future industry challenges.

Tickets for Magazine Street 2025 are already on sale.