Small but sturdy: Angeliki Gourni of Brainbuzz Media on making beautiful print products for corporate clients

“I get angry when I hear people saying that print is dead,” says Angeliki Gourni, owner of Greek publishing company Brainbuzz Media. “Print is my main job, my life. I want to talk about it and explain that print can’t be dead because it is timeless.”

Based in Athens, Brainbuzz is in the business of creating gorgeous print products – spanning travel, luxury, fashion and lifestyle – for a number of corporate clients. The publications they produce include ready2Board, the official, award-winning magazine of Athens International Airport, and Attica, a fashion magazine specially designed for the Attica department stores.

The publishing company was the brainchild of Gourni’s late husband, well known Greek journalist and editor Petros Bourovilis, who started the company along with Identity Media in 2014. After Bourovilis passed away in 2020, Gourni decided to continue with Brainbuzz, overseeing the digitalisation of its stable of magazines during Covid.

We sat down with Gourni to talk about the enduring appeal of print, the evolving luxury magazine market in Greece and the changing media landscape in her homeland.

Could you introduce Brainbuzz Media to our readers?

I’m actually a very small company in Greece, but I have some pretty big titles. I publish corporate editions mostly. I don’t publish magazines for the newsstands. My biggest magazine is ready2Board – the official magazine of Athens International Airport. It’s a travel magazine and one of the biggest Greek magazines because it has so many copies at the airport.

What are your main revenue streams?

It’s mostly through advertising, but I also make magazines for third parties. For example, I have this client, Attica department store, which is the biggest department store in Greece. We publish it twice a year, and we don’t make revenue from advertising. They commission us to publish their own magazine. I also publish a magazine for some luxury hotels in Greece and also a magazine for Mykonos island.

What is the key to successfully creating magazines for corporate clients?

Well, if you look at ready2Board – which is a title that’s been around for 18 years and is really well known – they prefer partnering with Brainbuzz mostly because of the aesthetics and tone of the magazine that we can produce for them. The aesthetics is a very big deal for us.

How has the luxury market changed in Greece?

Our print magazines have had to face the challenges of social media and advertising revenue going to influencers instead of print magazines. Many brands prefer to cut advertising spend on print and give it to Instagram and TikTok. So, it’s a challenge, but still we manage somehow. We don’t get advertising from big fashion brands that much, as we did 10 years ago. For example, 10 years ago we had Louis Vuitton and more luxury brands like that, now it’s less frequent – they do one issue per year, maybe two because they prefer to spend on social/infuencers.

What does print bring to clients that other mediums can’t?

Print offers quality and also offers authority because you don’t expect something that you read in a newspaper or a serious magazine to be fake. So, print, in essence, offers no fake news. Every CEO wants to have an interview in a print magazine because it offers an authority – it shows something real.

In 2020, you took the step to digitise your magazines, ensuring it mirrored the print issues as much as possible. Could you talk us through that process?

In 2020, we published magazines for airports, department stores and hotels. Of course, all three of these sectors took a huge hit and were shut down during Covid. We had to do something to have a digital presence. Fortunately, at a FIPP Congress we met a company called BlueToad and entered into a partnership with them to digitise our magazines. It was a need back then and our clients and our readers were very happy that they could still read the magazines. But I didn’t want to make a travel portal out of ready2Board magazine, for example, because it’s a magazine. It’s another philosophy. So, BlueToad was the best choice as a platform where it’s either a micro site or you have the option to flip through the magazine on your mobile like you flip through the real print issue.

How has the Greek media landscape in general changed over the years?

In Greece we used to have all the big magazine titles Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, Vogue, Marie Claire and Esquire – even though we are a country of just 10 million. There were too many magazines. During the big financial crisis from 2010-2017 two-thirds of those titles were closed or integrated into newspapers – for instance, Vogue Magazine is published with the Sunday newspaper eKathimerini once a month. These big titles don’t stand alone on newsstands anymore, because very few people buy magazines anymore.

What does the future look like for Brainbuzz and Greek print media?

I’m optimistic because there are still opportunities for print out there. I see international websites that I follow publish print magazines. I see this need, but not for the masses – more niche. I don’t know how the advertising market will be, but I see opportunities with companies that want publishers to bring magazine out for them without advertising. So, they pay to have a magazine and get some status. I also see younger generations turn to print. They grew up on their phone and they now see print as something exotic.