Big things are on the horizon for Are Media, with the company announcing the relaunch of Girlfriend and the return of ELLE as a digital pure play, alongside a push further into digital and data.

The first of four big announcements made at its 2021 Showcase launch today, Are Media revealed plans for new digital products, relaunches of existing brands, ecommerce expansion and an enhanced programmatic offering.

In beauty, Are Media will completely relaunch its flagship beautyheaven website, which attracts 147,000 users per month. The company said it will be comprehensively refreshed with innovations in beauty tech and include the ability to customise experiences, in addition to rewards.

This model will then be rolled out across the BEAUTYcrew website, while the Good Health and Wellbeing brand is set to be reborn under Are Media as a health listing and sampling site.

The path to purchase will also be made seamless with plans to launch a new ecommerce platform.

Following the success of the Better Homes and Gardens Shop, Are Media will use its insights into women (the company currently reaches over 4.12 million women each month) to curate a new homes retail destination. In addition, it will look to collaborate with manufacturers and launch magazine branded lines of furniture and homewares.

Furthermore, Are Media today launched HerMatch, a partnership with Adobe that connects brands with its targetable and authenticated audiences across all devices.

Are Media currently has more than 100 data collection points across its Beauty Voices (beautyheaven and BEAUTYcrew) and parenting platform.

Following the acquisition of Pacific Magazines, Are Media has also completed the build of a unified programmatic tech stack with a brand safety score of 98 per cent, via Oracle Grapeshot 2020.

Are Media is also bringing the latest technology to help amplify content. SmartVid uses artificial intelligence technology to take digital branded content and turn them into video.

While SmartBite will take written words and turn them into short-form audio content, enabling it to be distributed to voice assistants, smart speakers, and podcast platforms like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Spotify, and iTunes.

Finally, SoundSocial is Are Media’s reimagined commercial podcasts offering, delivered through the company’s 30 million social reach and averaging 15,000 listens per post.

Girlfriend relaunches and ELLE.com.au to return

Another major announcement from Are Media today was the news it plans to supercharge its portfolio of young women brands with a relaunch of Girlfriend and the return of ELLE as a digital pure play.

Girlfriend will be refreshed in 2021 with a “bright, optimistic new look” that connects Are Media and its partners to the next generation of powerful women.

The publication currently reaches two million Gen Zers and millennials each month across its always on mobile platform and social.

Are Media has also confirmed Elle is returning to Australia after striking an agreement with owner the Lagardère Group. A digital pure play, ELLE.com.au, which reaches 370,000 Gen Y women each month, will become a highly curated retail and shopping destination.

Girlfriend and ELLE.com.au join Are Media’s growing portfolio brands aimed at young women which also includes SYRUP, a unisex digitally led fashion, beauty and culture brand targeting 16- to 22-year-olds, which was launched earlier this year.

More than 1.37 million young women are reached by Are’s brands each month.

Sarah-Belle Murphy, executive general manager, publishing and digital at Are Media said: “This is a generation that wants to cut through the noise and hear about the topics that matter to them delivered on platforms they engage with most.

“As such, we continue to invest in growing our audience of young women, enhancing their experiences and offering our partners new ways to connect with them.

“A relaunched Girlfriend, with a curated and retail focused ELLE.com.au, means that in conjunction with SYRUP, we have this cohort covered from all angles and can offer advertisers tailored and authentic solutions to reach them.”

Are Media’s push to grow its brands targeted young women follows the Luxury Trend Forecast in 2019 which identified this demographic will be critical to the future of the category.

It commissioned its ‘OFFSCRIPT’ research which uncovered the emotional signature of Gen Z, with the findings driving the creation and development of SYRUP.

New partnership with media planning tool attentionTRACE

In other news from the Showcase, Are Media announced a partnership with attentionTRACE Media Planner, a new planning tool for media agencies to make more informed buying decisions based on real human attention.

Developed by Australian academic and researcher Professor Karen Nelson-Field, founder and executive director of Amplified Intelligence, attentionTRACE is based on empirically led research design that tracks human gaze on a second-by-second level for mobile and TV.

Are Media claims it is the first global publisher to partner with attentionTRACE.

Media is typically planned based on reach, but attentionTRACE adds an additional quality layer of attention paid to advertisements, Are Media said.

Attention metrics can be used to expose wastage, drive commercial outcomes, predict brand choice better than viewability alone and plan for conditions that extend the length of time a brand stays in memory.

In addition, Are Media and Amplified Intelligence are working on a natural setting, scalable methodology to collect attention-based data for print magazines.

“The amount of attention advertisements receive has been the missing piece when it comes to media planning, but now media agencies will be able to make buying decisions based on the measure of attention which is important for brands when it comes to memory and avoiding wastage,” Are Media director of sales, Andrew Cook said.

Data for the first stage will be collected early 2021.

AttentionTRACE supports the collection of ad viewability metrics (ad pixels and duration on screen), spatial clutter (screen coverage of the ad), ad sound on/off/level, ad orientation (horizontal or vertical), scroll speed, and product choice (a behavioural measure of brand buying).

Are Media said these form a rich set of data that can be mined for deep and practical insight that will “ultimately improve the advertising ecosystem”.

Neuro-Insights UK CEO: Magazines build brands by driving strongest emotional response

Finally, a bit of research insight from the Are Media Showcase: Neuro-Insights has revealed that magazines build brand equity by eliciting the strongest levels of emotional intensity.

Shazia Ginai, chief executive of the neuromarketing company, said magazines are a strong trigger of right brain responses.

The right side of the brain is where we take in the overall feel of something and all memories are coloured by some sort of emotion.

“The brain actually isn’t that interested in brands,” Ginai said. “What we’re really interested in is stories. Human brains make sense of the world and the meaning of life through stories, so what’s critical is to encode information and [to] do that with a story.

“It’s important to encode that information alongside the right kind of emotion. What we see with magazines versus other channels is that they elicit the strongest levels of emotional intensity.”

Neuro-Insights research is backed up by Are Media’s ‘Magic of Magazines’ study, which found women had strong emotions when it comes to magazines. Eight in ten agreed that reading magazines is one of their favourite ways to escape, while 72 percent said they love the feeling of holding a magazine.

The research of 637 women aged 18 to 64 found magazines provide a much-needed escape, helping to relax, inform and entertain women.

The key attributes associated with magazines are relaxing (84 per cent), entertaining (76 per cent), informative (69 per cent), fun (53 per cent) and inspirational (51 per cent).

As further evidence to the attention-grabbing power of magazines, 63 percent of respondents said they re-read magazines, with almost seven in ten (67 per cent) reading them twice.