Mamamia Expands Editorial Segments, Makes Bigger Play Into Content Marketing

Mamamia Women’s Network (MWN) launched a host of fresh announcements this morning at their Women 360 NewFronts, from expanded editorial pillars to opportunities for branded partnerships and ventures.

Staking their claim that they have the strongest digital reach to the Australian female audience, and referencing their push to get all Mamamia content under one banner throughout 2016, MD Kylie Rogers said it was about making MWN a “a truly generalist site”.

Co-founder and creative director, Mia Freedman, said that their new editorial segments would stretch their coverage to give women all the information they seek from a trusted digital space – not just “women’s” topics.

MWN announced they would be kicking off deep, engaging content in the areas of finance, automotive, sport and travel, not only editorially but commercially through branded content as well.

Freedman added, “Women want to know about everything – all the information, all of the time. And we’ll be covering every topic through a female lens.”

Commercial director Claire Harrison told B&T that the commercial proposals of the new editorial pillars would be something they’d be taking to market in about three weeks, adding “We’re not a niche, we are actually reaching a lot of women”.

MWN announced it would be starting a partnership with CarsGuide, providing 10 pieces of content on Mamamia every month, allowing brands to identify who “she” is and what she wants to buy.

Freedman also explained there will be two separate divisions of the site, split across News and Entertainment.

“News will be all written content, branded and editorial, which is very much our DNA,” she said. “And after almost 10 years of doing this, we know how to do this better than anyone else.

“Then podcasts and video come under the Entertainment umbrella – both branded and editorial.”

MWN recently launched Broad, a collaborative content agency specialising in women to help brands with projects aimed at reaching the wider female audience.

“Our investment into research, and real time insights into what women want and think means clients and agencies can access Mamamia insights into women,” research and insights director Tegan Gilchrist said.

“We develop effective standalone products, but we also know it takes a village to raise a brand-child, so we love collaborating with brands and agencies as well.

“Mia’s original philosophy is that women want to talk about politics and pelvic floors in the same sentence so that little nugget has guided us all the way through. And as we’ve grown and scaled up, we’ve been able to bring in more of those content areas and this is almost a coming of age to fill in these new areas.”

To further pull clients in with this content marketing venture, MWN is taking its ROI tool, Athena, live this month, to accurately and efficiently amalgamate metrics from EDMs, social media, website and more to create a complete report for clients.

Harrison added that there will be a 100 per cent increase in pre roll availability, and that they’ve “partnered with Tubemogul to allow brands to follow their influential audience off network”, while Gilchrist revealed they’d already begun a few projects with content agency Broad.

“We’ve been working with a few key clients, from rebranding with one through to a ‘back to school’ media strategy with another,” she told B&T, admitting she was unable to reveal who these clients were as of yet.

“We invest heavily in research and strategy. We have a full strategy team in our office so we apply the same filter when we get a brief so that we can truly layer in that female perspective. We realised we have a role we can help brands with not necessarily through media play with Mamamia.

“We look at what are the business challenges that keeps you up at night, be it communications, business strategy or just a sound-check of an idea you’ve got, and then bring in our expertise.”

But, as Harrison stressed, they’re not going to be “playing in the media buying space”, agreeing “100 per cent” with the notion that content marketing is the future of advertising.

“There’s still a place for banner advertising but increasingly it’s becoming a commoditised play,” she said.

“We produce incredible content and it’s the fact that our readers engage so deeply with it and the fact that we have so many arms to our content – social, written content on site, podcasts, video – and they all complement one another. And depending on the strategy a brand can dip in and out.”

Gilchrist added, “Branded content has been baked into the DNA of Mamamia since we started. We were doing branded content in 2009 before anyone was talking about native and the other buzzwords.

“While some businesses would be about five per cent branded content and 95 per cent display, we have absolutely the other business model. Branded content is fundamentally what we do and our audience love it because it’s good content.

“We look for synergies between our brand to a create halo across whatever the client content we’re creating is, and the brand and the audience. Sometimes it’s a challenge to find exactly that right balance but when you hit a piece of content that works for all three of those groups, then you’re on a winner.”