22 November, 2017

One-on-one With Pacific Magazines’ Wendy Moore

By B&T Magazine

With audiences consuming more media than ever before, Wendy Moore, general manager of Pacific Magazines’ homes and food titles, sat down with Magazine Networks to outline two unique projects in her portfolio.

When she’s not gracing our TV screens as a judge on Seven’s House Rules, Wendy Moore oversees Pacific Magazines’ portfolio of homes and food titles. Moore has spent her entire career in magazines, entering the business fresh out of high school as a copy girl for The Australian Women’s Weekly, where she cut her teeth on the brand’s famous cookbooks. And while lifestyle is her passion, she also has a stint in kids’ magazines under her belt.

Her time editing Home Beautiful has left the biggest mark on account of the success the title saw under her stewardship. Today, it sells 30 per cent more copies than it did a decade ago.

Moore said her experience prepared her for the general manager position of the division, as editorial know-how is particularly important.

“You need to be creative and then have the business understanding underneath it – that’s where the gold is – because being creative and understanding what’s commercial has to be the way of the future,” she told Magazine Networks.

Moore’s knowledge of the homes space, coupled with her ease in front of the camera, led to House to Home Beautiful (H2HB), a multi-platform venture in partnership with Thomas Archer Homes.

Under the Home Beautiful banner, interior design and building power couple Aimee and Frank Tarulli are documenting the construction of their two-storey home across online and print, including video and Facebook Live, all hosted by Moore.

The project is a response to the trend of house flipping, which Moore said leaves a whole subset of renovators out in the cold: people who are interested in turning their house into a home.

The average period of home ownership in Australia is 11 years, and H2HB provides material for people renovating for the long haul.

“A home is about a real sense of belonging,” Moore said. “It’s a collection of stories and memories. It’s a question of ‘how do you make it feel like it really does embody you?’”

H2HB has almost doubled the brand’s web traffic, with pieces of content attracting up to 80,000 views each. Moore said the success of the project is due to the genuine need for it.

“It’s not shoehorned in. The information is really valuable and it comes naturally,” she said.

With the house now complete, Moore is already working on extending H2HB into a second renovation featuring Aimee and Frank with additional projects expected to launch in the coming weeks, including smaller single-room projects as well as new larger collaborations.

“It’s been a great example of what a brand can achieve. It’s something a lot of people are chasing, but not actually achieving,” Moore said.

A focus on food

Also in Moore’s portfolio is Foodiful, a platform created in partnership with Woolworths. Foodiful provides simple yet innovative recipes which can be worked into a household rotation of go-to meals.

“When you’re in a repertoire, you’ve got a customer for life,” Moore said. “For a brand to connect to that is invaluable. We’re the people that can really influence behaviour.”

Foodiful’s high engagement is as much about behaviour as it is about recipes. In less than a year, the platform’s newsletter has gained 45,000 subscribers and sees higher click-through rates than the industry average as well as four times the engagement of competitors.

Moore said: “It’s an example of how great content with the personality of a fresh brand can attract new audiences.”

The future

With numbers like these, Moore is confident about the future of the brands under her stewardship.

“There’s no doubt that audiences are consuming more media than ever before,” she said.

“We’re definitely going to be creating things. It’s about understanding the role of every platform you’re communicating with your audience on, how those audiences best like to interact and the information they want.”

Moore likens the changes in the magazine industry to the changes the film industry has undergone.

When cinema-going petered off, the answer was the creation of movies that simply had to be seen on a big screen in an immersive experience. Similarly, she believes print will always have a place.

“There’s something so tangible about the print product,” Moore said. “Our customers tell us they sit with a cup of coffee and they fall in love with the possibilities all over again.”

Please note: this article was contributed by Magazine Networks.

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