Magazines

John Reynolds, mediaweek.co.uk, 07 July 2009, 07:30am

IPC launches Dinner Tonight to take on BBC and H Bauer

LONDON - IPC, the UK magazine publisher, is launching a new cookery title, Dinner Tonight, in a bid to establish itself in the home-cooking field against rivals such as BBC Magazines and H Bauer.

IPC quarterly Feel Good Food

The title will launch in September, priced £2.99, with 156 pages, and will feature a collection of recipes, advice on home cooking and celebrity content.

The first significant launch by IPC this year will have an initial print run of 100,000 and be sold nationwide.

Dinner Tonight will initially be sold as a one-off sub-brand of IPC's monthly women's title Woman & Home. However, rivals believe IPC is gearing up to launch it as a monthly.

One rival publisher said: "It is likely IPC will reuse material from its other titles for this and there is no reason why it can't launch straight away.

"Clearly, it is waiting for everybody to get back from holidays before launching it as a regular offering."

But Woman & Home publishing director Linda Swidenbank would only say: "We will see how it goes."

Editorial input for the title, dummy copies of which have yet to be shown to media agencies, will initially be handled by freelancers and staff.

IPC already has a presence in the cookery market and 18 months ago launched its premium Feel Good Food quarterly title, priced £4.25, sold in Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer and WHSmith travel outlets. Woman & Home and Essentials are also known for their cookery content.

Food magazines have held up well in the recession, bolstered by new arrivals such as H Bauer's Eat In and Jamie Oliver's magazine, Jamie.

According to February's magazine ABCs, cookery and kitchen titles were up more than 5% year on year, with titles such as the BBC's Easy Cook and Sainsbury's Fresh Ideas doing particularly well.

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All Comments

Face In Media - 07 July 2009

'IPC Purchase Good Houskeeping' probably would have been a more apt headline

David Gurney, Operations Director, Alchemetrics - 20 July 2009

IPC's latest launch into the lucrative food market will no doubt be under close financial scrutiny \(p5, 7 July, to ensure it generates significant enough revenue to justify its existence. One key area for Dinner Tonight will be in monetising its readership, to solicit ad revenue and to generate income from the sale of subscription data.

By using an intelligent approach to collecting reader data, IPC will be able to offer advertisers and other audiences valuable insight on readers. This could be achieved by dynamically serving readers questions when they interact, based on what information is already known about them, and what gaps appear in the data held. Advertisers and partners could even work with IPC to serve questions that are tailored to their own marketing needs; a hugely valuable and potentially unique resource.

Publishers, and especially those struggling in the current economic climate, would do well to investigate the revenue hidden within their own subscriptions data; expanding on the basics of customer name and address with complementary and insightful information could be the equivalent of striking oil.