This is my essay I wrote on The Bauer Media Group.
Bauer Media Group
The Bauer Media group - founded in Hamburg, Germany started off as a small company owning one magazine in 1875. It is now one of the biggest conglomerates in media. Bauer Media is owned by the Bauer family, and has been owned by four generations of the family. The BMG has grown into a worldwide publishing and media company. It comprises of 300 magazines in 15 countries, as well as numerous TV and radio stations. Bauer established themselves in the UK in 1987 with the launch of Bella magazine. The company has rapidly grown by buying out smaller magazines and creating a global range of established brands. Bauer employs around 6400 people, and has annual turnover of 2 billion euros. The company has spread into different platforms, and sell products online, through TV, radio and magazines. The Bauer company caters to a wide audience, with their 300 magazines having specific audiences such as “bike magazine” and “for him magazine”
In 1987 “Bella” was Bauer's first venture into publishing in the UK. “Bella sought to make an impact in the UK magazine market by mixing previously unseen real-life editorial with the classic elements more traditionally associated with women's magazines such as fashion and beauty, cookery and practical home features” – Bauer Media Group Wikipedia
In 1990, Bauer launched Take a Break magazine. It is a “true life” women’s weekly which was the 3rd of its genre, so it became very popular and gave Bauer a great deal of success-it became the market leader selling millions of copies. In 1995, Bauer launched a sister magazine for Take a Break called “that’s life!” which helped them to corner the “true life” market.
In 1991 Bauer bought a TV listing magazine called TVQuick to compete with the BBC and ITV listings. In 1999, Baur launched TVChoice magazine at a much lover price than their competitors, and overtook its main competitor in February 2008. It has been the number one weekly news stand magazine in the UK ever since.
BMG has turned it's most popular publications into global brands. Q and Kerrang! Both started as magazines.
Q was first published in 1986 and it set itself apart from other music press magazines with monthly production and a high standard of photography and printing, emphasising its unique style.
The Q brand has expanded to Radio and Television, with Q Radio and Q TV being music entertainment that specialises in indie, rock and alternative. Q also holds annual music awards in the UK, known as Q Awards. Since they began in 1990, the Q Awards have become one of Britain's biggest and best publicized music awards.
Kerrang! is a brand that specialises in Rock Music It originally began as a magazine and in 2004 Kerrang Radio was launched. Kerrang has a popular TV channel which plays music video and allows for viewer selection.
These poplar brands secured Bauer’s audience, and through it’s %50 stake in Box Television, a successful production company, the BMG also owns the television channels 4Music, The Box Heat, Kerrang!, Kiss, Magic and Smash Hits.
Bauer utilises new technologies and platforms.
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Brand Name
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TV
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Online
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Radio
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Magazine
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Q
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Yes
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Yes
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Yes
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Yes
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FHM
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Yes
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Yes
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Yes
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Yes
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Kerrang!
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Yes
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Yes
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Yes
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Yes
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Mojo
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No
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Yes
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Yes
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Yes
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Its four main brands are all cross platform, which means that new audiences and technologies are being reached. “Global publisher Bauer Media has conducted a neuro-imaging study that it says proves the effectiveness of running cross-platform campaigns. The participants viewed advertising campaigns running across the various platforms of British entertainment magazine, Heat (print, online, TV and radio) and then viewed the same campaign running across a mixed selection of competitor brands.
Bauer Media have grown to such a size now that they are in talks with the BBC to buy BBC Magazine. “Bauer is now understood to be honing the finer details of a contract that will effectively outsource most of the BBC's publishing responsibilities, through a series of licensing agreements.” – Media Week Magazine.
Bauer have launched a new service for it’s commercial partners called Bauer Access. Bauer Access will take the form of a series of ‘open-access’ sessions between Bauer Media's editors and programmers and advertisers and agencies.
`’Bauer Media has worked on recent bespoke cross-media campaigns for clients Russian Standard Vodka, Orange, Barclaycard and Sony Ericsson.
Barclaycard, for example, collaborated with Bauer's music brands such as Q on a recent campaign as it wished to further its association with the music industry. Barclaycard is currently the headline sponsor of the Mercury Prize, which has been renamed as the Barclaycard Mercury Prize for this reason.” -Bauer Media launches Access service for advertisers Campaignlive.co.uk
This new campaign joins Bauer together with iconic brands such as estee lauder. This means that Bauer could secure deals such as exclusive interviews in their magazines, and brings a lot of profit to the BMG.
Bauer Media follows the Ethos of not doing interviews, but instead letting their products and brands speak for themselves. The Bauer family is renowned for attention to detail, and builds it’s marketing strategy around local brands.
Bauer bought the company Emap – one of their biggest rivals – in 2008 for 1.4bn, and created Bauer radio. Bauer radio owns many successful radio stations such as Radio city and Magic FM. Through buying these Radio stations, Bauer gained a large share in the radio market, and also plays a part in the digital switchover - the change from analogue to digital signal.
Bauer has generated adverse publicity too though. “Bauer Media stops publishing magazine accused of being pro-Nazi” Bauer media ceased publication of the german magazine Der Landser, which had been accused of honouring pro-nazi troops who fought in the second world war. Bauer has also been subject to complaints to the British communications regulator Ofcom about its fitness to own radio stations.
"Faced with the loss of its UK radio licences, and not being allowed to acquire others, it has hypocritically closed Der Landser despite still insisting that its publication of the title was proper."
These problems come with being a global conglomerate. Controlling a huge chunk of the market comes with the cost of being in the public eye. Many people have the opinion that one company should not be able to hold such a grasp on media, because it will spread a biased view, as shown with the magazine Der Landser.
Appendix
Global publisher Bauer Media has conducted a neuro-imaging study that it says proves the effectiveness of running cross-platform campaigns.
The research involved hooking up 180 people to headsets and measuring electrical activity in their brains, using a technique called ‘steady state topography’.
The participants viewed advertising campaigns running across the various platforms of British entertainment magazine, Heat (print, online, TV and radio) and then viewed the same campaign running across a mixed selection of competitor brands.
Bauer found that when participants viewed the campaign across Heat‘s platforms there was a far higher level of brain activity compared to when the campaign was viewed across mixed media brands.
Martin Diamond, research director at Bauer, says, “the research matched exactly the same ads in terms of where you saw them on the medium, whether that was in print or online. The key difference was the editorial environment.”
The research used a total of five real campaigns including two cosmetics brands, a fashion brand, a confectionary brand and a drinks brand.
Clare Chamberlain, the sales director of London lifestyle at Bauer, says, “For us the exciting thing is it demonstrates a real opportunity for multi-platform activity and a benefit for advertisers in advertising across all of Heat. We’ve always suspected that, but we’ve never had anything that proved it in the past.
“Heat is our first 360-degree brand. We hope to grow the number of advertisers using multi-platform. More than 80 per cent all of our campaigns run across print and digital, while far fewer use the radio and TV, which are new areas for us. “
Heat‘s researchers claim in a statement that the level of brain response is important, especially ‘emotional response’, which they found is positively correlated to memory and can, in turn, lead to a consumer making a purchase in response to the ad.
Heat will be presenting the research to media agencies in October.
