Gourmet Traveller editor says pop-up restaurant not just a money making exercise
Loucas
Bauer Media food and travel magazine Gourmet Traveller is set to return to Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula next month with its pop-up restaurant, with editor Anthea Loucas telling Mumbrella events such as this are not just money making exercises but about engaging with readers.
“The pop-up restaurant and the food truck we did last year, they weren’t money making exercises. They’re much more than that. They’re great opportunities to engage with our readers in a fun way,” she said.
“It’s fair to say that advertisers are looking for interesting propositions, they’re not interested in just buying a single page ad. They want some engagement and it’s part of it but you have to be clever, you have to take ideas to your clients that are exciting and fresh.
“These brand extensions, when it comes to working with clients we know that if we genuinely believe in the idea editorially then it will be a success and our readers will engage with it and be excited by it. We can take that to clients and it’s one of those classic win-wins.”
The pop-up restaurant will be located at the Red Hill winery Avani in partnership with Melbourne’s Gertrude Street Enoteca, with co-owner and Gourmet Traveller contributor Brigitte Hafner creating a set menu each day from January 4 through to the end of the month.
Loucas said: “It’s very much a collaboration between great creative minds and brands, and our passion for great food and wine. We had such a good time last year that we thought we’d better do it all over again, only bigger and better.
“Whether it’s in the pages of our magazine, online via our award-winning website or through an experience such as this, the restaurant activation demonstrates the breadth of cross- platform opportunities available to advertisers that leverages the Gourmet Traveller brand.”
While the events allow the title to engage in a more direct way with readers and its commercial partners, Loucas said it is also about keeping the brand fresh and exciting.
“We’re so lucky the brand has so much freedom where it can move into. Yes, it’s a food and travel magazine, but there is a strong lifestyle thread running through it and ultimately, when you’re editing any magazine or product, you need to keep it fresh and engaging and surprising your readers.
“The reason why they’re so popular is the brand carries so much integrity and authority behind it that people know we will deliver on a promise, whether its the magazine or an event. They know if they book into a reader dinner, that it’s going to be great value, something exciting and different and a unique experience that they wouldn’t be able to have if they went by themselves.”
While the print edition of the monthly magazine experienced a 4.5 per cent circulation decline, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, Loucas doesn’t expect the title to be going anywhere soon, with readers using the print edition and its iPad and online counterparts differently.
“You use them differently. And I speak from experience, yes if you want to search for a recipe or you want to cook a recipe, then a website or an iPad edition or an app is great. But if you want to sit down and have a magazine experience you still love the print product,” she said.
“If I’m sitting at home for the evening, and I want to have a magazine experience I’m still going to pick up a print magazine. I feel if I’m on my iPad as it’s become so much part of your personal administration at the end of the night my mind wants to have a break from the screen and that’s when I enjoy having a magazine experience.
“The other thing that we forget is the print product and the iPad content come from the same office,” she added.
“We produce content and then we publish it in various formats, we publish it in print, we publish it online, we publish it on the iPad, we recalibrate it for cookbooks and apps. Gourmet Traveller as the brand is always the hero. I can’t see the print edition of Gourmet Traveller disappearing. We plan the edition of Gourmet Traveller but we don’t plan it for the print edition or for the iPad edition, it’s all the same content, it just gets curated for a different platform.”
On the declining circulation numbers faced by much of the print magazine industry – Gourmet Traveller saw its circulation decline from 68,108 to 65,041 in the six months ended June 2014 – Loucas said it is important for brands to be nimble and able to move into different areas.
“The brand just changes and moves into different areas. We have a very popular iPad edition of the magazine and we launched our first app this year, a recipe app. You just have to be nimble,” she said.
“You have to think of two things editorially in terms of the product, how do you deliver it and how are people responding to it. Gourmet is very lucky that it has a strong subscriber base and it’s very ‘keepable’, it’s not disposable. People keep them for the recipes, they have massive collections of them.
“The benefit of the iPad edition is that it’s mobile and you can store two years of Gourmet on the iPad. Some readers tell us that they keep one set of their Gourmets at home and the other set is on the iPad to take to the holiday house.
“I’m not sure what the future of Gourmet is in terms of growth of numbers but it’s very steady, it’s always going to sit around the same numbers and it has for the last 11 years I’ve been at Gourmet.”
Supporting those numbers commercially, Loucas said it is important to be coming up with new ideas and executions and engaging with advertisers to deliver those to the readers.
“Our advertisers want to engage with our readers,” she said.
Miranda Ward
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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