Influencing consumers starts with building trust
Being a brand that consumers recognise and trust today has become more important than ever before. Here, Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Edwina McCann and Zac Skulander, News Corp Australia’s head of content innovation and strategic partnerships, discuss how to turn that trust into influence.
Even if you’re far removed from the world of fashion, Vogue Australia is an immediately recognisable brand. In fact, the publication is the fourth-oldest Vogue in the world, before, incredibly, Vogue Italia.
“The audacity of having launched a Vogue at that time in Australia was extraordinary,” remarks the publication’s editor-in-chief Edwina McCann. This year marks the publication’s 60th birthday, which has given the editor and her team “time to take stock of where we are, how we got here, and the way we’ve diversified our platforms.”
The strength of the Vogue brand means the team is lucky to inherit 60 years of inbuilt trust, influence and authority. “It’s a very exciting time if you’re a strong brand, if you’re a credible brand, one with authority,” says McCann. “You can stretch your brand into other areas. You can take that authority and integrity, and move your audiences with it.”
As the team at Vogue Australia knows all too well, in order to remain influential, publications cannot simply do more of the same. They must learn to adapt to ever-changing market conditions, and keep up with differing consumer needs: “We communicate with people in so many different ways now. We can be agenda setting in a way that wasn’t possible when we were just a print magazine. The real skill in it is when we can align our big ideas across our platforms.”
She points to Vogue Codes as an example of a truly multiplatform idea, which is rooted in live events but spans online, social media and print: “That’s where it really works powerfully, on so many platforms.”
Events now play a huge part in influencing consumers. “You’re there, you’re accountable; you can answer questions. For audiences, that is such a great way to connect.” Take Vogue American Express Fashion’s Night Out, for example. The team were able to influence more than 200,000 people into the CBDs of Sydney and Melbourne for a night of shopping.
That influence benefited everyone involved, from the retailers to the city councils and the sponsors. For the sponsors, it was not only about new acquisitions but also rewarding both their customers and their retailers for that loyalty. And it’s not just Vogue that’s putting on a show: last year, over 700,000 consumers attended and engaged with a News Prestige Network event.
Click to play: highlights of News Corp’s Come Together 2019 journeys
Influence is not just about transactions, but can be “about saving people’s lives”. McCann points to News Corp’s recent campaign with the Heart Foundation as “an example of where community work crosses over with really clever copywriting, and through influence drive action to improve the heart health of millions of Australians.”
For Zac Skulander, News Corp’s head of content innovation and strategic partnerships, “influence means giving people all the information they need to make an informed decision. When you book a campaign with News Corp, you know you’re surrounding yourself with trusted content, so that attracts the right audience.”
And just like McCann, Skulander believes that News Corp’s heritage and the communities it has been able to build over decades are effective trust builders: “That’s where trust really is forged in: a masthead with 100+ years of experience in delivering the news to people. We have journos that are embedded in those communities that are embedded in their local community. And they care.”
A great story is one of the most influential assets a publication owns, a fact which doesn’t escape the content innovation lead: “I’m surrounded by these amazing storytellers. If I see great success with something from an editorial point of view, and I know that the eyes are there and the ears are there, then the client conversations naturally flow into that.”
NewsCast, one of the new initiatives announced at this year’s Come Together event, is the culmination of that storytelling ability combined with News Corp’s ability to innovate. “We had little audio experience when we started on the journey,” says Skulander. “It just came down to having a great story and being able to tell those stories,” he says, pointing to The Teacher’s Pet and Who The Hell Is Hamish as two key examples.
“There’s no secret to it, we’ve been doing it for years, it’s simply a brand new platform. That’s where NewsCast has really come into its own, where now we have a really strong, defined strategy where every podcast that we make moving forward is going to be better than the previous one.”
Finding and subscribing to a new podcast is not the easiest thing to do in the world, thanks to the proliferation of various apps and streaming services, depending on what device you’re listening from. But that’s the beauty of it.
“Audio is like all of our content, from clicking on an article to opening up a newspaper and reading it, you are engaged from the start as you have to actively go and seek it out,” says Skulander. “So that’s step one, that they’ve already shown an interest straight away in the content you’re producing.
“The other thing is it’s in your ears, so it’s a different sensory experience. You can listen while on a bus or a train or in the car or walk to work, and that’s where we’re seeing the most amount of consumption at the moment is in those commuting times.”
Ultimately, as long as the brand behind it is strong, trust and the influence can span any medium – from podcasts to print to events. As McCann puts it, that strength comes from a combination of “authenticity, integrity, consistency,” mixed with taking “feedback from your audience, understanding your audience, and moving with your audience.”
Outside of Vogue, News is nothing more than a Liberal funded machine who cannot be trusted.
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