St. Joseph Media’s flagship title Toronto Life is celebrating its 50th anniversary this month. Marketing spoke with publisher Ken Hunt about why the city magazine has endured and flourished, and what’s next.
Fifty is obviously a milestone anniversary. To what do you attribute Toronto Life’s longevity?
It’s a testament to the fact that Toronto Life has been very good at serving its readers very well. It’s a magazine that people know and follow and use. There’s a high level of utility to Toronto Life – people use it to make their life in the city a lot better.
I often say you give up a lot to live in Toronto. You pay a lot more rent than you would in other places, or your house is much more expensive, your yard is a lot smaller, you live a lot closer to people, you have to deal with traffic and transit and all of these things.
What you get in return is Toronto life. That means the life of the city. It’s such a fantastic city that’s going through such an exciting time, and Toronto Life is lucky to be connected to that.
How do you describe Toronto Life’s overall health at this moment?
Things are going well for Toronto Life right now. We continue to have increasing readership, a steady subscriber profile, and our newsstand sales are strong.
We have challenges with declines in budgets from national advertisers, but we’ve been able to compensate with increases in local advertising, especially in the Toronto real estate market, which is a very strong category for us.
If your universe were only Toronto Life, you wouldn’t think there was anything to worry about in terms of the future of the printed word. You’d say it’s not our best year ever, [but] it’s not our worst year ever. Things are motoring along. The future looks bright and there are lots of things to be excited about.
If you were just looking at Toronto Life, you wouldn’t know there was a crisis in the magazine industry.
The backdrop to this anniversary, of course, is Rogers Media’s recent retreat from magazines. Some say it represents a critical juncture for the industry. From your perspective, does it remain viable?
From my perspective, I think it’s a very exciting time to be in the magazine industry. Whether it was magazines or newspapers or other forms of media, there was a time in the not-too-distant past where this was not that difficult a business to be in.
Most of the players had monopoly positions, there weren’t a lot of advertising options so it was pretty easy to run a media business for a long time. It’s not easy anymore. This is the NBA: You’d better come to play and you’d better bring your A game and be on all the time, or you’ll get eaten alive.
What’s exciting about that is the demand on every single media outlet to be as great as possible, to serve their audience as well as they possibly can. There is no room for mediocrity in the market anymore.
How well has Toronto Life adjusted to those particular challenges?
There are a few things that we’ve done. First of all, we’ve made an absolute commitment to keep the quality of the product as high as it’s ever been. From a journalistic standpoint [and] from a design standpoint, Toronto Life has been fortunate to be able to continue to invest in high-quality journalism at a time other people aren’t. That helps us distinguish ourselves.
Another aspect of adaptation is just being much more rigorous about the way we look at things, with a lot more reliance on data than ever before in our history. We really analyze what we do, how well it works, how much it costs and continue to reinvest in the things that make the most difference in terms of reader engagement. We continue to divert resources from things that aren’t working well and to things that are.
That process also extends to sales – taking a very rigorous approach and figuring out where we’re doing well, where we’re falling behind, where the opportunities are and dividing up our sales team to be able to go after those opportunities in the most efficient way.
The days when sales people were essentially cashiers who sat back and waited for orders to come in on their fax machine are long past. Today’s media sales people need to be much more consultative and much more creative, they need to be able to really talk to clients about what their needs are and how we can service them.
How is the custom content aspect [Strategic Content Labs] of your business going?
It’s going incredibly well. We’ve gone from zero to quite a remarkable business in just a few years.
It’s probably growing faster than we imagined and we’re winning new clients all the time. That aspect of the business has taken off like a rocket ship.
There’s been an increased emphasis on events in the industry and Toronto Life has been active in that space. Can you talk a little about your activity?
Events are critically important to the future of Toronto Life, and have been a big part of our growth over the past several years – and especially the last two years.
One of the reasons they’re so important is they give us a chance to really engage with people in real life. They’re the ultimate form of social media – actually being able to really connect with people.
You can communicate your brand values to people in a much more tactile way and there are a lot of economic opportunities. They will continue to be a growing part of our business for some time to come.
Approximately how much of Toronto Life’s overall revenue do events account for, and where would like to take that number?
They account for about 10% and I think [that number] could easily go to 25% in the near future. I could certainly foresee a third of our revenue coming from print, a third from digital and a third from events.
There’s been a lot of talk about what a magazine brand even is in the modern media environment. How much has that changed for Toronto Life?
I think it’s smart to think of it as a media brand and after that which platforms you’re going to play in rather than say ‘This is a magazine brand that has a website.’ I don’t think that’s a good strategy.
I don’t think that in 2016 brands should be defined by the platforms that they publish on. Having a magazine versus not having a magazine isn’t the most important thing. What that brand stands for and who its audience is, is the most important thing.
