Caxton Television is live

“The publishing business is adapting and morphing all the time, no one knows what the end-point will be,” said Debbie McIntyre, head of Caxton Magazine Insights. “Magazines have to have be agile.” Caxton Magazine’s agility has resulted in Bona Mo, a brand extension of the country’s most read monthly consumer magazine. The divisions mandate is to produce quality television programming for the small screen and online, that showcases key South African brands within a glossy, magazine-style content marketing strategy.

Clive van der Wagon, head of client strategy at Caxton Magazines said; “We are doing Caxton TV because we love magazines, we’re mag-hags and we believe in the power of brands.”

The Caxton Magazine Insights department are charged with understanding consumer behavior and through their research are tasked to drive revenue, assist their clients and editorial teams to do better business, said McIntyre. Through this they are pitching bespoke proposals that will build brands across all audience touch points. “There are lots of resources for us to draw on,” she says. “We can’t control all touch points, for example conversation,” said McIntyre, “but as a publishing group we can access relevant content”. She said the Insights team is striving to be available wherever their customers are looking, “we need to do this if we want to remain relevant”.

Van der Wagon said they have always referred to themselves as multi-platform “and it was time to put our money where our mouth is”. So in 2014 they started creating TV for online and snippets for the small screen for clients like Clover and Knorr. “We are using our brands to speak about your brands,” he explained.

Bona Mo’s first TV instalment, a bespoke competition promotion for Dawn, made in collaboration with HB Pictures has been deemed a huge success. “It was an opportunity to not just give out a story but to share a brand,” said Van der Wagon. Since airing the clip, Unilever has received 28 000 entries to competition.

McIntyre expresses the huge value these products have and said with the help of Telmar’s new multi-basing software, advertisers can perform R&F analysis on media schedules encompassing Bona’s entire cross platform portfolio (print, online and TV). This is a completely measurable return of investment as multi-basing looks at TAMs, AMPs and IABs but does not duplicate stats.

Van der Wagon says Bona was the most obvious choice to roll out Caxton Television with, as it is the most uniquely South African title in their stable. “We will see the industry response, but the natural progression will be to take it to other brands,” he said.