Immediate has launched a new agency within the business to boost revenue from live events.
The agency, called IX, will help brands host live experiences – such as events, pop-ups and activations – in collaboration with Immediate’s 24 titles that reach around 20 million readers every month.
These live events will create revenue which is “100% incremental to what we’re currently doing”, Rob Hunt, Immediate’s director of experiential, told Press Gazette.
IX will also allow titles such as Radio Times able to run themed events with consumer-facing brands using the magazine’s reach to attract a targeted audience.
“So, for example, we’re talking about doing things like themed cruises with a big cruise company… they could be Radio Times cruises, or Gardeners’ World cruises,” said Hunt. “If you didn’t want to be involved necessarily with our brands, but you do want to do experiential [events], we can use the reach of the brands to get that message out to their audience.”
For example, if a tropical drink brand “wanted to do an experiential thing in London”, Hunt said, Immediate could host a tropical beach bar event using Good Food’s audience to reach numbers that a smaller consumer brand could not achieve by itself.
This “may have a link back to” Good Food but wouldn’t have to – Immediate would just publicise the event throughout.
Target niche audiences
IX can also allow for more niche audiences to be targeted, such as a specific age range: “Like Girl Talk, this could be a great source of new revenue to the brand, if, for example, we did pop up festival makeover tent with Glossier at a family festival aimed at young girls,” Hunt said.
Immediate already runs live events such as the Good Food Show and BBC Gardeners’ World Live.
Hunt said the difference with IX is titles do not need to attach their name to events but revenue would still be directed back to the publisher when this happens.
“It’s a big deal for Immediate as a publisher, because I don’t know many other publishing houses that have an experiential agency,” Hunt said.
“So I think we’re quite early in doing this… The Times does it, but they put on mainly Times events or Sunday Times [events]… This is about saying we can do that, and we will do that. But actually, we’re so good at doing brand partnerships, we don’t have to have our brands involved. We could just be your food experts, your entertainment experts, or your gardening experts. So I think that’s the slight difference that we got.”
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