By Mark Sweney

Despite a torrid year, leading media agency says UK consumer magazine market has been ‘seriously undervalued’ by marketers.

The death of magazines has been overplayed, according to a leading media agency, despite a torrid year that has featured the British title Glamour ending its monthly print run and Rolling Stone appealing for a deep-pocketed buyer.

There has been a precipitous slump in advertising in UK magazines this year with an 11% fall representing the biggest since the advertising recession of 2009. In addition, in 2017 almost 1 million British consumers stopped buying print magazines or gave up their subscription.

Despite this gloomy picture, Group M, which buys more than $75bn (£60bn) of advertising space on behalf of clients globally, believes that the UK consumer magazine market has been “seriously undervalued” by marketers looking to cut back their budgets as a weakening economy has hurt their businesses.

“It is too early to call the death of magazines,” said Adam Smith, a director at WPP-owned Group M. “The decline in ad investment is disproportionate to the loss of magazine circulation. This is regrettable and probably not based on the evidence. The single biggest factor [in magazine ad decline] is probably the growth of Facebook. Google and Facebook both continue to grow strongly, and Facebook has been remarkable and is affecting every medium.”

The Silicon Valley giants already account for 65% of the $6.5bn spent on digital display ads in the UK annually, according to eMarketer. This dominance is eating into a market that is the lifeblood for publishers seeking a digital future for their traditional print brands.

Smith says that 2018 will see a fightback by magazine publishers as ongoing issues – such as brand safety concerns from ads running next to inappropriate content such as extremist websites and fake news – provide a platform to get advertisers to reassess where they spend their money.

“There are increasing concerns from advertisers, loudly voiced, around issues including trust, fake news and ad fraud and some of the slightly more nefarious activities going on in digital,” says James Wildman, the chief executive of Good Housekeeping’s publisher, Hearst UK. “We are seeing the word trust increasingly appear in ad briefs [from advertisers]. Having spent decades building up a level of trust – Harper’s Bazaar is 150 years old this year – advertisers are increasingly intent on accessing and benefiting from that. I think there is going to be a correction.”

While pressure remains intense on mid-market titles – women’s weeklies and celebrity titles such as Heat and Grazia suffered double-digit sales declines – the luxury magazine market is proving resilient.

According to industry sources, the December issue of Vogue, the debut of the new editor, Edward Enninful, prompted a sales rise of 40% compared with a regular month (190,000). Ad revenue was up 29% year-on-year and it had the most ad pages in a December issue in a decade.

Vogue’s circulation is down a comparatively resilient 3% and other strong titles such as Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping are down just 1% to 2%.

“I think we are going to go more upmarket,” says Alex Bilmes, the editor of Esquire. “Us and other magazines in the sector will drive that, it’s what advertisers and readers want. You need a beautiful physical object that offers respite from social media and constant digital churn – although we are of course available digitally too. I hear a lot of doom and gloom but I don’t feel it. There is no cause for complete panic.”