Hello! targets luxury ads with two spinoffs

LONDON - Hello! magazine is getting a £4m revamp and is launching two print brand spinoffs in a bid to win more luxury advertising as the UK edition nears its 20th anniversary.

The magazine will be going into direct competition with luxury supplements brought out by the national newspapers, including Stella and Luxx, and trying to broaden its appeal to young thirty-somethings with a fresh design and more A-list celebrity content.

Two 400-page brand extensions, labelled “bookazines”, will be launched next spring in order to develop the brand.
The two new titles – Hello! Couture and Hello! Pret a Porter – will be published biannually to coincide with the major fashion collections and will be sold on news-stands. It is not clear what the circulation or cover prices will be.
Within the weekly magazine, content will be freshened up with better design, more white space and a further emphasis on A-listers and young royalty.
Eduardo Sánchez Pérez – the son of !Hola! owner Eduardo Sánchez Junco – is currently spending three days a week in the UK to help remodel the UK brand.
A radio, television and print advertising campaign will be unleashed over the next few weeks and continue into next year.
The Hello! cover price has also been dropped from £1.90 to £1 in an attempt to hook in new readers ahead of the 1,000th edition on 11 December.
Publishing director Charlotte Stockting said editorial would also be written in a “lighter and frothier tone” to help attract a younger readership.
She said: “These changes are about bringing the title up to date and making it even more upmarket. We’ve seen what the nationals are doing and the advertisers they’ve been getting – and, in a way, they are doing it better than other glossies. We want more than a piece of that.”
The new editor of the UK edition will be Kay Goddard, formerly of the Daily Mail and Closer magazine, who aims to give the title “more of an edge” when reporting on celebrity, royalty and society.
Former editor Veronica Whelan has been appointed international editor of Hello! and will work to tie the UK version in more closely to other Hello! brands.

Media Week 20-Nov-07