Story House Egmont’s Laura Adnitt on the power of licensed children’s magazines

Laura, thanks for making time. To kick us off, can you give us a brief introduction to Egmont?
Story House Egmont is a media company behind strong media brands, e-commerce companies and digital agencies. We are publishers at heart with nearly 500 kids and lifestyle magazines in 24 countries in our portfolio. We are a part of the leading Nordic media group Egmont, together with entertainment company Nordisk Film, TV 2 in Norway, and the book publishers Lindhardt og Ringhof in Denmark and Cappelen Damm in Norway. We bring stories to life.

What is your role with the company?
My role is Publishing and Brand Management Director. I am based in the London office, and I work locally with the UK business to launch and establish new titles. I work globally across markets in terms of new IP Acquisitions and for the Global Brand Management of our existing portfolios. Finding and recommending new IPs to the business is a key part of my role, as well as helping to assess and validate those opportunities. As a result, I am a regular on the licensing circuit and I place a big importance on the value of industry relationships.

“We are facing a national literacy crisis and children’s magazines have an important role to play.”

Client management is the aspect of my role that I enjoy the most. Meeting new contacts and hearing about new IPs. It’s an exciting industry to be in and Story House Egmont are a key player in our field. It’s great to be able to introduce people to our side of the fence and explain the huge brand opportunities that lie in children’s magazine publishing!

One aspect of Egmont’s media business is that part of the profit generated by your business activities is distributed to charities. Can you tell us a little more about this and the ethos behind it?
Egmont was founded in Denmark in 1878 by Egmont Harald Petersen, originally as a printing business – which soon became a publishing house. Over the years, Egmont has grown to become the largest media group in the Nordic countries, with operations in 30 countries.

After the death of Egmont Harald Petersen, his wife Elisabeth and their five children – Dagmar, Axel, Inger, Karen and Holger – transformed the company into an enterprise foundation in 1920. This means that Egmont now has two purposes: To run a commercial business and to provide financial support to poor and vulnerable children and families. The whole of Egmont is thus a foundation, a rarely seen company construct that is particularly unique, especially in the Nordic countries.

Fantastic.
Each year, 100 million DKK – approx. £12m – of Egmont’s profits goes to support children and young people at risk in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. We are committed to ensuring a good childhood and youth, where all children and young people can complete their education and have a good life. The aim is for everyone to complete a youth education so that they have the tools to lead a good life. We support a range of initiatives and projects, and giving back is part of our DNA and something that resonates with employees across all our businesses.

“There is something in our portfolio for every child.”

Brilliant stuff. You mentioned earlier that Egmont is an international company. How does this help your UK operation? What are the benefits of being part of an international publishing company?
When publishing brands with global partners, our global scale is a key benefit. We have a well-oiled set-up for licensing and brand management, and we pride ourselves on our client management approach. We have centralised global creative teams for content and covermounts and local teams of publishing experts in our markets, to optimise local activation.

We work hard to keep things simple for our partners, minimising points of contact for the commercial and the brand management; One contract, one royalty report, one business review, one Global Brand Manager. But where it matters, we give our partners valuable insights into all the markets and their individual performance – as global as possible, as local as necessary is our mantra.

Focusing on the UK and Story House Egmont for a moment, can you talk us through your current portfolio of titles?
Our current portfolio consists of 12 market-leading brands. There is something in our portfolio for every child, and we are very proud of our brands and our products. We are children’s publishing specialists; we only publish for children in our UK business. Our strong and compact portfolio generates impressive revenue, and we are currently the No. 2 publisher in the UK with a 20% market share. Our current 12-title portfolio contains the biggest brands, with 70% of our portfolio featuring in the Top 20 titles in the children’s market overall.

We publish the No. 1 Title in the market, with PAW Patrol Magazine still going strong after 10 years and showing impressive 10% YoY growth. We have over 35 years’ pre-school publishing experience with heritage brand Thomas & Friends. This has led the market with an innovative high-value format containing play-scenes, multiple trains with accessories, fun stickers, and an up-paged magazine with lots of splendid Thomas content.

We are also primary girls’ market leaders – we have published Disney Princess for over 25 years, and our other brand icons L.O.L Surprise! and My Little Pony both also feature in the Top 5 titles for Primary Girls. We have over 24 years’ experience in the pre-teen market, with our lifestyle magazines Toxic and Go Girl holding the No. 2 and No. 3 positions respectively. We have exciting plans to launch new boys’ titles in 2024 & 2025! Watch this space!

Will do! That’s an impressive slate of IP. How do you choose which licenses to work with?
We have a comprehensive acquisition strategy, which is a key pillar of our overarching kids media strategy. New business is a very important area for us. We have a regular Scouts forum, which is attended by all Publishing Directors in our G5 markets. This is the filtering and assessment forum we have in place whereby new IPs are discussed, and decisions are made on how we move forward.

My role as Publishing & Brand Management Director encompasses new IP acquisitions for the Story House Egmont group, plus also Global Brand Management for our established portfolios. Alongside the local leaders in our markets, I ensure our partners have a global overview, as well as the local specifics.

The yearly licensing circuit is very important for me, meeting up with new and existing partners, attending the showcases, and just having a feeling for the buzz of the licensing industry. What is everyone talking about – you don’t know if you’re not there! Toy Fair, Bologna, Vegas, BLE, Frankfurt, all form a regular part of my annual travel plans.

When working on licensed content, how do you achieve a balance between their brand requirements and your creative ideas?
Our job is to really immerse ourselves in the world of the brand – all brands are different and need to be treated individually. However, we also really know our audience, and we are magazine publishing experts in our markets – so we do know some perennial aspects that should be included, as part of a desirable magazine offering. This is not just based on our expertise, but also on the expectations of the consumers. There has not been an example that I can recall where we couldn’t find a balance between a brand owners’ requirements and our own creative ideas.

How does Story House Egmont focus on the creative side of putting together a magazine?
We have an experienced, dedicated in-house creative team. They are magazine experts, trained in childhood developmental ages & stages. They are specialists in creating tailored content for specific target ages. We utilise the brands we work with to create the best products, really immersing ourselves in the brands and ensuring we produce content that meets the needs of the brand and is appropriate and achievable for the target reader – all of this creates an experience with value.

“There are fewer young designers coming into the industry… There aren’t as many print-focused university courses.”

We put the consumer first and pride ourselves on creating products that meet the needs of our readers. It’s important that we are in constant dialogue with our young fans, and we do this by running structured group studies, regular reader surveys, office-based research days and school visits. Consumer insight is a fundamental part of our creative process, and it underpins everything we do.

A key feature of children’s magazines has been covermount gifts. I believe you have changed your approach to covermounts in recent times. Can you give us some insight into that change?
Our covermount approach is all about purposeful play. We worked with child development expert Dr Amanda Gummer, founder of The Good Play Guide, on developing a ‘Magazine Benefits Guide’ for our creative and commercial teams to use when planning.

Understanding the main developmental areas and what children can achieve is key to developing stronger products and increasing customer satisfaction. The Magazine Benefits Guide ensures we are creating and designing products with purposeful play in mind, from the very inception of an idea.

Regarding materials and recyclability, when we do use plastic in our covermounts it must have a minimum of 30% recycled content. They also must be durable, multi-use and meet at least one of these criteria: Play Value, Educational Value, Collectable. We are working on the recyclability of our products, and we have removed hard to recycle plastics from our products.

Great insights there. Thank you! Now, I wanted to dive into Peppa Pig for a moment! You acquired this license in January and have two Peppa Pig titles in the market. Can you tell us about those and the process you went through to launch the titles? It must be challenging to bring something new to such a well-known brand.
We are now six months in since taking on the Peppa Pig license, and we are absolutely delighted with the results so far. YTD we have generated £3m in RSV and delivered a massive 52% uplift in sales. Our approach was to demarcate the two titles. For retailers, this distinction meant more reasons to stock both titles – and for consumers, it meant more reasons to buy both.

Peppa Pig Official Magazine is now on sale every three weeks, and focuses on a single, recent episode, with a relevant covermount linked to the content. This is published alongside the Peppa Pig Play-Pack, which is a four-weekly higher-value offering, focusing on key brand themes and using multiple episodes. The frequency, pricing, packaging, and design execution for the two magazines is completely distinct, meaning that they act as a standalone purchase but also as a complementary purchase to each other.

Another recent launch for Story House Egmont was Monster High Magazine. How has that launch gone so far?
The launch has gone well! We have secured premium mass-market placement. Overall, the Monster High Magazine is available in over 12,000 outlets in the UK. EPoS for the first issue is tracking above target, so we are very pleased with the results. We are getting good engagement on our activity across social media and as we get into our stride and establish our optimum circulation footprint, we hope to end the year with a Top 10 position in the Primary Girls’ market.

How you make sure consumers know about your titles at retail? How do you ‘get seen’?
We invest significantly in trade marketing. This can be in the form of annual deals, category space, extra facings on range, link-saves, promotional bays, and out-of-category mechanics. Wherever possible we support our activity with in-store artwork to help propel us into the minds of consumers. Our aim is to be seen first and wanted most, and this is what we focus on when creating our product point-of-sale.

We also support every issue we publish with its own social media campaign – showing consumers the content, the soft learning benefits, and the play value of every issue. We create content across the main platforms of Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, with TikTok becoming increasingly important for us and our audience of parents and kids.

Why should a retailer stock children’s magazines do you think?
One of the key reasons why retailers should continue to stock magazines is that we are facing a national literacy crisis and children’s magazines have an important role to play. Magazines are loved by kids and valued by parents. They are fun and entertaining firstly, and as a secondary bonus they act as a gateway to reading, even for the most reluctant readers. When children read and interact with magazines featuring their favourite characters, they don’t realise they are advancing from the soft learning benefits that magazines have to offer.

Shockingly, there are nearly a million children in the UK who don’t have a book to call their own. One in eight primary schools don’t have a library and five million adults in the UK have the literacy level of an 11-year-old. Couple this with the knowledge that one in three magazine shoppers are from a lower socio-economic household, and that these magazine buying households are also more likely to over-index in the deprivation statistics mentioned above… It highlights that if we remove children’s magazines from accessible mass-markets outlets, we are making it even harder for young families to access approachable reading materials.

Very good point. Before we wrap up, I wanted to focus on design for a moment… What changes have you seen in design terms in children’s magazines in recent years?
Well, there are fewer young designers coming into the industry. There aren’t as many print-focused university courses, and fewer designers specialising in magazine and book design.

Good children’s magazine designers need to understand their target reader, and tailor their designs to the child’s ability. This is especially important for pre-school magazines where simple navigation and instruction is essential. Our in-house design team are trained in children’s developmental milestones and understand key ages and stages for children from three to 13.

We also work with skilled designers out-of-house who are experts in children’s magazine design. When recruiting new designers for licensed children’s magazines we want them to really understand the brand they’re working on before they approach the design. The detail really matters to young fans, and it’s important that we’re creating magazines that are on brand, as well as being age-appropriate, and that look great!

Last question, and it’s crystal ball time! How do you think the children’s magazine market will be shaping up in five years’ time?
The children’s magazine sector is the second largest after ‘women’s interests’ and represents 19% share of sale. However, it is experiencing long-term decline. Value (£117m) is down 7% YoY and Volume (20m) is down 16% YoY. This trend is expected to continue, as space for the magazine category is reduced by retailers for higher margin goods, and consumers opt to buy magazines less frequently.

The children’s market has a very long tail. There are over 200 titles, yet the top 50 titles represent 80% of the total market value. Which means there are c. 150 titles all fighting for that remaining 20%. This doesn’t feel sustainable. Our approach is to publish the brands that families want, in a way that supports changing consumer behaviours and the needs of the category.

Laura, thanks again!