2. IPC MEDIA: AN INTRODUCTION
IPC Media is the UK’s leading publisher of consumer magazines and websites. In print and
online, the famous brands that the institution covers deliver high quality content time and time
again to 26 million UK adults in key audiences.
IPC Insight represents a step-change in how a media owner shares its customer understanding
with advertisers. Through continuous investigations into consumer lifestyle, attitudes, behaviour
and buying patterns, IPC ensures that advertisers have the best understanding of the people to
whom they are advertising.
Although primarily focused on the distribution of consumer-friendly magazines, IPC Media works
across a variety of platforms, each being used in a totally unique and approachable way, in
order to ensure that all its singular products are innovative across a range of media. This will
generate an even larger fanbase.
3. IPC MEDIA: NME MAGAZINE
NME has become a truly unique multi-platform media proposition. Across the magazine,
www.nme.com, NMETV, NME Radio and the brand's live events and awards, NME reaches over one
million music fans every week. NME is the longest published and most respected music weekly in the
world.
Every week it gives its readers the most exciting, most authoritative coverage of the very best in
contemporary music, including award winning features, the latest releases, live reviews, the definitive
guide to the best new bands in its Radar section, as well as a regular look back through the
magazine's incredible 58 year heritage.
NME.COM is the world's biggest standalone music site serving an intensely engaged audience
of 16-24 year-olds. It draws on NME's heritage as a music authority to delight users with a mix of
news, opinion and artist interviews. NME.COM is where the most passionate music fans on the
planet come together. Constantly innovating across a variety of platforms, NME is everywhere
its audience wants it to be – thanks to IPC Media.
4. IPC MEDIA: WHY I CHOSE THIS
INSTITUTION
Based on the previous information shown, IPC Media is evidently the most suitable institution for
the distribution and handling of Symbal magazine. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of using
this world-renowned media institution is how it specifically encourages and allows for a huge
variety of multimedia platforms to be used in both promotion and presentation of the magazine
– and, evidently, this is best seen in NME magazine, and how it has expanded under this
institution.
Symbal magazine also wishes to emulate this success, in all forms of media, and is consequently
very similar to NME in the media platforms it wishes to utilise. Ideas such as Symbal TV,
Symbal.com, and Symbal being adapted and present in numerous foreign countries have the
potential to be realised and executed under a media institution such as IPC Media.
Furthermore, in the constantly changing technological world, this media institution will assist in
allowing Symbal to go even further in accordance with the latest technological innovations. A
prime example of this would be extracting the APILAW (All’s pairs in love and war) idea from the
magazine and expanding on it in the form of making it into it’s own weekly TV series – where an
actual programme is created based around new and upcoming bands meeting their famous
idols.
5. IPC MEDIA: WHY I CHOSE THIS
INSTITUTION (CONTINUED)
In creating such television shows, shown on its own channel, IPC Media would emphasise
Symbal magazines total individuality in comparison to its other indie rock brand counterparts.
Further income would be gathered from applying the APILAW TV series to DVDs and
purchasable episodes on iTunes, and various other significant music websites, and this would
benefit both the institution and help establish the magazine as one of the most important
contenders in the music business.
Proceeding on from this, under IPC Media, Symbal could also expand into music sharing apps
such as Spotify, Blinkbox, and Soundcloud, as these are currently rising in popularity throughout
the world. As most of these are currently being used by the younger, more technologically able
generation, Symbal could also find alternative ways to appeal to the higher older percentage
of its target audience by introducing its own radio station, for example – something that is rarely
done under magazine brands. It could also promote the continuation of CDs and Vinyl across
all its media platforms, as this will appeal to the 30-40 year old target audience who grew up
with this form of music and will consequently appreciate the magazine’s desire to maintain it as
an essential form of music sharing. Indeed, this will also coincide more with the ideals of the
magazine itself.
