importantly, “what they want to know but they don’t know they want to know”.
The Abril Group owns the leading magazines in almost every market segment they serve. In total circulation, Abril’s market share is around 55 per cent. In the Brazilian advertising market, the group gets around 62 per cent of the money that goes into magazines.
Despite this strong position in print
media, Abril is investing in building a significant digital presence as well. In 2012, the group’s magazine sites of Abril’s got 44 million unique visitors. Almost all magazines can be followed on Facebook and Twitter. On the web, some magazines have a wider audience for their sites than the estimated readers per edition. For example, Exame, a business magazine, has 2.3 million unique visitors but 700,000 readers per edition on a circulation of 148,000 copies.
Abril launched a virtual newsstand and bookshop called Iba to sell even more subscriptions and single copies of magazines and newspapers, and it fast became one of the largest electronic bookshops in the country.
Civita credits Abril’s “continuing
obsession” to know their readers and their interests as a major reason for the
company’s success because they go “beyond doing market surveys”.
According to Civita, some of the factors contributing to Abril’s leading position in the Brazilian market are: a state of the art printing plant; a newsstand distribution and home delivery operation; and a subscription and fulfillment service that handles 4.7 million subscribers, an all-time record.
Another key driver of Abril’s success
is the company’s ability “to attract and motivate the right people,” says Civita. Every year, Abril runs an internal course for journalists, designers, photographers, and, more recently, web designers. The attendees are chosen from the most important journalism schools in the country. Out of 2,500 candidates, 60 young professionals are chosen to take part in a four-week programme inside the company, having as monitors the editors and art directors that work in the most successful titles.
Looking back at the more than fifty
years spent closely attached to magazines, Civita sees the transition to digital as both a challenge and an opportunity to continue influencing people on a daily basis. “What,” he asks with a smile, “could be more fun, more exciting and more rewarding than that?”