media owner profile: mongoose A need for speed
Mongoose Publishing has expanded at a rapid rate in Malaysia and Singapore. With a portfolio of leading international brands, a brace of industry awards and a ‘digital first’ strategy, the company is primed for future gains, says CEO Graham Paling.
How did it all start?
Mongoose has been in Malaysia since 1996 and ventured into publishing with our own standalone title Expatriate Lifestyle in 2002. We launched Time Out Kuala Lumpur in April 2008, with a series of international Time Out Malaysia guides starting the following year and we expanded the Time Out brand to Penang in 2011. In the same year we launched Esquire Malaysia, while we acquired Men’s Health Malaysia in January 2014. Our most recent publication is ELLE Malaysia, our biggest and most ambitious launch to date, which we unveiled in mid-February of this year. It’s been an amazing few years of growth for the company and we now employ more than 110 staff, almost all local Malaysian talent who are the very best in their fields. In September 2012 we began operations in Singapore with both Esquire and Time Out. Currently we have a team of around 20 in the Singapore office driving the success of our two publications.
What got you motoring in recent years? We try to foster an entrepreneurial spirit throughout the company. Everyone who works with us joins because they want to do
something different and better than what has been done before. This means we share a desire to grow, which is reflected in our rapid expansion over the past six or seven years. You can only expand a business as quickly as your talent allows you, and we are blessed to have amazing talent who are all creative, passionate and hard working.
The last year has seen you take on some high profile international brands. Is there a clear appetite for these titles in Malaysia? I think there’s a clear appetite for good publications in every country, but yes I believe that is especially true in Malaysia. There is an emerging group of intelligent, outgoing people with disposable income, who have arguably been under- provided for by the magazine scene until now, and who want more from their media. With all our titles, Esquire, ELLE, Men’s Health, Expatriate Lifestyle and Time Out KL, we put intelligent content to the fore and respect our readers’ intelligence. This has proved rewarding both in terms of copies sold and market positioning for premium advertisers.
Putting digital at the front of your operation is revolutionary for your domestic market. Explain your strategy. Going “digital first” as we have with many of our brands – most notably ELLE Malaysia and Time Out KL – means we are constantly in our audience’s mind. They are comfortable with the regular contact with our brands in the digital space and they get to be more familiar with our values. The changing publishing space globally and in Malaysia is one that many publishers are understandably unsure of as it is expensive to resource. However, the benefits of knowing your audience better and helping your advertisers reach them more quickly and efficiently is self-evident. In simple terms, digital media lets us reach more people, more effectively and thus provides better value for our commercial partners. That is ultimately what we are here to do, hence why we are committed to a digital first
strategy for our brands. Having said that, the print experience we deliver is
still proving exceptionally valuable. Indeed, like many premium publishers around the world, our print revenues are significantly up (15 per cent) year-on-year. Esquire, both
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Market leading brands are atracting advertisers
fipp.com issue 82_2014 | Magazine World |27
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