Porter is Luxury Daily’s 2015 Luxury Publisher of the Year

Image courtesy of Porter magazine

Online retailer Net-A-Porter’s magazine Porter is Luxury Daily’s 2015 Luxury Publisher of the Year for its innovative mixture of print and digital content and its successful disruption of standard industry practice.

Porter won over the first runner’s-up The New York Times and second runner’s-up Modern Luxury, a media company that targets consumers in niche groups. These top luxury publications aimed to appeal to the lifestyle of affluent readers by featuring advertisements from the industry’s leading brands, services and travel destinations while providing an outlet for relevant content.

The Luxury Publisher of the Year award was decided based on luxury marketing efforts with impeccable strategy, tactics, creative, executive and results. All candidates selected by the Luxury Daily editorial team and from reader nominations had to have appeared in Luxury Daily coverage this year. Judging was based purely on merit .

Net-A-Porter in print
The inaugural Porter was printed in February of 2014 and was the first print extension of the luxury ecommerce outlet Net-A-Porter. The magazine focuses exclusively on fashion and beauty and aims for quality over quantity, with less frequent, smaller and more editorial-heavy issues when compared with competitors such as Vogue.

The publication gave Net-A-Porter a physical extension of its brand, a move that both relied on frequent consumers and also reinforced their loyalty to the outlet. As many luxury publications have slowly turned toward mass in response to the changing publishing industry, Porter’s introduction, the retailer’s first venture into print media, has created tension among competitors because of how far down the purchasing funnel it resides. There is no regional content and the publication only covers fashion and beauty, providing a much more streamlined option for affluent fashionistas (see story).

Porter Magazine spread

Perhaps its most notable innovation, however, is in mixing digital into the print magazine. Accompanying the print magazine is an app that recognizes the images in the magazine, allowing consumers to shop directly from the magazine without having to go through the steps of identifying the product, doing a search and locating the product page.

In one year, over 90,000 products were scanned, likely translating to millions of dollars in revenue and proving the business model a viable source of revenue. After scanning the product, Net-A-Porter asks consumers to “be inspired” by a selection of coordinating products, a smart way to keep consumers shopping for products beyond those advertised directly in a way that feels natural and helpful rather than pushy and intrusive (see story).

Omnichannel marketing is already the focus for many, as consumers oftentimes navigate multiple devices and locations, including stores, over the course of a single purchase process. Porter’s scannable pages predated Like2Buy, in which products can be purchased from Instagram pages, by several months and have represented a major step on the way to multichannel integration at the consumer’s convenience.

Further standing out from the pack, Porter is published just six times a year, has a unique square page design and is priced higher than many competitors at $10, a promise of high-quality content as well as a recognition of the consumer base. The average reader is a woman who spends more than $34,000 a year on fashion.

Online Net-A-Porter publication The Edit

Further standing out from competition, the publication challenged the status quo with the latest issue.

In Porter’s Winter Escape issue, the print magazine empowered its female audience with an editorial feature honoring 100 Incredible Women.

The listorial feature is in partnership with beauty brand Elizabeth Arden. As brands that both cater to different aspects of a women’s lifestyle, partnering for an integrated editorial project will underscore the codes of Porter and Elizabeth Arden (see story).

The magazine also includes a 24/7 concierge service for personal shoppers and merchandise from fashion to books to event tickets not available on the site, providing an added incentive for Net-A-Porter loyalists to subscribe.

First runner’s up: New York Times
Despite a lengthy and storied history as a print publication, the New York Times has made considerable and successful efforts to emerge as a pioneer in the world of digital publications over the past year. Front and center of those efforts is an embrace of native advertising, following in the footsteps of Condé Nast, who in turn followed digital native Buzzfeed.

T Brand Studio, The New York Times’ commercial content studio, now includes a London office to allow its production team to work with international clients on content marketing services, including its award-winning “paid post” native advertising platform. Publications already have an established readership, which presents marketers with a built-in network of consumers when communicating their goods and services through a media outlet (see story).

New York Times

Also, in August The New York Times expanded its travel program Times Journeys to include new trips and itineraries on all seven continents and 37 countries around the world.

Times Journeys also added a unique feature called “Women in Focus” that will highlight women’s rights and experiences in locations such as Cuba, Jordan and India. By incorporating these new destinations and itineraries, The New York Times will be able to appeal to a wider range of consumers and add new dimensions to its travel offerings (see story).

Second runner’s up: Modern Luxury
With almost 70 publications, Modern Luxury has struck gold with a one-of-a-kind business model. Rather than relying on anything close to an advertising blitz or casting a wide net, hyper-localized and niche, special-interest publications allow for more effective and specific marketing.

For example, Modern Luxury expanded its regional coverage in the United States with a title dedicated to the lifestyle of Silicon Valley, CA’s affluent residents in November 2015.

Modern Luxury already publishes a title focusing on nearby San Francisco, but given the technology boom in neighboring Silicon Valley, a standalone magazine will likely be a welcome addition for affluents based there. Silicon Valley has seen an influx of wealth due to the technology brands that have sprouted in the area and employees that have settled nearby (see story).

Modern Luxury San Francisco December 2015

With location and interest specified, advertisers will be more enticed by a chance to impress consumers who are most likely to be interested. That special interest also allows Modern Luxury to leverage its ability to reach niche markets with partnerships.

For example, at the start of the year South Florida’s Aventura Mall elevated the content found within its lifestyle publication, Styled, through a partnership with publisher Modern Luxury.

Styled is an annual glossy, available in print as well as digitally, that features luxury advertisers and fashion and lifestyle content. The 2015 edition, the first alongside partner Modern Luxury, totals 180-pages and covers fashion, trends and culture (see story).

Final Take
Forrest Cardamenis, editorial assistant on Luxury Daily, New York

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