EXCLUSIVE: British Vogue Tops Inaugural Launchmetrics Ranking of Glossy Magazines
PRINTED MATTER: British Vogue and Italian Vogue edged out American Vogue in Launchmetrics’ inaugural ranking of the top 20 glossy magazines in terms of fashion, luxury and beauty advertising.
Harper’s Bazaar U.S. and Marie Claire Korea round out the top-five titles with the most ad pages, with Australian Vogue at number six, T Magazine from The New York Times in seventh place, Korea’s Noblesse and Korean Vogue in eighth and ninth position, and French Vogue at number 10.
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Actual page counts were not disclosed.
Also making the top 20 were American Elle, Korean magazine Luxury, Italian Marie Claire, Vogue Japan, Japan’s 25 Ans, British Harper’s Bazaar, Italian title Amica, Vogue Taiwan, Vogue Arabia and W Korea.
Those top-20 magazines also held roughly the same ranking when evaluated by share of voice, with British Vogue boasting 8.5 percent, Italian Vogue 6.6 percent and American Vogue at about 6 percent.
That metric calculates the percentage of advertising pages captured by a magazine out of the total advertising pages scored by the top 20 publications. According to Launchmetrics, perhaps best known for tracking the value and impact of social media posts around fashion week, this number demonstrates a publisher’s ability to effectively attract advertisers.
Sharing its first publisher data exclusively with WWD, Launchmetrics said it analyzed more than 2,000 titles, examining both advertising and editorial pages.
Alison Bringé, chief marketing officer at Launchmetrics, said the data suggests fashion, luxury and beauty brands are maintaining their investments in glossy magazines as it found that “advertising has remained stable” over the past year.
Also suggesting there is still life in print media, Launchmetrics found that editorial coverage of fashion, luxury and beauty increased 5 percent in the first quarter versus the same period in 2022.
“It is evident that publishers are competing to attract brands by creating more editorial content in order to get the brands to invest in their publications,” Bringé noted.
That said, there was a gulf in terms of the ad-editorial ratio. Launchmetrics found that magazines from Eastern countries, which tend to be visually driven, dedicated more than two pages of editorial for each page of advertising, whereas some news-driven Western titles offered as little as half a page. The global ratio was a little more than 50:50.
For the top 20 magazines in the ranking, the average was 2.25 pages of editorial coverage for each ad.
British Vogue covered almost 400 fashion, luxury and beauty brands over the first quarter, according to the data and insights firm.
Launchmetrics harbors additional proprietary data, including on “unique brand mentions.” It counts about 30 customers from the publishing side for deeper insights and more detailed numbers, and aims to grow this business in the coming years.
“In our industry, everyone’s always trying to have the most data insights to be the most effective and efficient,” she explained. “They want to understand what’s working for them and also what’s working for their competitors.”
Fashion, luxury and beauty brands are also keen to benchmark their advertising investments and editorial coverage against other titles, and glean insights their return on investment.
“I think brands need to understand how the editorial voice impacts their performance, because it’s actually the voice that creates legitimacy,” Bringé said in an interview. “You’re never going to be a heritage or anchor brand if you don’t have the right support in the editorial community.”
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