Bauer is to bring together its women's brands under one banner and creating a digital women's network.
Sales director Tony Kendall flagged up the plan at a Bauer Insiders event in Sydney last night where the publisher talked up its strengths across the women's maket and unveiled new research into womens' connections with peers and brands.
The firm remained tight-lipped on detail of the network, but it is thought that Bauer plans to bring together content from its portfolio under one umbrella network. That proposition would give audiences a single destination and expose readers of certain titles to other Bauer titles.
It would also enable the company to better sell a bundled digital package to advertisers with considerable reach across the spectrum of female demographics.
Kendall said the the network would launch in the fourth quarter, leveraging the scale of "hero" brands The Australian Women’s Weekly and Women's Day.
Kendall said: “These sites already reach over 2 million women, that's twice as many as Mammamia. They're hugely powerful sites, but we want to grow that further.”
Bauer will also launch a range of key content verticals as a result of "thousands of hours of research and consumer testing and are designed to be the complete digital destination for women," he said.
He said the aim was "to become the number one digital network for women to compliment our dominance in print".
“These products are highly personalised and functional and will give advertisers access to amazing content and data.”
The network is scheduled to launch towards the end of this year.
Bauer also unveiled results of its latest research project “Inside Female Friendships".
This study investigated the way that women relate to their friends and its results suggested that those complex friendships are actually directly linked to how women view a relationship with their favourite brands.
Deborah Thomas, director media, public affairs and brand development, said: "People do actually relate to brands: I love Nike, I depend on Apple, I trust The Australian Women’s Weekly... there’s a definite relationship there."
This five-step system will be available in the future for brands to assess how they fit on the friendship scale.
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