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Business News/ Industry / Media/  We create the content, you brand it: Condé Nast’s Alex Kuruvilla
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We create the content, you brand it: Condé Nast’s Alex Kuruvilla

Cond Nast India managing director on new ideas and why you now have to build more than a multimedia company

Alex Kuruvilla, managing director of Condé Nast India. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/MintPremium
Alex Kuruvilla, managing director of Condé Nast India. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint

In the last few years, Condé Nast India has moved from being a publishing house to a multimedia company and beyond. With key titles—Vogue and GQ—already dominating the market, Condé Nast India is now looking at other areas to drive growth. Alex Kuruvilla, managing director of Condé Nast India, says this includes a focus on digital, the launch of a branding solutions studio and other live event properties such as the Vogue Wedding Show. The company is also exploring opportunities to extend its brand presence in India, possibly through restaurants and a Condé Nast College of Fashion. Edited excerpts from an interview:

How is Condé Nast doing in India?

2013 will end up being our best year. So, obviously, China, India, Russia continue to grow robustly… The India story has been remarkable from day one. When we started, our mission was to build India’s most admired publishing group. We changed that to say we wanted to be the most admired multimedia company. A couple of years after that, we’ve moved even further into other realms. In the UK, we’ve launched the Condé Nast College of Fashion, we’ve done the Vogue Wedding Show—a completely new space for us. If you look at the overall business results, we’ve grown 20-25% on topline (revenue) this year, and our bottom line (profits) would have more than doubled. So, we’re profitable and we’re ticking all the relevant boxes on editorial excellence, innovation, etc.

How are the magazines doing?

Today, GQ is at 40,000, Condé Nast Traveller is at 30,000 and Architectural Digest at 20,000. What’s interesting is that now, the digital part of the business is helping us take this number up. So our PDF sales on Magzter.com and Zinio.com are already contributing 30% to our subscription numbers. That’s several thousand copies being sold on digital. It’s all very interactive. So if it’s a story on music, you can hear the music of the band you’re reading about. Also, because it’s got video, it’s suddenly given us this back-door entry into competing with television channels who look at a premium audience. In very developed digital markets, we are seeing as high as 20-22% of overall revenues coming from digital...we aim to reach there in the future.

Is the business model changing?

At this point we are rolling out our single biggest integration process. We are integrating our digital, social, print, events, (with) everything coming under one head. The idea is to stop thinking in silos and even in terms of deals we have with advertisers. The game has changed to such an extent that not only are we platforms for advertisers to connect with audiences, but we’re also content creators (for advertisers).

What kind of content?

We do two types of content—first, there’s white label content, which means we create the content and you brand it. We’ve created content for Unilever, such as the Bebeautiful.in website as well as launch video content for Toni and Guy. We just shot the new campaign for Disney’s new range of apparel, which you will also see in the magazine. In other cases, it might be a blend, for example, the MasterCard Special City Guides that were powered by Condé Nast Traveller, and could be downloaded from a kiosk at the airport.

We now have our own studio and team for video, as well as for social (media). From the very beginning, we’ve always done promos for our magazines, obviously. So if a brand wanted to do an eight-page feature, we would execute it. Now we’ve extended into multimedia as well as extended the service to offer non-branded or white-label content. We are planning to formalize this offering and will be taking it to the market early next year. We will be resourcing that significantly, and branding it separately. It will have its own head, but will dive into the expertise of the brands. So you can get a stylist from Vogue, the insights team from marketing, the digital and social media people to come and advise you on the content, to take the best of what we have. It will be a Condé Nast studio of sorts, a branding solutions service, but focusing only on the premium segment.

What about the launch of new titles in the print space?

We keep rolling out a new title every other year. And there were two titles that we wanted to launch (Wired and Glamour), but this year we had so many big projects that we decided to focus on those. For instance, we curated the Vogue Wedding Show, which targeted the very big wedding market, estimated at $35-38 billion, as we felt it was a great fit between our audience and the brands participating.

We had a little over 1,200 people, coming from Raipur and Jaipur as much as from South Africa and London, so we had an interesting mix of people. It was an invite-only event, and we had a screening process to ensure that there were serious buyers. There are a lot of other things on the anvil. And we are trying to consolidate our business…multimedia is easier said than done. Today, I reckon, we have a market share of 65% of all print publications in our space. And in digital, it’s 100%, there’s no comparison. It is a very frustrating space (digital), because the users are here, but the advertisers are not.

What are some areas of interest for Condé Nast in the future?

Following CN (Condé Nast) International’s successful roll-out of brand extensions, CN India is also aggressively pursuing this attractive opportunity. For instance, in 2013, we had tremendous success in India with the Vogue Wedding Show, which we plan to repeat in 2014. Internationally, we have launched Vogue Cafés and GQ Bars in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, Dubai, etc. Restaurants are a very attractive category, so we could possibly look at this space. Recently we had a hugely successful launch of the Condé Nast College of Fashion in London. Plus initiatives like Wired Conferences and Consulting. All these areas are of extreme interest to us.

Is the Condé Nast Group looking to make investments in e-commerce and digital companies?

Absolutely. CN international and its parent Advance Publications have already made as many as 20 investments to date. These are strategic investments, several in e-commerce, often where fashion meets digital and other allied areas. Our first investment has been in mobile and social gaming start-up Mango Games. We are actively scouting for other investment opportunities.

You’ll are also focusing on events…

We are currently focused on creating and leveraging our signature properties across all our platforms. The GQ Men of the Year awards were only an editorial property with a strong on-ground event and a one-hour TV telecast. Over the last two years, we have leveraged it across our website, our social media platforms launched GQ’s G+ platform and Instagram accounts, and our readers got an almost live telecast of the event through our Vine videos.

The GQ Playlist is another example of an editorial property that we are now in the process of taking into an on-ground experiential event through a partnership with blueFROG. Apart from this, AD Salon and CNT Around The World are experiential on-ground events where we bring alive the experiences from the magazines for our readers through live workshops and intimate interactions.

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Published: 18 Oct 2013, 10:16 PM IST
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