Industrial context - the brand - Hearst

This is a list of audience demographics of Hearst from 2020:

From an article from 2021, Hearst's target audience demographic consists of "an audience of more than 165 million readers and site visitors with direct engagement from 70% of all millennials and 69% of Gen Z over the age of 18".

This suggests that it is quite likely that Hearst's target demographic is largely left-leaning and socially conscious and aware so I would need to consider portraying issues that are significant and would evoke empathy and engagement with my target audience given to me in my brief of a 16-25 year old aspirational audience. I also think that a younger audience demographic would be more up to date with social and political issues due to their large interest in advocating for these issues so I expect that these case studies I research reflect the ideologies of a younger audience demographic.

Case studies

Case study 1: "Blending creativity with diversity" - 2017

Cosmetics brand Sleek MakeUP wanted to take a stand against judgements many young people face for their  beauty choices and wanted to "bolster their feminist and diversity credentials while simultaneously driving sales among their millenial fan base" and Hearst united their values with Cosmopolitan's values and brand to deliver social and digital campaign to advocate for this.

"Make-up shaming" is a term that is used to refer to shaming people for enjoying the act of wearing makeup and this had become a rising trend.

Hearst worked collaboratively with MediaCom's content division, MediaCom Beyond Advertising, devising the "My Face, My Rules" campaign which consisted of Sleek MakeUP's real audience of men and women, some of which including drag queens, who broke down stereotypes surrounding the use of makeup within all genders. 

Cosmopolitan promoted this campaign across all their platforms, using original video content displaying Sleek MakeUP's diverse audience in use makeup different ways to define their own beauty without boundaries. 

This campaign won the 2018 Magnetic Spotlight Award for "Best Use of Digital" and the results of the campaign proved to be a great success.

Although this campaign was targeted mainly at men, women and millennials, many people in Generation Z, people who are part of my magazine's target demographic, may be the same age as some of the millennials in this campaign. Since this campaign was set up five years ago, I believe that this issue may still be prevalent today and that it could be advocated for but perhaps with a different approach. I think the target demographic of my brief, a 16-25 year old middle market aspirational audience, would perhaps search for something more accessible to them. For example, tutorials on how to do a specific makeup technique or get a specific makeup look to feel confident with cheaper, more accessible products which would also allow for me to accomplish the audio-visual part of my brief.

Case study 2: "Women's Health Live Virtual" - 2020

Hearst held their flagship health and wellbeing event which was adapted and reimagined for their inaugural Women's Health Live Virtual festival in 2020 where people exercised using the hashtag #GETFITDONE. This was taking place online in 2020 to adapt to the situations the UK was in due to the pandemic.

Between the 3rd and 5th of April 2020, Women's Health collaborated with Hearst Live to showcase the UK's biggest wellness festival to their audience through a different method, showing how they can adapt to unforeseen circumstances.

This livestream was held on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, where the audience were shown three days of immersive experiences through the form of 11 Q&As, 13 workouts and 19 fitness gurus.

Here are the results:

This campaign was advertised to Gen Z, millennials and women and I think that Hearst's ability to adapt their festival to reach and target an even wider range of people through digital services shows how dedicated they are as a brand to provide the best health and wellness advice and resources for their audience. There were many other case studies on the Hearst website that surrounded issues to do with women, confidence, and health proving that these topics are most significant to Hearst and the ideology to cater to a majority audience of women through advocating to improve their health and to help them feel more confident is something that they tackle quite often.

Most of the campaigns that I saw that they had in their case studies targeted audiences through a higher emphasis on digital platforms rather than print platforms, perhaps aiming more directly at a younger audience demographic.

Other campaigns in their case studies consisted of issues to do with saving money which I think would be quite prevalent in terms of the brief I have chosen but, as I mentioned in a previous example, I think I would apply the idea of saving money to fashion and beauty rather than food, which is what most of the money-saving Hearst case studies tended to be about.

References: https://www.licenseglobal.com/publishing/hearst-magazines-lifestyle-edit, https://www.hearst.com/-/audience-demographics, https://www.hearst.co.uk/case-studies/blending-creativity-diversity, https://www.hearst.co.uk/case-studies/womens-health-live-virtual