← The Barefaced Podcast
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Foreign.
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Hello, and welcome back to the Bareface Podcast, a beauty business podcast hosted by me. My name is Lily twelve Tree. I am a beauty analyst and now founder of Unfiltered, a consumer insights platform that I'm building for the beauty industry. Now, today I bring you an entirely new type of episode. This is actually the first interview I have ever done, which is crazy. So today we're sitting down with none other than Kate Lancaster. Now, I am a bloody nerd for the beauty industry, which you can probably tell if you've listened to this podcast before. But when I first moved To Sydney at 18 years old, my eyes were opened up to the industry's celebrities, AKA journalists. If you're an Aussie beauty lover, I am positive that you have read Kate's writing somewhere, whether it's in the pages of Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, or Grazia, or even on a billboard of your favorite sunscreen brand, Ultraviolet, or maybe even on her substack titled the Vanity. I have always considered myself much more fluent in numbers than in words. So the power and influence of copywriters and journalists genuinely tickle my brain in a way that I just cannot describe. But the reason I reached out to Kate to sit down and chat was because of this TikTok that she posted at the end of 2024. Kate duetted or responded to a TikTok that Abby Chatfield, who is a prominent media voice and podcaster herself, posted about how radio stations actually measure the size of their audience. And I'm going to play the full clip that Kate responded to Abby's video about, which is four minutes, but it will contextualize why I wanted to chat to Kate so much and make it seem so, so obvious. So take a listen.
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Okay. I am so glad we're finally talking about this. Abby's pointing out here something that most people who work in traditional media know, but no one really talks about. The tools that have been used for decades to measure traditional media's audience share in Australia are so cooked. Abbey is specifically speaking to Australian commercial radio, but I would like to talk about how this relates to Australian women's magazines. Over the last year, there's been a lot of reporting in the media, ironically talking about how magazines are back. It's been a lot of this kind of thing where it's talking about the magazines that Australians are currently really loving. And it's a lot of conversation about how post pandemic, we're wanting to sit down and read a printed product. I'm someone who works in women's lifestyle media. I have worked on two relaunch issues of Australian women's lifestyle magazines this year. I know how hardworking and talented a lot of these people are who work on these magazines, but even I wonder who are the people who were buying them. Think about my own consumption habits of media and my friends. It just feels really weird to think that all of a sudden everyone's suddenly apparently going buying magazines again and I'm not out here trying to debate the value of a print product. That is absolutely a conversation for another day. What I want to discuss is the fallacies around magazine readership reporting. I'm going to talk about how the size of an audience is measured. In Australia, audience share was typically measured by circulation or readership. Readership is as it sounds. It's about how many people read that magazine. Circulation is about how many copies of that magazine are actually printed and distributed. There's zero denying that people are buying less print magazines and women's lifestyle media than they used to. So naturally circulation numbers have been dwindling for a very, very long time. Obviously these are not great figures to have reporting to advertisers for women's media. Many media companies stopped reporting on circulation figures a long time ago for this reason. And now newspaper circulation is actually not counted either. Now it's up to media companies to self report about how many print products they're putting out. Now it's expected that if there's any questions about circulation, the publishers themselves have to report how many issues they're printing and how wide their distribution is. And as this umbrella feature rightfully data, the pool of advertising dollars is so small now that we're holding print publishers to an honesty system, as has been the case for the last couple of years, I do think that a lot of publishers will just stop talking about circulation altogether and instead they will focus on readership. How accurate are these readership figures? In Australia, the majority of the readership that you'll see reported on is done by Roy Morgan and this is how they obtain and interpret the information that they collect about which magazines Australians are reading. Similar to how Abby was talking about radio audience measurement, it's done through questionnaires and surveys. All of the points that Abi made in relation to these figures that are circulated for radio also still stand here for magazine. Unlike digital media, where we do have numbers, we have downloads, we have streams, you can't actually tell how many people are reading a magazine. Obviously. So many variables. And when people are faced with these kinds of questions, such as what print magazines do you buy? Do you. Which. Which titles do you like to buy regularly? Often they won't be honest or the interests won't be indicative of a large part of the population. A lot of these survey questions will also take the fact that someone might belong to a five person household and use that as an increase in the readership for a magazine. So if you've bought a copy of a magazine, statistics will reason that there are four other people within the household that could have read that magazine and so they will report on that as a readership Share this is now what a lot of them are basing their figures on, which is why it feels really strange to not report on the amount of magazines that are being printed, but instead to report on the potential readers that one could possibly have. In fact, a lot of the stats about print magazines and readership being up across platform numbers, just where they've obviously taken their digital readership numbers which are measurable, and added that in with the interpreted readership numbers from print. Now in digital media we have so much more access and audience insights that it just feels crazy that we've relied on this for so long. We're not debating the merits of a print product because I think there's so much to discuss there, but it is another example of how hard it is to measure traditional forms of media.
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How crazy is that? Like this fully blew my mind when Kate is describing the questionnaires that that company Roy Morgan uses to ask people in her video. She is using the TikTok green screen thing to sit in front of the methodology that Roy Morgan outlined, which is titled how we Obtain and Interpret our Information for Australia. And their sampling approach states the following and I quote, an address based stratified random population sample design is used to identify potential respondents and to provide a representative sample of Australians aged 14 what a sentence boost surveys are conducted to reach some difficult populations. End quote. That is a very verbose and messy way of what they're actually describing is door knocking. The way these magazines are measuring their readership is by knocking on random doors and asking people if they have read or bought a certain title. That is absolutely bongus to me. Because then of course like Kate mentioned, those numbers and figures the magazine is calculating, they then report to advertisers with an associated dollar value of their influence. Right? So what I really wanted to do was sit down with Kate and pick her brains about the evolution of Aussie beauty media. Because to say that Kate has been at the forefront of this rapidly changing landscape for a decade feels like such a simplification, because Kate went from working in the beauty closet at Elle as an intern to getting laid off by Bauer, who we will learn is one of the owners of one of the major players in the Aussie magazine landscape. They own titles like Ellen, Harper's Bazaar, and they laid off a bunch of employees during the pandemic, one of which was Kate. So Kate has lived so many of the shifts that the rest of us have merely heard about or maybe read about. And we had this wonderful conversation, two hour conversation, I might add, back in May of 2025. So it's really been a second. And I want to note that mostly. So when you hear Kate and I chatting and we refer to last year, we are meaning 2024. But guess what's even worse than it taking me nine months to get this out. You will never guess what happened. I managed to lose the entire first half of the conversation. Has just gone into the abyss. Sick. So as we were sitting in the studio, I realized the recording, the time of the recording hadn't gone up in a while and it just stopped. So I tried to complete it. Like, I tried to stop it and start a fresh one and just poof. I have not felt lost like that since high school when my year 11 research project crashed and I lost 15,000 words. I was honestly devastated. I was rattled, and it just sucked. So to combat that, you are stuck with me for part one of this episode. If you're new here, I usually break these episodes down into parts, but today we're just going fully off the rails. We're going absolutely wild and doing something incredibly groundbreaking and just doing two parts. So in part one, we're going to kind of set the scene and get a bit of a history lesson of the landscape. This will be exclusively me, but we will look at the different beauty, fashion, and women's titles at the time and learn who owned them and the game of musical chairs that they all played with, passing around ownership, how they made money, how it changed, and most importantly, who. Who ran these places, who did the heavy lifting, the grunt work, who they were. Very sadly, the who part is the juice that we lost from Kate. But alas, this sets us up nicely for everything we need to know about unpacking their demise, which is exactly when Kate comes in. And that is part two. We really pick up the conversation around early 2020 and then take that up to present day, being mid last year, 2025. And then we also chat a bit about where we heading. So I'm going to Weave together some research I've done since our chat and some additional sources as well in part two to build this out into as comprehensive of a picture of the evolution of beauty in the last 10 years that I, I can and I will add that we are talking pretty specifically about the evolution of Aussie media, Australian media and the Australian market in particular. But if you don't operate down under, I still think you'll get a lot out of listening to Kate describe the changing mechanics of journalism. Let's start off by chatting about the golden era of magazines. I became a pop culture nerd and an Internet fanatic right at the end of magazine's reign to fame. So my only memories involve my mum buying me a copy of Dolly and ripping out the middle section, which for my non Aussies was a mini mag inside a big mag called Dolly and the mini one was called Dolly Doctor and it was essentially the sex part of the magazine. So it had a seal that you could tear out so younger women could still read Dolly minus the Dolly Doctor section. A precaution. I wish that had been accurately recreated on social media. But anyway, my point is I didn't live this, so I had to do a decent amount of reading to kind of figure out this peak stage of magazines, particularly Aussie magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s. So forgive me and feel free to correct me wherever you're listening in the comments or on substack if I, if I misspeak in any way. It was a business that was sustained by the print advertising model. We can start there because it really was what gave beauty brands this huge cultural influence that they still have today as media has just kind of grown more and more inescapable. Perhaps that's the right word there, but the thing about Aussie magazines is that we had a uniquely dense magazine ecosystem relative to the Australian population. The key beauty, fashion, women's lifestyle titles included Australians, Women's Weekly, New Idea, Women's Day, Vogue Australia, Dolly, Clio, Cosmopolitan Australia, Harper's Bazaar Australia, Girlfriend, Elle who Weekly, Marie Claire, Madison and Grazia. So that is obviously a shit ton of titles, right? But when you looked at who owned them, the list is far less expansive and as we will learn, there was a lot of change in ownerships and licensing from the 90s to now. Firstly, what does that even mean? Right? Because I didn't understand that if Conde Nast owns Vogue, what does it mean for them to license it? I have since learned that it's really just a franchise model. So for most of These big titles, they have a global parent. This is part of what makes them legit and desirable. The title itself holds most of the weight as to whether someone is going to pick up that magazine and flick through it and ultimately leading to the decision to purchase or not purchase. So global parents like Conde Nast for Vogue, Lagarde for Elle are the ones that own the brand. They are the companies that own the name, the logo, the DNA and the standards. But they don't necessarily want to set up their own offices, hire their own staff and run operations in every country in the world. That is expensive and complicated. So instead they license the brand to a local publishing company and say, you can print and sell a magazine using our name, our logo and our guidelines in exchange for a royalty free and our approval over certain editorial decisions. The local publisher then does the actual work. They hire the editors, they sell the advertising, they print the issues, manage distribution, deal with the news agents and maintain the revenue. They then pay the brand owner a licensing fee, usually a percentage of revenue, and again have to meet a certain set of standards that are set by the parent. Basically what I'm saying is that Conde nast is really McDonald's. The franchisee owns and runs the restaurant, but the McDonald's owns the brand. They set the menu, the standards, and they take a cut. What happened a lot as the media landscape changed quite drastically, as I mentioned in the intro, was this musical chairs of local Aussie publishers. It is no small thing when the publisher changes either. I found a lot of conversations online about how this is really felt by the audience. It's also why some international titles disappear from markets entirely. If they can't find a local partner that wants to take on the license, they would rather kill it than survive in a diminished form under a local owner who has bought the rights really cheap and runs it lean. So when we talk about ownership, there's a couple of big guys. Let's get acquainted with with the big guys. Firstly, we have the Australian Consolidated Press, ACP magazines, more commonly known as the Packer Empire, the single most dominant force in Australia when it comes to print media. The Consolidated Press was formed in 1936 by Frank Packer and renamed the ACP in 1957. ACP actually created and founded a couple of these big women's and beauties titles, including Australian Women's Weekly, which now Publishers Monthly despite its name. And then also titles like Cleo and Madison, which they launched much later after they had built the younger girl magazine audience and space so they could double dip in this demographic, ACP's other big titles also included several that they acquired from Fairfax. Fairfax Media was originally an Australian media conglomerate founded in 1841. So we've got some real old businesses that were running the show for quite a while here. So it was John Fairfax who acquired the Sydney Herald and renamed it the Sydney Morning Herald, establishing it as one of the nation's oldest, most influential newspapers. So while ACP and the packers dominated magazines and tv, Fairfax became one of the largest media companies in Australia and New Zealand with investments in newspaper, magazines, radio. And you can think of them as the old money, prestige side of Australian media. But they started having a little trouble in the 90s. So that's when ACP first acquired several of those titles from Fairfax. ACP also acquired Dolly in 1970, Women's Day in 1988, and cosmopolitan Australian, which Fairfax bought ACP for the local rights to. And then ACP actually launched. There was this whole betting thing ACP actually lost, which is why they launched Cleo, but then they acquired Cosmopolitan from Fairfax a handful of years later. Anyway, ACP also lies since Harper's Bazaar nw, Take five, Grazia and a whole heap more. Their portfolio has over 60 plus titles. And if this feels like a lot of names and this feels kind of confusing, that's kind of just all I need you to get from this is like there is just so much movement already in the 90s, already in the 90s at the peak magazine that was really at the height of their value. So people like ACP wanted to monopolize the market. Classic, classic Aussie business move. Because you can. In Australia it's easy to monopolize the market because it's. The market is fairly small. So that's really all the movement that was happening in the 90s. But up against the Packer empire, we also have the Murdoch empire. Crazy to me about how little I knew about any of this, given the packers and Murdochs are well and truly household names. So the Murdoch family have long owned Southdown Press and the Murdochs and the packers the two big dogs. But on the smaller side, there was Conde Nast, which launched Vogue Australia in 1959, but then pulled it out of the Australian market in O2. Since then there has been a new publisher license, first by Federal Publishing Co. Then by news Corp. And again, objectively, a confusing timeline, or maybe just to me, because this whole part reads like a jumble of names rather than being able to kind of picture the different covers on a newsstand or pull any sort of memory. I have for each of them. So if you're in my boat, the only necessary takeaway is the amount of movement in this space. We can tell that the 90s were the key acquisition period where true print conglomerates were forming. And then the 90s were the heyday and really the peak cultural power. And then everything gets a lot more blurry in the mid-2000s as the Internet starts to take off, which I'll touch on in a second. But that's all you really need to know about the historic lay of the land is the historic who. But then the next thing you have to understand is the what. What were these magazines selling? And how the hell did they make for such profitable businesses? After all, these are physical products. This is a media business selling a CPG product, which in 2026, it's pretty fucking crazy to imagine the whole point of having a media business is that it's digital and high margins. But the business model was incredibly straightforward. Magazines earned revenue from two strains. Cover price sales. The fancy industry term for this is circulation. And then advertising. And advertising, probably unsurprisingly, was the bigger earner. Ad space was sold on a cpm, which means cost per thousand readers basis. And of course was the cost that you would pay to reach a thousand readers. This is actually the same metric that platforms like YouTube and TikTok reward creators, although they of course can be a lot more diligent with those with those numbers. But for the peak magazine era, for reference, Vogue Australia's ad revenue was estimated at properly AUD 7.5 million in 95. That's a lot of cash. And among the brands that were advertising in these magazines, who do we think were the biggest spenders? Beauty brands, my beloved. The role of print media can simply not be understated during this time period. And that's kind of the reason that I drag you back to the 90s, because the best stat I could find to support all of this is that as late as 2018, beauty advertisers were still allocating 13% of their total ad spend to magazine advertising, significantly higher than the cross industry average of just 4%. And if we look at the US market, 37% of beauty ad spend went to magazines in 2018. That's a crazy stat. And I will link you to the source on stub sac. It's still hard for me to believe, so take it with a grain of salt. Magazines were truly the cornerstone of pop culture and therefore beauty for years. And that's why I just think this story is so worth telling the Glossy and highly designed editorial pages just make sense for brands to want to position themselves inside. Another interesting dynamic here is the reputation of beauty journalists and editors, because that was really important too. The positioning at least was that their editorial work. So their recommendations and longer form write ups were not paid. Instead, journalists were positioned as the trusted sources to help us, the consumer, filter through the confusion that came with shopping for makeup. They were sent everything, they got to try everything and therefore they were the most qualified to give opinions on the best products. And people, people took it as gospel. They were curators and tastemakers as much as they were writers. And it's not even comparable to to influencers because there were so few beauty journalists. Yes, there were a lot of beauty and lifestyle magazines and through the lens of looking at Australia particularly, but each would have as few as two to five staff writers, salaried, full time writers even at the peak. So that's only what, 20 to 40 jobs in the entire country, furthering the credibility because there was this dog fight to get there. Of course there were women working across editorial and shoots and admin, but I'm talking about the journalists. And again, what makes so much sense about this model is that it was more about quality than it was about quantity. The complete opposite of the model we have today. Many of these titles have only ever published monthly, so you would write, I am unsure how many pieces a month, but far less than the digital versions of these publications today. It's an SEO game and they're publishing multiple times a day. But this infrequency of releases meant that content could be planned months and months in advance. And all of this flexibility gave publishers a much stronger foundation and model to make money. How much a brand would pay to be in a magazine as well was based on readership, demographics, so things like agent income as well as the editorial environment. The ideal situation for a beauty brand was their advertisements to be adjacent beauty editorial if not included in supposed neutral editorial. A similar dynamic again today that we see where if an influencer doesn't disclose it's paid, it usually has a stronger sell through because people don't like feeling that they're sold to. And then of course, brand advertising rates would also be based on the prestige of the title. In the golden era of mags, a beauty editor at a major glossy was one of the most influential figures in the beauty industry. Their recommendation could genuinely make or break a product. This is because readers understood the difference between paid advertising and editorial recommendation. A full page ad would tell a reader that this brand has money. But a beauty editor's pick told the readers that this product actually works. Editorial coverage was earned and not bought, at least in the traditional model of how it was supposed to be. Beauty PR professionals then their entire job was cultivating relationships with editors to secure the editorial placements. The schmooze of it all, if you will. A product featured in the beauty pages of a Vogue or an Elle carried the implicit endorsement of a trusted expert and the prestige of the publications brand as well. So it was understood to be far more valuable than advertising outside of a magazine. But if these brands are selling advertising space based on a number of readers and circulation, who on earth is tracking that and how on earth? Enter Roy Morgan. Roy Morgan Research is Australia's largest independent research company. They have been collecting data for 80 years, which we will come back to because I think the flex of how long you've been in the industry for something like data is kind of a weird position. And this comes up a lot in my like competitive positioning for the consumer Insights app that I'm building unfiltered, where you've kind of got Nielsen and Sakanas that really position themselves as being the industry standard for 30 plus years. Not them, sorry, their methodology being the industry standard. And I just, it boggles me that if you, if you could find any other tech enabled industry that thinks doing something the same way for 30 plus years is a good thing, I would be flabbergasted. But anyway, basically Mr. Roy has operated as the dominant readership measurement system for Australian magazines for decades. And as I mentioned in the intro, the way they collect this data is through single source surveys. This company conducts roughly a thousand face to face interviews a week with Australians aged 14 plus or 50 to 70,000 interviews annually. Which objectively is a lot of people to chat to personally. Right? But in the, in the digital age it still feels quite bizarre. But what they're actually measuring for these magazines, it's, it's those two metrics that we, that we keep touching upon. Circulation and readership. Circulation is the number of copies actually sold or distributed that can independently be reported by magazines because they know how many they print, they know how many goes wherever. But it's readership that is kind of the crazy figure because readership is the estimated total number of people who read a copy, including pass along readers. For instance, this includes people who might have read a copy of a magazine in a hairdressing salon, a doctor's waiting room, shared it among friends, or maybe they read someone else's copy at work. That is kind of the confusion in trackability, if that's definitely not a word. But that's the confusion that magazines really kind of mince to their benchmark benefit. And because of this, readership figures have always been dramatically higher than circulation figures, often by a multiplier of five times or more. So a magazine selling 80,000 copies might claim 400,000 readers. So this means when magazines negotiate ad rates with advertisers, they would always use readership figures, not circulation, because of course, the higher number justified higher rates. This was the industry currency. Media buyers used Roy Morgan readership data for planning and purchasing. Sorry, I just used past tense, present tense. This is the industry currency. This is how it still operates in 2026. It's not hard to understand why the methodology has been very well debated. As early as 1972, 73, there were published critiques as well as Roy Morgan's own papers acknowledging known issues, including telescoping, which is the idea that respondents over report how recently they've read a title or prestige bias. Respondents might claim to read prestigious titles they don't actually read for whatever reason to look smart or whatever. And also they report a casualness problem where they struggle to account for people who merely glance at a magazine verse read it cover to cover versus something in the middle, because obviously they are drastically different experiences. But I think the lack of understanding on how print and other more legacy forms of media actually function, like radio, for instance, is a testament to how much these industries have changed. The average social media literacy, for instance, of a teenager is dramatically higher than the average magazine reader even 10 years ago. But the main point I'm trying to get at, and what I keep learning time and time again, but in different contexts, is how little change, evolution and innovation there has been in the way that beauty brands are really run. The fact that Roy Morgan is still the main body for reporting readership figures is wild. I am sure there are reasons that they have actively kept it person to person and not digitized it, but I personally struggle to think of them. What we're starting to see a lot more of, though, which I imagine will phase out the Roy Morgans, is YouTube surveys. For instance, you know when you're about to watch a video on YouTube and they have the check boxes, they're like, have you bought one of these brands and you meant to click one? Or have you heard of any of these brands that is effectively a digital version of these surveys with drastically improved scale, of course, and then also measurability. And you can then pay YouTube for insights into certain demographics and people that watch certain types of things. And it just makes a lot of sense. And particularly for users that are active enough on a platform like YouTube in many regards. I feel like you could just derive an incomparable level, level of depth from Roy Morgan. Not this. Not the same data, of course, but you could only infer things like household income, for instance. I really doubt YouTube's ever going to be able to get that from you, because why would you tell YouTube that? But you would have other factual behavior data too. Not this self reporting. I watch a lot of X, but rather user Y. Watched 20 hours of makeup tutorials this week. Hopefully all of this helps paint a picture of how these magazines were able to make so much money and still be so sexy. The inflated circulation figures meant inflated budgets, but those numbers very much did not translate into salaries, which is something I really want to talk about too, because I think a lot of us, when we picture the newsroom, when we think of magazines, particularly in that peak 2000s era, you think of Devil Wears Prada, right? High heels, assistants sprinting down hallways, glossy cover stars everywhere. And that isn't necessarily untrue, but the context is missing, is that all of those event invitations and free handbags come at the cost of a comfortable, livable salary. My first job in the beauty world was in pr, which sits very adjacent to the journalist world. It's kind of like there's a bit of a pipeline of everyone wanting to be a journalist and then money being tight, so people go to the brand side of things and end up becoming publicists. And it's a pretty understandable pipeline. Like this isn't to say that they're sellouts or anything. Like journalism salaries are abysmal. Makes a lot of sense why people try and create their own platforms online and earn so much more. Of course, you lose a lot of the prestige. But anyway, I really want to sit down with a publicist, and I really plan to do episodes on all of these different types of angles of the beauty world so we can try and help democratize the understanding of the business of this landscape. Because PR is a wild one. It's just this hidden undercurrent. But my point is that in this early job that I had in PR, back when I was, what, 18, we used to get a lot of free stuff. Free products from agency clients, gifts from bosses, vouchers, and God, did I eat it up. I loved it. Little old me from Adelaide. I loved the glitz and the glamour. And then one day, my manager said something to me that I think about all the time. She said, lily, don't forget, you can't pay your rent in lip liners. Shout out to KJ because she really ate with that one. I referenced this anecdote because it's very reflective of the early stages of becoming a beauty writer. Kate spoke about in the part of our chat that I lost. Her early days were spent organizing products, loading things on and off a server. Very mundane work, but you're just. She was so excited to be in the room, to be in the world. And that was the drive. And I relate to that on every level. I love beauty way too much and way more than someone should love their job. It's kind of sick. But these, these industries are built off that desire. They are built off that sex appeal. They are built off that want to be there. So what that translates to is unpaid internships. I wrote my very first sobsack piece ever on this because it basically opens up this creative field to only a certain few that have the financial security to travel to the center of a major city, because all of these jobs are in the New Yorks, the Londons, the Sydneys of the world. For these internships that are unpaid, often for several months, and that is, that is the only way you can actually get a foot in the door. And if you think about the type of person that can afford that, she ends up looking a little like me. She ends up being pretty damn white and pretty upper class. This is supported by the data, of course. In 2018, the Sutton Trust conducted a report on the state of internships in the uk, outlining how unpaid internships were socially exclusive and offered advantages to those with better off backgrounds, which was serving as a drag on social mobility. The findings were particularly cooked for some of fashion and beauty's key sectors. 89% of internships in retail, 86% in the arts, which included TV, theater, film and fashion, and 83% in media. And 83% in media were below the minimum wage. Media in particular had the highest proportion of internships that offered zero remuneration at all, at 58%. So then why do it? Well, the answer is again in the statistical probability. According to the National Associates of college and employers nace, 50% to 60% of interns transition into full time employees, making internships one of the most effective recruitment strategies with the Harris ROI for employers in the us. It's also worth mentioning that in Australia in particular, under the Fair Work act, it stipulates that lawful unpaid work should not involve productive tasks and must primarily benefit the intern through meaningful learning experience, experiences, training or skill development. In short, interns are only supposed to engage in activities that actually enhance their learning. However, who are the considered the hardest workers or the most driven interns who are most likely to be offered future work? It's those that do the most of the productive administrative tasks that are not meant to actually be included. Unpaid labor, which is fetching the coffee for execs, refilling the printer paper, running errands for office supplies, sorting mail or taking out the bins. And I tell you all of this because I truly believe in my heart of hearts that it is this dynamic and it is the unspoken part of why Aussie magazines have taken such a dive. Of course there were financial challenges with flow on structural challenges, but it cannot be understated how this early career dynamic means that you end up with a whole bunch of the same, if not similar voices sitting around these executive tables making the big creative decisions of the biggest publications in the country. And it's so obvious you feel it in the content. I love Aussie media. I think it's such an important landscape with a vibrant point of difference, but you can't feel that in the work or the print. A lot of the time this creative stagnation is driving consumers away from magazines and towards the Internet where anyone can showcase their unique creativity. So consequently consumers are actively seeking designers and creators who genuinely stand out and have unique points of view and embracing diverse voices and innovative ideas that print platforms just don't platform because of this archaic structural low paying thing where I'm sure there's a decent amount of money at the top. But like my God, think of, think of how many years you have to work on 50, 60k a year salaries to be able to be the Justine Collins of the world, to be the editors in chief. And that's not a great example because I really like Justine's writing but like it just isn't sustainable and it wasn't sustainable. That's why we saw so many of them take a dive in Australia in particular versus other countries that do platform different voices. Look at Vogue China, that is an Aussie with a creative difference who took that magazine and oh my God, I have never, I hadn't bored print in years. And Margaret Jang, who is Sydney I believe, born and raised but Chinese Australian, became the editor in chief of Vogue at 27. She was the youngest editor in chief at Vogue in its history. She was there for three or four years but fuck, it was good and What I've really just recounted takes us quite nicely up to now. Like 2020, this was the dynamics that was playing out from the peak in the 2000s, the next kind of two decades and because then of course, another way that magazines were really hit by the lack of different points of view in the room and were really controlled by these archaic legacy org structures is that you had all of these prestigious and frankly older people at the helm that didn't like the idea of getting online. They didn't like the fact of surrendering their print power, surrendering their cultural influence. So instead they were just killed out. And I'll convert this to a simplified visual timeline as well up on Substack. So you have kind of one touch point of understanding all of this, but I really want you to hear how fast everything fell to get us up to speed for Kate to join right at 2020 to tell us what it was like to really live it. So September 2012, Nine Entertainment agrees to sell ACP Mags to Bauer Media Group. All of those 60 plus titles for approximately Australian $500 million. October the sale completed. ACP rebranded as Bauer Media Australia only a few months later. February 2013 Bauer closes Grazia. May 2013 Bauer closes Madison. Also in 2013, Bower sells computing titles. Couple years pass. January closes Clio after 44 years in publication. Also in 2016, Bauer reduces Dolly from monthly to bimonthly print. PAC Mags followed suit. Girlfriend went for a monthly to quarterly printing with a mobile first Strategy. Then in November 2016 Bauer announces closure of Dolly where their circulation had plummeted from 200,000 at peak to less than 30,000. So they shifted to digital only. 2017 Bower closes shop till you drop. October 2018 Bower announces closure of Cosmopolitan Australia after 45 years. And remember how there was that big back and forth over getting getting that license deal? At its height Cosmopolitan was printing 400,000 copies and Addict's closure was well below 50,000. With the CEO Paul saying that the commercial viability of the magazine in Australia was no longer sustainable. October 2019 reports emerge of Seven West Media in talks to sell PAC Mags to Bauer. So Bowers closing all of these publications but but somehow they're still not stopping from acquiring them. October of 2019, Seven West Media sell Pac Mags to Bauer for 40 million in cash. This prompts the ACCC to review the merger because they have preliminary competition concerns. By March 2020 they clear the sale. April 2020 Bauer shuts entire New Zealand operation making 237 staff redundant. Also in April 2020, Bauer suspends multiple Australian prince titles, making 70 staff redundant and an additional 50 standing down. And we then get to May of 2020. By 1 May 2020, Bauer completes the acquisition of PacMags. And then on 4 May, three days later, via a Zoom call, Bauer absorbs PAC staff and then immediately cuts 60% of them with an additional 14 standing down. And guess who was on that zoom call? None other than. Than Kate. The last thing I want to timeline before we get Kate to jump in and give us a retelling of events post 4 May. I also want to footnote that by 17 June 2020, Bauer Media Group announces the sale of their entire Australian and New Zealand business to Mercury Capital, even though they're closing down their New Zealand business. But they sell everything. And guess how much they sell it for? 50 million after they had bought it all from ACP for 500 million eight years beforehand. It is truly a crazy story and I hope I'm doing it justice by 21 July. One month later, eight titles permanently close. A further eight titles close. Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Australia, InStyle, Men's Health, Women's Health, Good health. And then in late September of 2020, the company rebranded as R Media. Like, the scale of this demise and the pace of it cannot be understated. But let's put a pin in 4 May 2020, because this is where Kate jumps in, because she was on said Zoom call.
- [42:31]
A
So they'd offered them all these jobs in, like, December, in 2019. Everyone's like, oh, we're all gonna be under the one roof. You know, you meet so many of the other journalists working at other magazines because you spend time with them at events. And so we're like, oh, everyone's gonna be together. And I was like, I just have a bad feeling because, like, this company, you can't trust what they say.
- [42:50]
B
So why couldn't you trust them at this point?
- [42:52]
A
Because they would say, say one thing and then do another.
- [42:54]
B
Because they'd already closed a bunch of.
- [42:55]
A
They already closed a of bunch. And they would always say they weren't doing something and then they would do it.
- [42:58]
B
I say.
- [42:59]
A
And so people working there just had this natural distrust. But Pacific, I think their company, they were owned by a division of 7 West, and they were always, you know, quite upfront about any changes and they'd still had, you know, and they were Aussie, they were Australian, and yeah, they've been treated quite well over there. They were kind.
- [43:18]
B
You had friends there. How do you know this?
- [43:19]
A
Yeah, yeah. I knew them because I'd meet them at events. And so it's like, I know the other beauty editors. I know other people working digital there that I've met over the years, and they were treated quite well. They. They were kind of like the ugly stepsister compared to Bower, just because Bower had the more desirable magazine titles and obviously to Vogue as well at News Corp. But they were treated well and they liked it there. It sounded great. And then. So they believed Bauer when they were like, yep, we're going to give you all jobs. They were excited to come over the first day that they get there. Mass redundancies. Not just them, but ours as well. So we'd all gone into lockdown at this point. So they had been saying, oh, it's all good. Everyone work remotely. But obviously as a magazine company, they're very analog. They hadn't really put systems in place to be able to work remotely. Everybody's on these old systems that are in this old computer that is working very. On a server, not like in a.
- [44:22]
B
The server. Yeah, yeah.
- [44:24]
A
But they told all of us on a Zoom, just, oh, hey, guys, We've. Because of COVID you know, we've had to make a bunch of changes and essentially because in the press releases I
- [44:35]
B
read it was all about COVID Yeah, but it was like July. I was like, that's pretty quick for
- [44:39]
A
Covid wasn't even July. It was May.
- [44:41]
B
It was May.
- [44:42]
A
It was May. And they were like, well, we tried.
- [44:45]
B
Covid didn't really, really hit Australia until, what, April?
- [44:48]
A
No. It was very funny because it was like, obviously the company Bauer had been. We'd heard that the owners were really unhappy with the business. They'd been hemorrhaging money and they. They didn't really want it anymore. So they kind of just used it as a easy buy more. They bought more so that they could package it and sell it off as, like. Rather than being like, oh, you're buying a few magazines, you are buying the Australian media, basically all of Australian magazines. And I was like, again, at the time, I was like, who's. Who's buying? Yeah, it's a magazine company. First, they never were able to sort of digitize properly. They took too long. They had this deal that was way before my time. They had a deal with 9MSN that published all of their websites, but it wasn't actually like the teams themselves didn't really have control over it. So they were still very separate. Because it was like. Do you remember when like digital websites were kind of just like, like fan pages or like.
- [45:46]
B
Yes.
- [45:46]
A
Just pages where it was like you would go click on the. There was legitimate.comaugirlfriend and it would just be like a random, like almost like a blog. And it would just be random stuff on there being like, oh, here's, here's a shoot that we did the other day. But it wasn't treated as the digital media.
- [46:05]
B
I think that's such an interesting distinction though, about like, because they were. They did exist online. So I'm seeing them online and thinking that, oh yeah, they're doing well. I'm seeing their stuff. Stuff. But like, that's one. It's one thing to exist digitally and it's another thing to shift your entire business model.
- [46:19]
A
Yeah.
- [46:19]
B
From print to digital.
- [46:21]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [46:21]
B
And it's a way that you make
- [46:22]
A
money, especially when the company is just only really nose print. And so for a lot of these big publishers, they have this legacy in print and they feel like the titles that they have, like the mastheads that they have, should be overseen by the same people who are doing magazines. As to digital. But I learned, and you know, we all know that digital is a very different thing. And the reader that you've got for digital is often completely different to the one that you've got for print. And it doesn't work the same way. Like, I could write a story in print and they'll be like, oh, well, you can just put that online. But then it won't work online because it's not something that that reader would be interested in.
- [47:03]
B
But even if it does, the business model is being built around someone buying a physical mag.
- [47:09]
A
Yeah.
- [47:10]
B
So even if you do get the readership and then you can reposition that an advertiser. But like we were saying, you don't want to advertise on any of these online. You want to be in the print,
- [47:19]
A
you want to be in the magazine,
- [47:20]
B
but how do you actually re. Incentivize. Yeah.
- [47:22]
A
And I mean, I totally believe that there is a way to do it. I think that the problem is, is that for too long publishers put their heads in the sand and we're just like, oh, it's going to be fine. Not, you know, we're going to get. You see it all the time. And this is. I think one of the reasons that I did that TikTok was like, I was really confused about why some publishers continue to pedal this narrative that like, oh, magazines are back and readership is up. I'm like, no, it's not like, no,
- [47:49]
B
they might be cool again, doesn't mean that the people are buying them.
- [47:52]
A
But. So they'll be like, but look at how many new magazines are coming into the market. And I'll be like, well, the reason why those magazines are coming into the market is not because people are wanting them. It's because there's advertiser appetite. So advertisers, for example, like Cosmo. Cosmo relaunched last year. And the reason why it relaunched was because there is so many advertisers who want to reach a Gen Z customer. They want to reach someone in their. In their 20s, right? And so if there's a Gen Z media title, they'll be like, oh, yeah, okay, cool, I'll go advertise there. But they're probably not thinking about the fact that Gen Z don't read back then.
- [48:29]
B
That's what was my question. If you're trying to get Gen Z, why are you going print or are they printing the Mac?
- [48:35]
A
They print.
- [48:36]
B
Okay.
- [48:36]
A
And they have, they have digital as well.
- [48:38]
B
I knew they had digital. I didn't realize that they'd gone back to print.
- [48:40]
A
Yeah, they've got print. But because again, these advertisers, they are like, we want to do print advertising and we want it to be in for a Gen Z audience. And so we will do that because that's our demo. And Cosmopolitan or, you know, whichever other magazine, maybe Girlfriend or whatever, services that demo. So we're going to advertise with them.
- [48:59]
B
Them because no one else is doing print, because no one's picking up print. But if we can be the one group of people that are talking to that group in print, then there's a white space.
- [49:07]
A
And like, how many Gen Z, like, Gen Z didn't not grow up with magazines? They don't know what it is really. They don't have the attachment that a lot of millennials do. So that is why you'll see a lot of the titles that are geared towards an older demographic. So for example, Marclair or even Elle and else kind of spans. A few is much more Millennial and a little bit of Gen Z, but much more Millennial. And then you've got, you know, Vogues and Harper's Bazaar. Their reader is much older, so they have a connection to print magazines. They've. They grew up with it. They have the nostalgia behind it. They appreciate it. Gen Z is like, why would I pick this up? I'm sure there are some, but I think they're probably all interested in Media and they want to work in a magazine, but there's not many of them left. So it's interesting. It's. That's what I was saying before about how the reader used to be number one and now because of the state of the industry, the advertisers. Advertisers are number one. Our advertisers have so much power. It's not like that in any other media format anymore. You know, like, imagine if like we were exclusively doing content on TikTok for brands. People will say that they don't mind magazine ads.
- [50:20]
B
Right.
- [50:21]
A
Because they'll be like, oh, you know, I can see that. Just this big ad for Prada or something like that. And I can see that's just an advertisement as a picture. I know it's an advertisement. People will say that influencer marketing and creators, you know, doing ads on their TikTok or Instagram, being like, oh, like this, this is doing a paid partnership with a brand saying, I'm reviewing this product and I like it. They don't like that. They find that more sus. But what's interesting is that like, like brands who put advertisements like advertising, like advertorials or in magazines are then entitled to get editorial support. Naturally. It's like when I was at Beauty Heaven. It's like if there was a brand that was paying to be listed when they had a new launch, you would cover it in content because you would want them to keep their listing. It's like a relationship building thing, you
- [51:16]
B
know, so it helps legitimize them too.
- [51:17]
A
It does. And also it's just like giving them preference. So it's like, oh, if you give us this money, which keeps the lights on for us and keeps things going, we will then ensure that, you know, your launches are covered, we'll look after you. There's a lot of that in magazines. I don't know, it's interesting. People just treat it very differently when it's an individual. Do you find that?
- [51:37]
B
Yeah. And it also going back to working at a retailer, I never realized that a brand will pay a retailer to be like in the storefront or be in all the emails or all the other ways that a brand wants to be seen and sell a product.
- [51:53]
A
Yeah.
- [51:53]
B
But even in retail it made sense because it was like there was an end point because then you could go to the retailer and buy said product rather than in a magazine. Obviously there isn't that. It's a different form of awareness, obviously. But as social media and influencers become more and more and more about measuring the conversion. How can you actually translate that to a sale? And it's less about awareness, it's more about all the other ways of actually transacting thing. And there's so many conversations about like how you measure that and last touch points and like who attributes the sale. But there's still an end point.
- [52:24]
A
And I think back in the day when everyone did read magazines and it was like the done thing, it was the same way that people were scrolling social media. People were reading magazines because that was like what we had access to. Consuming social media now is like how people would consume magazines. It's like you would all be talking about the thing that was in that issue, which is so funny because you just didn't have crazy. You didn't have.
- [52:44]
B
It's just digital, finite. And that obviously is like then a testament to being a good writer and actually the editing and what makes it into the mag rather than now. There's no curation, which I think is something that's changed so drastically. It's like, who's the tastemaker? Who's the cool person?
- [52:59]
A
Well, yeah, I mean, that is a really interesting one. I think that something that a lot of publishing houses really did not understand was the power that their staff held. So back in the day when magazines were massive, what you put in that magazine was like, you know, an indication of the editor's taste and what they thought the reader wanted. So it was powerful. Like it had gravitas and they would be subject to seeing everything that would launch and there would only be so many spots. So potentially it did lead to a lot of sales because everyone was looking at the same thing. It's like everyone saw the same billboard or everyone saw the same placement. So you probably could say, oh, we were featured in. Our product was featured in Cosmopolitan that month and we saw sales of it go nuts. So you probably could say that would be why you could more easily attest to it because there was less opportunity for the brand to connect noise outside of that. Yeah, exactly. When social media started to really take off, it was interesting because if you're a journalist, you know how to curate really, really well. Naturally that lends itself to social media and you can kind of do elements of your job on there. And that's why a lot of people who worked in media were able to turn themselves into personalities, media personalities and people on social media who also happened to work in traditional media. The problem was publishers didn't recognize that, you know, speaking broadly for the opportunity that it was that to have someone that is a social media personality and has a really good following and it's really respected work for your title was an advantage, not a threat. Whereas a lot of publishers it was decent advised, it was absolutely decent.
- [54:52]
B
That was one of my questions is like now every journalist and writer has some sort of personal brand. Well some of them that people that aren't. Oh, that I don't read mags so they're the only ones I know which is fair.
- [55:03]
A
But even digital media. So I can say that when I was working in magazines it was considered there was an attitude towards influencers. Right. And I always felt it was really misguided because there are a lot of incredible influencers that I felt like were working just as hard as the rest of us and were really, really good at what they did. And I respected that and I consumed their content too. But there was this attitude in magazines that was very much like they're not as qualified or credible in a way. And it's like there are elements of that sometimes but like we're all serving different purposes. But that was what they did wasn't respected.
- [55:44]
B
What do you think about now in that there seems to be this shift going from everyone's doing digital. So doing things in the real world seems to be like how you legitimize yourself less so print but like in the beauty space it's a lot of like pop ups. And returning to store all the pop ups, man.
- [55:59]
A
Oh my God, the pop ups. And also like I just want to put this out there guys. We can stop with the newspaper. The fake newspapers we've done. Everyone's done one, we've all done one.
- [56:15]
B
I wasn't even thinking of that. But that's a really good point in
- [56:17]
A
that they're always featured at the pop ups. Yes.
- [56:20]
B
No, no, no, they totally are. But that's even that example is such an interesting 180 of the print version now being the cool thing because everyone's doing digital. Like such a 180.
- [56:30]
A
Yeah. And I mean I believe in print so much. Like I, I think print is really cool and I love magazines but it's the independent ones that I find interesting because offering a point of view a lot more brands are making, you know, different experimenting with different forms of advertising.
- [56:48]
B
It's just so interesting in an Australian context because the American and also British ones, they don't have a retailer like Mecca that's doing a lot of this already.
- [56:57]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [56:57]
B
And providing that experience that I wonder if like because we have a Mecca that is often often facilitating a Lot of these things. I associate it with Mecca more than I do with Charlotte Tilbury. Rather than a brand, even glossier. Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think they did a big pop up when they launched here. It was more about like them being Mecca. It was about Mecca being the middleman.
- [57:14]
A
Yeah.
- [57:14]
B
Rather than. They don't have that in the States. Like a brand is more on their own.
- [57:18]
A
Yeah, yeah. Which is interesting because obviously Mecca has its own cult following that people will go to Mecca pop ups.
- [57:24]
B
Yeah.
- [57:24]
A
If there was like anything Mecca branded, people will be there. Like I saw people at the AO at the Australian.
- [57:29]
B
They had that big pop up.
- [57:30]
A
They had like a pop up there and. And the line was out of control. And I'm like, you guys could buy all this stuff, you know, around the corner, but it's about like taking a photo there and experience it and being like, oh, I went to this Mecca thing. What does that say about me to my, you know, in the way that we're always branding ourselves to our social media audiences? Yeah, it is, it is interesting. Here's an example. Did you see today that Rhode is launching in Sephora? I did, yes. Which I find that's. They. They love a pop up.
- [57:55]
B
They are so 2025 version of like glossier to see, like us in our community, no one else.
- [58:01]
A
Yeah. Yep, yep, yep.
- [58:02]
B
I thought that was so interesting. But then you've got Rare that's done so well in the States that I was like, okay, this is the first time they're going to have a run for their money because they've got that to be mass distributed and also have a customer that's so obsessed with you is such an insane double to be happening.
- [58:17]
A
Do you know what's really interesting? And I actually am writing about this on Substack, but I hate using these two as comparisons because I feel like it immediately feels like we're playing into the narrative of like Haley versus Selena. And I, I cannot say I don't give a shit. Like, I like both of them.
- [58:33]
B
I love them the same. I think they're both great.
- [58:36]
A
I do not care.
- [58:37]
B
It is insane that it's ended up this way.
- [58:38]
A
It's so crazy that it's ended up this way. But I truly, I'm only interested in the businesses and I really like both women. I think they've both done a phenomenal job. It's very interesting to compare and contrast these two buzzy beauty brands to see how they approach content in particular and social media. So did you see that Rare beauty launched a substack.
- [58:58]
B
Oh, I did. I expected to hate it. I really, really thought I was gonna hate it.
- [59:03]
A
You didn't.
- [59:04]
B
I didn't hate it.
- [59:04]
A
I hate it.
- [59:05]
B
Interesting.
- [59:06]
A
I hate it.
- [59:07]
B
Okay. I only read the first like two or three. I was like, if I can actually get some sort of. I read the one about the new blush and they spoke.
- [59:15]
A
Yep. That was interesting.
- [59:16]
B
Yeah. The cosmetic chemist ahead of product. I was like, that is actually an insight that I can't get. Get anywhere else.
- [59:22]
A
Yeah.
- [59:23]
B
And I have been begging for that. It reminded me the parallel I made in the video about it that I made about it was Jeffree star and Shane Dawson.
- [59:31]
A
Oh yeah.
- [59:32]
B
When they made that, when they made their videos years and years ago about like the cost per units. They went to the factory, they went, they had a meeting, like a manufacturer's meeting. That level of insight. I have been, we need that. I was like, if that's what this can be. I kind of don't love that it's on substack only because it just feels like why are brands coming? But brands always come to places that
- [59:54]
A
they're coming and they can do well.
- [59:56]
B
Yeah.
- [59:56]
A
This is what's interesting. So I. I hate it.
- [60:00]
B
Interesting. Tell me why.
- [60:02]
A
The reason I hate it is because it is just. It's not the content in that I. That I dislike. I think the content itself is fine, but it is just not the place. Subsect is not the place.
- [60:13]
B
It did surprise me. It was subsec and not just a newsletter. Yeah.
- [60:16]
A
I mean the thing is I get why. I get like we said, like I get why they're there. And there will be more brands that join because substack is.
- [60:23]
B
That was the visceral reaction I had to. I was like, why are you here? Why?
- [60:27]
A
Immediately I was just like, no. Because the fashion brands started joining and so, you know, there was only going to be a matter of time until the beauty brand started joining. The thing that they don't understand and it's very obvious is that. But this is again a platform that is user generated and people follow people. They follow writers that they're interested in and they follow like communities.
- [60:51]
B
Do you think that's why they have that one voice though? Which I don't understand.
- [60:54]
A
But it's anonymous.
- [60:54]
B
Yeah.
- [60:55]
A
And so it doesn't allow the reader to actually connect to the person. If that was an actual person who they were like, you know, in the same way that TikTok will have someone who works for the brand.
- [61:05]
B
Because that was going to be my Parallel.
- [61:06]
A
I was like, exactly.
- [61:07]
B
The brands that got on TikTok quickest were the ones that got a lot of traction.
- [61:11]
A
And then they. And they were. People got to know them and thought that they were. So it humanized the brand. It made it about community because you could be part of the community that already worked there. And so that's the same with Substack. It's like, people want genuine, people want real. I find the stuff that I write that's really, like, off the cuff and usually more of, like, you know, my personal opinion and interesting insights. That stuff is usually what people want to read. And I read an interview with the person who writes it. So it's anonymous. Yeah, so it's Anonymous. It's like the rare beauty Insider, which, first of all, it's a really lame name. Like, we could have done better than that. Like, feel like we could have been creative.
- [61:47]
B
Like, I didn't get why it was Anonymous, though.
- [61:50]
A
Like, I just didn't neither.
- [61:51]
B
It felt like that felt like a miss. Because I think that it undermined its content even.
- [61:56]
A
Because I think the thing is, is that, like, products are amazing. The branding is strong, and obviously Selena is. Is a really big driving force behind it, but it's not really, like, interesting content brand. The products getting reviewed is what does really, really well for them or stuff. With Selena, it's not really community outside
- [62:16]
B
of the company itself.
- [62:18]
A
Yeah. It's not really about, you know, the people that work there. And it's not really like Selena's not really in the content very often.
- [62:24]
B
Do you feel like that's smart, though?
- [62:26]
A
Yeah, in a lot of ways. Absolutely. Because I. I think, again, making comparison with Rode, obviously, without Haley at the moment, Rode doesn't fully stand on its own. You need someone behind the substack because Substack is about having a person behind it. You don't want just an anonymous group. And it's interesting because Allure have launched a substack, which I was having a chat with a beauty PR the other day, and they were saying that they'd met up with Allure to be like, okay, but what is the point of Allure's substack? What do I get versus having my brand featured on your website versus in the newsletter? And, like, well, you know, it's maybe a little bit more, like, unfiltered. And I was like, you see, that's a mistake. I think if you're going to have something beyond Substack, it needs to be in a niche. It needs to be written by a specific person. In the team, and it needs to service that, like, personal connection. So my problem with Rares is just that it's written by an anonymous person. The person who writes it is, like, one of their creative team.
- [63:22]
B
Do you think they're in house?
- [63:23]
A
No, they are in house.
- [63:24]
B
Oh.
- [63:25]
A
They did an interview with someone that I stumbled across another substack, and they talked about who it is and why they decided to start a substack. And I was like, oh, I want to know. They wanted to start a substack because they wanted somewhere to put their, like, rare initiatives and their, like, you know, charity things and their brand messaging, essentially,
- [63:46]
B
and about us page on the website. Yeah.
- [63:48]
A
Or their blog, essentially. They wanted to repurpose brand content and put it on substack, and they thought that was the place to do it because they're like, oh, we. We love substacks, and we follow a lot of them. And I was like, yeah, but, like, that's not what substack is. Substack needs to have a point of view. It can't just be a dumping ground for press releases or for a marketing campaign, you know, so the tone of voice behind it, as well, was just a bit confused. And I was like, look, if it was gonna be someone or imagine how. Imagine how it would be if it was ghost written by someone for Selena, if it was Selena's substack and it
- [64:21]
B
was the thing that she loves.
- [64:22]
A
Crazy Haley does that, Right? So Haley hasn't got a substack yet. I would say it's a matter of time, but, you know, that it will be written from her. You know, it will be her. I know it will be her favorite things. It will be, you know, road will be featured as, like. Like, one of the things that I always, you know, advice always give to brands when I consult for them is that, like, good content can come from anywhere. But obviously, to make it work for a brand, you want to include your products, but it should feel like hiding the vegetables in the sauce. It should just be good content that can stand on its own, and your brand just happens to be interwoven organically, naturally. A lot of brand founders who, you know, like, Diana Cohen with, like, take your time and found a crown affair. Her subsec is essentially about career, and it's about, you know, cool. She's great, but it's more about her and her own brand and her other interests.
- [65:14]
B
Isn't that interesting, though, because Haley got so much shtick for being, like, an influencer, like, when she started her YouTube channel, which makes made so much sense the two years later when she launched Road.
- [65:23]
A
And then also, not only that, but she started to really establish herself as like a skincare, you know, enthusiast. She started doing all these TikTok videos of her skincare routine. She started saying she wants to be glazed donut, you know, all of that, that she started building it early because she knew she was going to go into the beauty space. So she built this kind of like credibility and you know, as someone who likes makeup and skincare, she still does that. It's like that's why she does like the latte makeup or the strawberry, you know, all of those little micro trends.
- [65:52]
B
Day in her life. You would never see a day in a life for Selena, which I understand as a celebrity. But yeah, in the substack founder argument it makes a lot of sense that yeah, that's a message.
- [66:02]
A
I think substack still needs to be niche and human. I think for brands it's just you are going to get your die hard fans on there because they'll go and comment on anything that you do because they, they love you and they, they support the brand no matter what. But substack is really meant to be about engaging with new audiences, not the current one that you have.
- [66:20]
B
Do you think then with like substack and brands becoming more written, like copywriting, of course, yeah, is alive and well but branding has been so visual for so long. Like how do you see that shift kind of happening?
- [66:32]
A
Oh my God. Well, I like love the opportunity to get to do that kind of stuff. I think that it will be written by people who just understand good content.
- [66:41]
B
Journalists.
- [66:42]
A
Yeah, no, but that's the thing. Journalism has changed so much and I am notorious in this industry for corralling young journalists who have potentially come into this industry in the last five years and hammering home home that they cannot rest on the fact that they're in currently in a media job because if you do that you're going to be really shocked when you don't have one. Whenever like it's like I said when I was working in magazines I never, I never thought, oh, I'm going to be here forever. I knew that obviously there would be a time when that's a tough thing to accept. Yeah, but I mean that's, that was the state of the industry and I was the only one, you know, not a lot of people in the industry had that. It's like you either were a print person or you're a digital person that there weren't many people who had that experience. Across like, you know, especially the legacy fashion titles that you wear their print or digital. And it gave us an edge. We understood what would translate on digital and what works in print and also how to work with like elevated brands and tell longer form stories that you just don't get one without the other. So we found it was really helpful. And I think that as brands start to understand more that they are actually publishers themselves, they are, they publish in the same way that like a magazine would or a, you know, that has a social media account or a product, they are publishers in and of themselves. And journalists are kind of the best people to do that. And so I love to chat to young journalists and just be like, you know, always think about how this will translate for you later. Like, when I was in that job, I made sure I made good connections. I made sure that I was always thinking about, you know, the kinds of things I might want to do after that job no longer exists. I just feel like the skill set just translate translates so perfectly to branded work. So, you know, whether that's, you know, writing a ghost, writing substacks for brands, I think that will be a huge thing.
- [68:35]
B
That's. So what's your favorite type of work to be working on now? I mean, branded stuff, do you like as much?
- [68:41]
A
I. I'm okay. No, honestly, my favorite stuff remains editorial. It's actually hard because I feel like it uses again, the adhd. It's like it uses different parts of my brain that I really like and I like being able to do so many different things. So at the moment, my split is basically like TikTok sometimes when I can get around to. I don't know, I don't know how you do it. Like, I don't have a post in a week. Oh my God. I haven't posted in weeks. I. I just, I feel like I'll film stuff and then I won't get around to editing. It's the thing I drop the most because. Because I'm more focused on, you know, the right. The written side of things and working with brands and then occasionally be like, oh, but I knew I need to do this because.
- [69:20]
B
Visibility.
- [69:21]
A
Yeah, visibility. And people will want to work more with me if they see me on this and that, you know, but using
- [69:25]
B
it as a brand is what I've like tried to. I've had some really great people that I've spoken to about thinking about what type of work you want to do and I was like, I don't want to be like a typical content creator.
- [69:35]
A
Yeah.
- [69:35]
B
So I want to use it as an avenue of getting people elsewhere because I really want to be doing like my reports and my client work and things like. Things like using it as an avenue to do so.
- [69:43]
A
Absolutely.
- [69:44]
B
But not making content for the sake of making content because I feel like I have to and it exhausts me.
- [69:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. But it's interesting because brands need to do that too. Yeah, you know, they need to do that too. Now everyone is just fighting for audience and attention. And I think that is the main thing is brands are now not looking for people to buy like consumers. They are looking for an audience. They are trying to build audiences. And there is nobody better at building an audience than creators and journalists. And obviously creators can be great for their social media journalists. When it comes to written content such as long form substack, the website, that is who you want to have working on your comms because they know what creates a community. That's their whole job. That's their whole job is to create a community less so in the digital space. But you know, they. It's about clicks and you still want clicks though. That's the thing. You still want clicks on any written content that you're doing. You want it to be something that's interesting so it can translate to digital. But if you've really worked on a brand or you've really worked on a magazine that has a really specific audience and a specific tone, you know how to curate for that. And that's important for a brand because that is essentially what I think sub sac will be. I think when it comes to people on, on like beauty brands on substack it will be founder led or it will be team led because that's what the platform is, the brands that do it. It'll have to be a very niche thing to avoid feeling too branded, you know, and still feel intriguing. But I think it will mostly be founder led and it'll be a broad topic span. You know, it's not just about like niche, but broad.
- [71:20]
B
What do you mean by that?
- [71:22]
A
So it'll be about the founder for example, but it might cover so many aspects of the founder's life. It won't just be about their, their day at work. Right. Or the products that they're making. It will be about where they travel, where they stay, what they like to eat. You know, it's recommendations based like that is really popular on substack for a reason. It's like you, because you follow the person, you trust their taste and so you're going to them for that particular expertise.
- [71:47]
B
And do you think that will be like, the brand founder themselves or behind the name of the brand?
- [71:53]
A
It could be either. I think it really depends on the founder because the founder obviously has to be interesting enough.
- [71:59]
B
Yeah.
- [72:00]
A
To be able to quantify that amount of interest. Like call it get, you know, get. Get that sort of. Get that audience to care. Sometimes it could be the team and it could be, you know, it's hard, though. So, for example, I know, say, do one and it's called. Well, probably because it's like, it's called like, from the, say, office. And so it's like dispatchers from the, say, office. Cool idea. But I feel like it's still a bit too branded. There's not really regular people writing it. Like. Like, I think it's still like one person. Right. Like doing a team roundup or something, which can be great, but I feel like you want it to be some consistent people that you can get to
- [72:34]
B
know, which is so hard being in house in a brand and having been in content teams because no one wants to be in content.
- [72:41]
A
That's fair.
- [72:41]
B
That's not your job. But, like, that's my job.
- [72:43]
A
That's so fair. I know. I so get that, too. It's so hard.
- [72:47]
B
What type of work do you do for brands?
- [72:49]
A
So I do a lot of consulting work. So basically I will be brought into, I don't know, essentially give my opinion on what I think their strengths are, what I think their weaknesses are from
- [72:58]
B
a copywriting point of view, from a
- [73:01]
A
brand perspective as well, because journalists are across the entire market. So, like I say, every product launch and I see, like I was saying before, like, how. How it's being positioned, the ingredients that they're using and, you know, what's. What's trending, essentially, like what. What all the brands are doing. So a lot of brand positioning and, you know, tone of voice work because brands are realizing that you can't just show up and say whatever, you know, you have to have.
- [73:28]
B
It's not enough to just look cool, I think is the big thing at the moment. It's like you have to kind of back that up with something verbal or tangible or not just a visual. Yeah.
- [73:38]
A
Like, the tone of voice is just as important as the formula. It is. Obviously the product has to work, but that is table stakes at this point. Oh, yeah, exactly. So it's like. Like you need to have something that people connect to. People are not just mindless consumers anymore. They want something to connect to. And especially in beauty, where there's only so many formulations that you can make in the world. Science continues to evolve, but, you know, there are so many brands out there. The reason why you would pick one over the other is either because innovation in the formula or there's something particular about it or because it says something about who you are or who you want people to believe that you are.
- [74:17]
B
Your experience.
- [74:18]
A
Your experience, exactly. And I think that's so important. And platforms that we're now experiencing brands on or discovering them on, it's never been more important. So I do think that Substack will be potentially a niche platform that people will continue to consume brands on. But I think the ones that will be able to make it really, really work for them is they're able to build a community, and they're building a community through Substack rather than just speaking to their current one.
- [74:46]
B
Well, thank you so much.
- [74:47]
A
Thank you.
- [74:47]
B
Thank you for being here. And that's a wrap on one of the more emotionally turbulent episodes I have made. I still cannot believe I lost an hour of that audio. But genuinely, I think the reason this one just hits a little different is it's the first time I've really sat with how much was lost. Not just the magazines themselves, but the entire ecosystem around them. The editors, the beauty closets, the whole world in which you could still have incredible writing career and beauty journalism career and still be able to afford your rent. And of course, those. Those roles still exist. They just look so different now. They look a lot more influencer like. And that's not necessarily bad. But I do feel a loss for. For the death of the Aussie. Aussie magazines. And again, I just didn't really live it. So I don't think I'd grasped the. The stakes before researching for this episode. But the thing that Kate and I just kept coming back to was was trust. Because at least with a magazine ad, you knew the full page spread for a new foundation launch, that's advertising. Everyone understood the transaction. What we have now is so much murkier. And again, I talk a lot about media literacy, but I think beauty is a category as one of the most vulnerable because the stakes just feel personal. It's your skin, it's your face, it's the things you see in the mirror every day. And I think beauty is such an incredible avenue for play. And I think that it's ultimately what Kate's career represents to me is the fact that she navigated every version of this industry from the beauty closet to getting laid off in a pandemic to rebuilding on her own terms through her work with the Vanity and freelancing. She didn't wait for the industry to figure itself out, she just kept writing, which I think is really, really quite gorgeous. And it's kind of the thesis of the whole episode, honestly. Like the medium changed, the business model collapsed, the measurement has always been a little bit made up and yet the thing underneath it all, a person with a genuine point of view telling you whether a product is worth your money or not. That part's not really gone anywhere and the people that we connect with has changed and they look a little different but but the model itself is is quite fundamental to the industry. And on that note, if you want more of Kate, which I wouldn't be surprised, you absolutely should go and find her on substack at the Vanity. I have linked her on my sub stack also. I will also link you in the show notes. Go subscribe immediately. She's wonderful and if you enjoyed this episode please rate it and follow the show wherever you are listening. It's genuinely the single best thing you can do to help me me keep making these and to help other people keep finding them. And it signals to the universe that the hours me, Kelsey Dewa and Florence spend chipping away at them and working on them pretty ad hoc. We're a small team across a ridiculous amount of time zones, but that it's worth our time. So if you do get a lot out of them, pretty please support the show. It really really does help. And I'll see you back here in two weeks. In the weeks that we're not here you can head to bareface.substack.com where you'll get the visual timeline I built for this episode plus all the analysis that came with it. I try and reference as as many things as I can as many of the sources and provide videos and photos and articles to really help color the episode so you don't have to just take my word for it. You can kind of have your own poking around, but we've kind of taken the leg work out for you and found the things that are worth worth reading and worth your time. Other that I will see you back here in two weeks for the next episode.