Will the 'beauty booty' and fashion spreads of new girls' glossy Kiss be enough to drag teenagers away from their mobile phones, asks Bernice Harrison
It takes a hard neck - and deep pockets - to launch a monthly magazine these days. Advertisers are spending less and newsagents' shelves are already full of long-established women's glossies that every month have to offer elaborate freebies to tempt readers.
However, publisher Michael O'Doherty thinks he has found an unexplored niche in the crowded Irish market and this week he introduced Kiss magazine to fill it.
"There's simply nothing for 13 to 17-year-old Irish girls," he says. "There are loads of UK imports but there's nothing there offering Irish content and that's what Kiss will be doing."
With one of Ireland's most famous teenagers, Samantha Mumba, on the cover of its first issue, and, inside, make-overs on young girls from Letterkenny to Clontarf, Kiss immediately brands itself as a locally produced publication. The teen models on the fashion spreads aren't stick insects and are wearing normal-looking outfits from shops such as Vero Moda and Oasis. There are endless pages of "beauty booty" product shots and the latest cheap and cheerful jewellery. A typical Kiss feature is a pacey guide to "10 secrets of mega confident girls" or how to discover if he's "a date or a mate".
Sex is a controversial area for teenage girls magazines and in the 1990s some of the UK titles courted controversy by being too explicit.
Readers targeted by Kiss are still going to school. "It'll only work if I get acceptance from parents and teachers," says O'Doherty. "So no, you won't find tips on how to please your boyfriend or position of the month." The only place that sex appears is on the problem pages.
Tom Harper of Media Audits believes it's going to be tough sell for O'Doherty. "This isn't the best environment to be launching any new magazine," he says. "This age group are more interested in TV and radio than in reading magazines." And then there's the mobile phone phenomenon. "Your average teenager is more interested in spending on mobile phone top-up cards than on anything else in the newsagent," he says.
Kiss is modelled closely on UK teen magazines Bliss and Sugar and early this year when both of them announced huge drops in circulation, the blame was placed on mobile phone use hoovering up teenage pocket money.
It has been estimated that this age group in Ireland sends on average 40 text messages a week. With the launch of photograph-taking mobile phones here this month, Vodafone and O2 will be doing everything to make sure that if there's any teenage cash left after the texting bill is paid, it's going to be spent on photo mailing. Sending a snap to a friend via a mobile phone - a fairly irresistible idea for most teenage girls - is going to cost around 50 cent a go.
The first issue and the promotional campaign to lunch Kiss is costing O'Doherty €80,000 and he knows that advertisers won't come on board until the title has proved itself.
"It's smart looking, the design is really contemporary and it should work," says Melanie Morris who published the youth orientated D'side magazine for 10 years.
It's not the first time that O'Doherty has taken a successful formula and "Irishised" it. He launched VIP two years ago with co-publisher John Ryan as an Irish Hello! and it has become something of a publishing phenomenon with a circulation of 35,000.
Apart from this success, Irish consumer magazines have had a particularly difficult year and many of them are in the process of being offloaded by their publishers.
The two biggest consumer publishing houses, Smurfit Communications and Mike Hogan's company Hoson, are selling off familiar names such as Woman's Way, U, In Dublin and Who magazine. There was a further setback to the industry during the summer when The Irish Times revealed that Smurfit's had been exaggerating the circulation figures for its top women's titles by as much as third. In an already nervous market, the news made advertisers even more wary of the Irish magazine industry which, even in the boom years, was not able to capitalise on the big budgets being thrown around by advertisers. Between 1991 and 2001 their share of the total ad market fell from 5 per cent to 2 per cent.
"The advertising pot for a teen mag is narrow but it is deep," says Morris, pointing out that there are a lot of beauty advertisers, in particular, out there looking for somewhere to go. The Kiss publisher will be hoping that they can be lured to his new glossy and that teenagers are prepared to put their mobiles down for long enough to pick it up.