Create a publication strategy to maximise coverage of your architecture projects
This Live Q&A session question came from an architect in Melbourne, who wrote:
My question(s) relates to the ‘tier’ that I am lead to believe exists in publications.
If a small practice has a residential project that they would like published, does it really matter where it ends up, say a Saturday Real Estate Magazine/Newspaper article, to the standard home magazines from the newsagent to an online publication.
Does it really matter?
Should a practice consider this?
The short answer is definitely yes. There are tiers; they do matter; and you should consider this. I’ll explain how and why in detail. You can watch the Facebook video here.
What are the most desirable publications to approach first?
To start, I’ve divided publications into hierarchical tiers, and segments within those tiers.
HOUSES magazine featuring Daylesford Longhouse by Partners Hill.
Photography by Rory Gardiner.
At the top of the hierarchy, you have print publications including the following segments:
1. Glossy consumer magazines – HOUSES, Vogue Living, Belle, Habitus, House & Garden, Home Beautiful, Real Living, Country Style, Inside Out, Grand Designs Australia etc
2. Industry design magazines – AA, Artichoke, Inside, Indesign
3. Reno type magazines – Your Home and Garden, Kitchens and Bathrooms, the Trend titles
4. Green magazines – Green, Sanctuary etc
Then you have mid-tier publications:
5. Daily and national newspapers and their various liftouts and magazines – Domain, RealEstate.com.au, Wish from The Australian, the AFR titles
6. Product-specific publications such as BlueScope’s Steel Profile, Brickworks’ Folio, CCAA’s C+A, and Viridian’s Vision
And the lower-tier publications include:
7. Online blogs and publications such as The Design Files, Lunchbox Architect, The Local Project, ArchitectureAU, ArchitectureandDesign, etc
8. International online publications such as ArchDaily, Dezeen, Designboom, Architizer, etc
9. Local and community newspapers in your area (or the area where your project is located)
These tiers are not a value judgment about the appeal or reach or influence of these publications, rather, they reflect how hard it is to get your project featured in each tier, and why you should have a strategy to go for the hardest tiers first, and lock those in before you attempt to place your story in an easier-to-feature tier.
The degree of difficulty is tied to the barriers to entry, the cost of publication, and the number of projects that publication features in a year. So print magazines - which have long lead times and high production costs and a very limited number of feature slots – are at the top of the hierarchy. They also have greater longevity, because subscribers keep them, and they sit around in doctor’s surgeries and the like, long after the publication date.
Australian House & Garden magazine featuring McIntyre House. Architecture by Greg Everding Architect. Interior Design by Ascot Living.
Photography by Maree Homer. Styling by Kate Nixon.
By contrast, the barriers to entry for weekly and daily newspapers are lower, and they have more spots for features, and a shorter shelf-life. Anything online is even easier again, in terms of getting stories from the point of commissioning to readers eyeballs, and content on these platforms is very rarely referred to again, after an initial – and sometimes very quick – glance.
Within each of these tiers, there are several segments, Most titles regard other publications in the same segments as their direct competitors, which means that titles from other segments are not seen as such a competitive threat.
Also, working through my list in order from top to bottom, each segment views publications from the lower ranks as competitors for exclusive content.
That’s why I always encourage architects to secure placement in a glossy magazine as the first step in their publication strategy, if that’s something you aspire to, because it’s very hard to work backwards up the list into segments 1 and 2, if you’ve already had several features in segments 6, 7, and 8.
What’s the big deal about exclusive content?
Every publication wants exclusive content, but for some, that’s more of a deal-breaker than for others. The sector that places most emphasis on exclusivity is printed publications and there are several reasons for this – it’s expensive to compile and print hard copy magazines, and the lead times are long (it can take months from your pitch to site visit, new photoshoot and interviews, to layout and printing and distribution) – whereas online publications could upload your project on the day they receive your pitch if they wanted to. The barriers to publication are much lower for online than print titles.
Also, the business model for traditional printed magazines has been absolutely decimated by the rise of online publishing, making the stakes even higher in terms of exclusivity because the advertising and sales volumes that used to provide decent margins are now almost entirely eroded.
Consider a glossy magazine such as Vogue Living – it will feature about 5 projects per issue, over 12 issues per year, for a total of 60 houses a year. So they don’t want to feature projects that also appear in their competitors’ titles: why would a reader purchase Vogue Living when they have already read about the same projects in Belle or HOUSES, or for free online in The Design Files or The Lunchbox Architect?
As I already mentioned, magazines earn their income from advertising and sales, and both of those will be impacted if they feature content that is readily available in other locations (especially if those are online and free).
So what are the key steps you should take to secure publication of your architecture projects?
1. Determine your objectives for seeking publication – what’s your ICA and your USP, and where and how are you most likely to hit your target?
As a communications advisor, I believe there are two main reasons for seeking publication of your projects:
a) To promote your practice in a general sense (brand awareness); and
b) To promote how your practice can solve a specific problem for a future client (to attract new clients)
Both of these aspirations are important, but I would argue that architects place too much emphasis on brand awareness and not enough on attracting new clients.
Also, some publications will help you achieve both – for example, you’ll get brand kudos AND potentially attract new clients by publishing in HOUSES – but some titles are skewed more towards brand awareness, like Vogue Living, and others more towards attracting new clients, like Sanctuary.
So, if you want to tip the balance, and use publication to bring new clients and projects into your practice – and to specifically seek more of the types of projects that you like working on, because you have a specialty, or they are profitable for your practice, or for another reason – you need to be strategic about what and where you publish.
2. Make a list of your target publications by tiers and segments (using the list at the top)
It’s essential then to make a hierarchical list of your preferred top tier titles – the printed publications that will best serve your efforts – and to work through those in order from top to bottom. Approach your number one preference editor to see if they are keen, and if not, move down the list one by one.
Only once you have secured placement in your top tier title, should you approach titles in lower tiers. Often the printed magazine will ask you to hold off approaching any competitor titles (within the same segment and in lower-tiered segments - until that issue is available on newsstands). They may even ask you to refrain from uploading your images to social media or your website, so they can claim exclusivity for that project. You can think about this as being the value that’s changing hands between you and the publication in exchange for their investment in your project.
You can potentially have your project published in several segments - such as a glossy consumer magazine, a sustainability magazine, a renovation title - as long as you approach the top tier in your list of target publications first.
The alternative way of approaching editors is to send your project to multiple titles at once – both within the various segments and across the tiers – but by doing that you run the risk of having two competing titles – such as Belle and Vogue Living – both wanting to feature it. If that happens, you’ll find yourself in the unenviable predicament of having to disappoint one editor by telling them they can’t have it exclusively, even after you’ve freely offered it.
That situation can potentially risk damaging your trust and reputation with both editors, possibly putting your future working relationship with them on shaky ground, because some editors have long memories for that sort of thing!
Green magazine featuring Bellbird Retreat by Steendyk.
Photography by Christopher Frederick Jones.
3. Work out the angle for your pitch
In order to get a sense of which publications are best suited to help you reach and connect with your target audience, you need to spend time getting to know a few publications. I subscribe to my favourite magazine, and I read all of its key competitors online, using a free app from the local library called Libby.
For online blogs and platforms, you can subscribe to their free newsletters and scan that content regularly to get a better understanding of the types of projects they feature, and the sections they categorise content under. For example, The Design Files features Australian homes (sometimes architect-designed projects) every Wednesday, and other sections include Creative People, Family and On the Market.
Then, when it comes time to pitch your project, you can email the editor directly (their contacts are often printed in the front of the magazine, or can be found online) and frame your project in terms that will resonate with the magazine’s ethos or stated focus. Better still if you can nominate a suitable section of their website – it shows that you are a loyal reader and understand their product.
Alternatively, if you know a local journalist in your town or city that writes regularly for the publication you’d like to target, make contact, and take them out for a coffee. They may be happy to make pitches to their editors on your behalf (and they’ll be paid by the magazine, so this is usually a free service to architects).
Building relationships with journalists in this way may also mean that next time they need a source – a person to speak to about a particular issue for an article – they might ring you for comment.
If that happens, it’s always worth asking to see the copy before submission for fact-checking, to ensure that your comments are represented in the way you intended. Don’t just assume that the writer knows what you meant and will accurately portray that, because it’s often too late to repair any damage done once you spot the errors or inconsistencies in print.
4. Send your pitch for consideration
There are two ways of presenting your work to editors, once you’ve made the key decisions outlined in steps 1-3. You can email the editor directly, including some bullet points about your project and why you think it’s a good fit for their publication, and a selection of 6-10 professional images (if it’s been photographed already). Very few publications commission new shoots ( before Covid-19, House & Garden would reshoot every single house; Inside Out and Habitus only occasionally reshot their projects, for example), while Sanctuary and Artichoke always use images supplied by the architect.
You can access more info about creating your media kit and borrow my sample emails to editors in this blog post.
The second way is to join Bowerbird and upload your media kit details to create a Bowerkit. If you go down this path, I recommend you make your Bowerkit private – meaning an editor has to request access to view it - so you can control which editors can see it, to avoid the problems of multiple outlets wanting it at the same time (see Point 2).
Editors can take a while to come back to you – some put new submissions in a folder and review them all at regular intervals – maybe once a month if it’s a monthly magazine, so this process can take time and it requires patience on your part. Once an editor responds with a yes or no about your project, you can proceed.
If they agree to publish, ask them to commit to a publication date, and find out what sort of exclusivity they require, and whether you and the clients will be interviewed for their story. You can ask to review the copy before layout, to check for errors or inconsistencies (this is particularly helpful if the journalist is writing the story without visiting the project in person).
And, if they turn it down – don’t take it personally! Most editors have a clear sense of the types of projects they like to feature, and sometimes yours may not be a good fit; the photography may not match their aesthetic; they may have published something similar last issue; or the furniture / fittings / artworks may not be to their liking. These are just a few of the many reasons editors may cite for declining your pitch.
It’s definitely worth asking for feedback about your submission: you can frame your request for feedback around a desire to gain more insight into what they are seeking, to help you position any future submissions (if you’re keen and willing to try again with that publication).
Once you have a “no” from that editor, you can send your project to the next one on your list; working through the competitors within a segment before you move into the next tier.
This way, if an editor picks up your project for print publication, you can wait for it to appear before you start making approaches to lower-tier publications.
As I mentioned on a previous Q&A, you’d ideally have several projects in various stages of publication – some just completed in the print publication pitch queue; some that have been placed and are awaiting print publication; others that have been published in print that you’re now pitching to local newspapers, and online etc.
You can also pitch different projects to different titles, so that your work is appearing across a range of titles in the same segment, for example: a new house in a rural setting might appear in Country Style, while an apartment in the city is published in Vogue, thereby expanding your influence and reach across the residential market.
That concludes my answer to this question, so I hope you have a better sense of how to approach publication - and a plan to help you create a strategy for your future projects.
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Resources:
Do your magazine research for free using Libby
https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby/
(use your local library card to join up)