Massive marketing campaign backs new celebrity and entertainment mag

"It makes sense to use TV extensively for the launch of heat," says heat publisher Kim Browne. To this end, three TV spots, created by Extension 40, part of The Old Shanghai Firecracker Factory, have started flighting. All highlight the infectious and addictive nature of celebrity news - making heat an indispensable part of readers' lives. The initial media campaign, to be flighted over six weeks, has been budgeted at R3 million.

UCM publishing director Louis Eksteen comments, "heat is the first strike into South Africa of a new genre of magazine - the quality celebrity weekly - with a combination of both international and local 'skinderstories', a category that continues to boom worldwide. This led us to decide on a unique method of testing the waters as the audience we're targeting has largely been untapped."

Prior to launch, three issues of the magazine were produced, none for sale. First was the preview issue which was bagged with the March issue of FHM. This follows an international precedent of packaging one title with another to encourage trial. The daring part of this was that heat was bagged with men's market leader FHM, because the heat reader is best understood as "the FHM reader's girlfriend", according to Eksteen.

Thereafter, a test issue was produced which was largely sampled to advertising agencies and media houses to give planners and buyers first-hand experience of this new celebrity magazine genre. Finally a sample issue was available free at selected retailers.

As heat targets women in the age group 18 - 34, this was a broad-based exercise to expose the heat brand to potential readers.

heat's launch issue has a print run of 117 000 but the publishers hope to see weekly sales settle at 50 000 copies.