Female-targeted cable channel WE has entered into a cross-promotional initiative with Meredith publications including top titles Parents, Ladies Home Journal, Fitness, Family Circle and American Baby.
The deal marries WE’s unscripted series including Adoption Diaries, Raising Sextuplets, The Locator and weight loss series I Want to Save Your Life with Meredith magazines. It includes editorial content featuring WE personalities, Web extras from WE programs on the magazine’s Web sites, on-screen appearances by Meredith’s stable of experts, collaboration on public affairs initiatives, and Meredith editorial content for WEtv.com, including tips for the site’s Moms and Health & Fitness sections.
“This is a long-term opportunity to promote our brand,” says Kim Martin, president and GM of WE. “Our viewers and their readership are so similar demographically. They’re moms; they’re the household decision makers in the household. It just clicked.”
The initiative kicks off with the June issue of Fitness with includes a Q&A with I Want to Save Your Life’s “diet detective” Charles Stuart Platkin. The magazine will also get integrated branding on the series, which airs Saturdays at 10 p.m. There will be a similar initiative built around the new series Raising Sextuplets, which bows June 11 at 10 p.m. Parents magazine advisory board member Michele Borba, Ed.D will appear in the series, which follows the lives of Jenny and Bryan Masche and their sextuplets from 16 months to their second birthday.
The Locator, WE’s most-watched series, will be featured in Ladies Home Journal with a special call out to readers who want Locator Troy Dunn to help them find a long lost loved one. The particulars are still being discussed among executives at Meredith and WE, but LHJ readers’ Locator story could be featured when the show kicks off its third season in September. (Go to www.lhj.com/thelocator for details and entry information.)
The partnership also will include a multiplatform integration of WE’s “WE Volunteer” and LHJ’s “Do Good” public affairs initiatives, both of which promote volunteerism, which has been ushered into the national spotlight by President Obama.
Additionally American Baby will partner with WE’s Adoption Diaries, which also kicks off in September. And Family Circle will partner with mother/daughter fashion therapy entry You’re Wearing That, which is slated for 2010.
For WE, editorial partnerships are not uncommon. The network has in the past partnered with Conde Nast’s Modern Bride on its bridal programming and is currently in talks with various editorial partners for its wedding programming. (Meredith does not have any bridal titles.)
And Meredith’s editorial experts are no stranger to the talk show circuit appearing on daytime shows such as Today and Regis & Kelly. But the WE partnership offers a more integrated, deeper dive for Meredith’s magazines. The deal was six months in the works. “It says a lot about how our two companies approach things,” says Nancy Weber, CMO, Meredith Corporation. “You’ve got six different magazine brands and six different TV shows. That includes editorial and marketing and the different producers on each show. To be able to navigate and make this happen in a relatively quick time says a lot about how our companies can work together. And while it’s a simple idea, sometimes simple ideas aren’t that easy to execute.”
