`Irish Times' adds magazine to line-up

A £500,000 (€634,869) advertising campaign will promote The Irish Times Magazine which will be launched this Saturday. The 84-page full colour magazine will be an insert in the Saturday edition. There will be a strong emphasis on lifestyle issues including wine and food and the magazine will also feature some of Ireland's leading columnists, combining observations on life and humour. The magazine will also feature a seven-day television guide.

The first issue will have a print run of 180,000. Strong demand for advertising space has meant that slots in the early issues are already booked out. The advertising industry will be able to preview the magazine tomorrow. As part of the advertising campaign, a series of imaginative television ads were devised by McConnells.

The challenge for those involved was to devise a campaign which would convey instantly that the ads were for a different Irish Times product, while still leveraging the brand.

Magazines inserted into newspapers have different marketing and editorial requirements from newsstand magazines. One key difference is the front cover's role. On a crowded newsstand it has to prompt impulse buying.

"In our case the cover will be an important statement about what the magazine is all about," says the magazine's editor Ms Patsey Murphy. "They will mostly be personality based but they could also be conceptual covers."

"It's an extension of the paper," says Ms Murphy. "It will be visual and in the way that we've never had a chance to be before." Columnists who have been signed up include Maureen Gaffney and Nuala O'Faolain who is currently based in New York and who will be writing a column called Regarding Ireland. "There will be snappy items at the front and longer feature articles throughout the magazine," says Ms Murphy.

The new magazine will not replace the existing weekend section which in turn is undergoing a substantial revamp. Several of the regular features such as the wine column are moving to the magazine so the weekend section's cultural section will have expanded books coverage, arts coverage and cultural commentary as well as additional features.