Behind the Virgin Australia Magazine launch

Nothing gives me greater professional satisfaction than winning a new client and launching a new magazine for them. I’ve gone through the process dozens of times over my 20-year career and it just doesn’t get old. Why? Because every client is totally different, what they bring to their industry party is different, and what they’re ultimately trying to achieve is different too.   

The process has also become so much more exciting in an age where content’s status has been elevated within the marketing mix and a single channel point of view just won’t cut the mustard. A brand’s magazine needs to be viewed – both editorially and commercially – as part of a connected multichannel customer experience, sitting within a broader content ecosystem. And this is just what we presented to Virgin Australia.


Our first cover for the new Virgin Australia Magazine.

But enough of the marketing speak: what does this mean in reality and where does one start with a launch? Here’s how we do it at HGM:  

Step 1: Get to know our client, who they are and what they want to achieve. 

With Virgin Australia, this involved a series of one-on-one meetings with key stakeholders and agency leads as well as half-day sessions with a much broader group from across multiple divisions. Essentially, these were "get to know you" sessions where the HGM team were able to present our credentials and a few initial creative ideas but, more importantly, we had the opportunity to hear firsthand from Virgin Australia about anything really important – including company values, operational needs, legal requirements, brand guidelines, key partnerships and business priorities.   

Step 2: Get to know our client’s audience, who they are and what they need.

The sweet spot of content marketing is where a brand’s expertise intersects with the needs of their customer (or guest, in Virgin Australia’s case). Therefore, it’s important to feel like you’re on first name terms with your client’s customers – or at least have a crafted persona of their customer based on sound research and data – and identify what type of content they might crave. Lucky for us, Virgin Australia has a talented Insights team who were able to provide us with what we needed to complement our own qualitative and quantitive research.  

Step 3: Combine all that we’ve discovered and create a content playbook. 

Think of this as a set of brand guidelines for content. Our playbooks start with a channel-agnostic view, clearly articulating details around key personas, content pillars and tone of voice before deep diving into channel-specific formats and design elements such as colour palette, iconography, illustration and photography.