MANILA – Having reached 25.1 million unique users across its 15 websites in April, Summit Media has strengthened its position as the leading lifestyle digital lifestyle network in the country, if not one of the three biggest digital media companies in terms of audience.
This number is higher by 21.9% versus last year’s average of 19.6 million unique users and 12.3% over the average of first quarter 2017. These figures are based on Google Analytics.
Meanwhile, Summit Media’s social media fan base has grown to 33.7 million across its brands, with fans for Facebook alone at 30 million. The company dominates in most categories—Spot.ph for city dwellers, Cosmo.ph for young women, Townandcountry.ph for the affluent, Smartparenting.com.ph for parents, and Topgear.com.ph for auto enthusiasts, among many others.
DIGITAL INVESTMENTS
“Our investments in quality content, business intelligence, and technology are paying off,” says Summit Media president Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng. “Our local digital audiences already reach more than 25% of the internet population in the country, and we are talking about a majority of females and millennials, an audience that is very attractive to marketers.”
According to Gokongwei-Cheng, Summit Media is continuing to invest in these key areas as well as in video, and creating independent content for social media like Facebook and Instagram. “We have built two studios to accommodate our video needs as well as a test kitchen just for shooting food videos,” she adds. “These videos reside on our sites, on YouTube, and on social media—wherever our audiences want to find them.”
“We have always been a company passionate about the communities we serve,” she adds. “These communities are reading magazines but have become very heavy users of digital media and we are very proud to say that our brands reach more people today than ever.”
GROWTH OF BRANDED CONTENT
Summit Media is also building a 50-person branded content team called Storylabs to accommodate its growing advertising requirements. “Content marketing and native advertising have become key strategies for many marketers,” Gokongwei-Cheng says, “and who else but a company devoted to specialized content can best help them create effective messages for their customers?”
DATA-DRIVEN CONTENT STRATEGY
“What differentiates our approach versus that of our competitors’ is our data-driven approach to content,” she adds. “We have so much data about our readers, their reading patterns, and their habits, so we are able to share this information with our customers. We know what is doing well with different subsets of readers. For example, 18-to-25-year-old women could have different reading preferences from older women. We use our content management tools and analytics tools to make sense of this data from all sources—websites, social media—and then use it as a basis for crafting story ideas for both readers and advertisers.”
