Bauer Leverages Influencers for Exclusive Walmart Magazine

Bauer Media Group teamed with the influencers behind the popular Whoa, Wait. Walmart? Instagram microblog to launch a shoppable magazine exclusively for the retailer."Partnering with influencers is a strategy to bring new users into the magazine category," says project lead Melissa Meredith, vice president of sales and shopper marketing at Bauer. “They’re content creators and voices that people really trust so we wanted to test that in a magazine and partner with our biggest customer, Walmart.”Dubbed Whoa, Wait., the multifaceted lifestyle publication launched across all Walmart supercenters and Neighborhood Market stores in early September, following a survey of hundreds of Walmart shoppers. Products featured in the magazine are available at Walmart and the content was overseen by influencers Bethany Halford and Amanda Jerkins, whose Instagram account focuses on fun Walmart finds across a variety of categories and boasts a mostly female following of more than 300,000.“Everything is chosen by Bethany and Amanda,” Meredith says. “We feel like we want to stay very true to that because that’s what they do online. The advertorials, though, those are things that Bethany and Amanda help collaborate on and that we can place adjacent to relevant editorial.”The Walmart shopper marketing community has been very receptive to the magazine, Meredith says, with ad sales maxing out early in the process and pushing the issue’s final page count from 96 to 104. Among the inaugural advertisers were Clorox Co., Bayer, GSK’s Flonase, Markwins Beauty Brands’ Physicians Formula, DeMert Brands’ Not Your Mother’s, Procter & Gamble’s Align, Henkel’s Persil ProClean and Unilever’s Suave. Relevant advertorials and editorial pages include a callout for Walmart’s Online Grocery Pickup service.“We can collaborate with teams here on where this goes and what works best. I really want people to think of it as something that’s living and breathing, especially from an advertiser perspective,” Meredith says.Some advertisers have taken advantage of QR code Click2Cart technology Bauer is testing from Atlanta-based SmartCommerce across several beauty pages in the magazine. Additionally, a partnership with Shopkick offers a $5 incentive for shoppers who download the mobile application using an exclusive promo code and walk into stores within the next seven days.“The QR code or potentially a text add-to-cart function is really important because we want people to be able to purchase and not get frustrated. Everyone knows it might be buried on walmart.com,” Meredith says. “Our plan is to expand the QR codes into other sections of the magazine and then to partner with Shopkick in a bigger way … working with Bethany and Amanda to get some of that engagement around the Shopkick offers but also partnering with some of the advertisers in the magazine to create some sort of Shopkick ecosystem around the magazine when it’s in stores.”Walmart has been supportive on both the merchandising and marketing side of the partnership. “Bethany and Amanda used their connections with people at Walmart and their suppliers to get samples of what would be in stores in the fall for the first issue,” Meredith says. “We were also invited to Walmart’s Saturday morning meeting, where Bethany and Amanda were interviewed by the social media team and did Walmart radio spots."The influencers additionally leveraged their pre-existing relationship with celebrities Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard to include an interview about the exclusive Hello Bello line they launched at Walmart in April.In stores, the magazine is stocked upfront alongside Meredith Corp.’s People magazine on the impulse checkout racks as well as in the back of the store in the magazine section of the entertainment department, where it is supported with “New at Walmart” signs. The inaugural issue will be on sale through November and the spring issue will drop in February 2020, after which the magazine will publish on a regular quarterly cadence.Price testing is ongoing to determine if the current $9.99 price point — on the lowest end of Bauer’s price range for a perfect bound, matte-finish publication — is right for the price-conscious Walmart shopper. So far, sales have been outpacing Bauer’s typical special interest publications.

P2PI MEMBERS

JOIN P2PI

You May Also Like

Hall of Fame Profile: Pamela Velarde

Hall of Fame Profile: Stephen Bettencourt