So now Tina Turner: On the cover of the March issue of the madam the singer can be seen on the seventieth anniversary edition of the fashion magazine. The issue is more than ten pages about the 82-year-old, who looks as if she stopped aging decades ago. But what about the aging process of Madame?
At the beginning of last year, the magazine publisher Bauer from Hamburg sold the magazine to the Munich PR agency Looping Group.
“It really shook us up”
The owner changed, the editor-in-chief stayed: Petra Winter has been in charge since 2014 madamshe is also managing director, together with Bettina Billerbeck, who previously worked for the Hamburg publishing house Gruner + Jahr for a long time, including as editor-in-chief of Beautiful living.
“The first year was a rollercoaster ride, we were more up than down, but it shook us up a lot,” she says in an interview. Looping boss Dominik Wichmann adds: “madam is clearly back in the black. The title is stabilizing, the sales figures are no longer falling so sharply, the decline in subscriptions is slowing down, but advertisements are growing strongly.” The increase in advertisements is clear, with some magazines 50 percent madam but continued to decline and was most recently at almost 69,000 copies, a good 18,000 of them in retail sales, at the beginning of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, it was almost 88,000 copies.
Petra Winter, editor-in-chief of the magazine “Madame”.
(Photo: Celine Gaille/imago/Runway Manhattan)
The magazine has been published monthly since 1950, initially under the name Figaro, as a “magazine for the well-groomed woman”, reading material for the hairdresser’s visit. After a legal battle with the French daily Le Figaro is the name of the magazine since 1952 madamit describes itself as Germany’s oldest fashion magazine.
After the takeover there was a facelift. The website of madam was largely discontinued. “We have switched off the online site, we no longer make a pure content site,” says Winter. In the luxury sector, click-driven models are not a recipe for making money. At the same time, a new business is to be set up on the Internet. “We want our platform ‘Maison Madame’ in the area of luxury health. That offers a lot of potential, the target group, women over 40 years of age, is quite willing to spend money,” says Billerbeck – a separate online shop is planned.
And so back to Tina Turner: As a pop star, you can obviously be 82 years old and look decades younger. And as a fashion magazine, it doesn’t age a day at the age of seventy: As the makers report, the average age of readers has fallen by five years since it was sold to the Looping Group and is around 47 years old.