Monika Klinar: Life at Bonnier Corporation

My GROW experience has entered its last month, and up to now I haven't told you a lot about my work here at the Corporate Research Department at Bonnier Corporation. I better do it, so when I'm back home, I won't need to do a lot of explaining. As I've told you in my first post, Bonnier Corporation publishes more than 50 special interest magazines, related multimedia projects and events.

As said before, the role of the Corporate Research Department is to support ad sales and editorial initiatives of every magazine and its multimedia projects. It is done by using syndicated research data (print & online) and findings gained from primary researches. So half of my coworkers (we are 11 in the department) take care of research data requests from different groups of magazines. These data is pulled from syndicated researchers such as MRI, MMR, Nielsen, Comscore, PIB etc.

Magazines are divided into different groups by the interest they are covering, such as Marine (Yachting, Boating), Life & Style (Saveur and Garden Design), Travel (Islands, Caribbean Travel & Life), Parenting (Baby Talk, Parenting), Outdoor (Field & Stream, Outdoor Life), Science (Popular Science, American Photo), Working Mother (Working Mother), Mountain (Ski, Skiing), Transworld (Transworld Motocross, Transworld Surf), Water Sports (Sport Diver, Kiteboarding) and Snow/Spa (Spa, Snow). Each magazine has its own ad sales and editorial, which are not all located in Florida or in New York City but in many other cities. 

The other half of my co-workers work on custom research, which could be advertising editorial, web or market studies.  They work on online and direct mail studies, such as online reader studies, pre/post studies (before and after an ad campaign is finished), cover testing, advertising engagement studies, web visitors studies, market studies, etc. All custom online research is executed inhouse, which allows a lot of flexibility and of course costs and time savings. 

The department also supports different editorial initiatives, especially Working Mother initiatives, such as 100 Best Companies, Best Law Firms, Multicultural Women, Diversity Best Practices, etc.

So in the past two months I have worked on many different projects, mostly in the beginning (still) learning from co-workers and helping them with different research requests. I have been/am working on a project with a goal to join affluent readers of different magazines, who have "similar" features into networks of affluent readers. This joint syndicated research data will give ad sales people selling arguments to accomplish combined ad sales for more magazines at the same time. In addition, I have attended different ad sales and marketing meetings, presentations organized by the Magazine Publishers of America and visited Saveur's kitchen (Saveur is the magazine for lovers of authentic cuisine).

I hope that you now have a bit better idea about BCR and my work. To conclude today's post, back to my leisure time.  This weekend is going to be an exciting one, as I'm going to experience crazy Halloween (my co-workers told me that the Village Halloween parade is a must see) and the NYC marathon (if I'll manage to get up in the morning; luckily the clock changes this weekend). But first tomorrow I'm heading down to Washington, D.C. to say hi to the President.

Oh and yes, fall in NYC is beautiful (when it doesn't rain).

PS. I almost forgot to tell you that I managed to see a bunch of celebrities at the Sex and the City 2 movie location! Now, I only need to also get to the Gossip Girl set and I'll accomplish my celebrity track list:)