Agency Insider #1: BMA

In this first edition, agency insider Richard Muscat Azzopardi speaks to us about his experience in BMA ltd., a media venture he co-founded. Recently one of BMA's publication has joined TheTimes distribution network. Curious as we tend to be about media we emailed BMA to get to know why after 74 issues they decided to change the magazine's distribution.

How long have you been working on print products?
We, as BMA (and previously as MB Creations) (www.bma.com.mt) have been working on print design since 1999, but it was only in 2004 that we entered the hectic market of publications. A publication is the mother of all print jobs for many reasons, but in this case we were handling the publication from inception to print. This adds a completely new dimension to the job and involves much more than pretty lines on a page. From commissioning articles and writing them in house to chasing advertisers at all the different stages of the process to the complete design and export of the final product, no amount of experience in design can prepare you for the whirlwind that is a publication. We had no one in house who had ever published magazines, so we made loads of mistakes and paid for them, sometimes dearly. By one year later, though, we had arrived at a winning formula which gave us one of the best publications on the island.

Why Boats & Yachting (www.boatsandyachting.com)?
It all came about from a chance meeting between Matthew and Mario Psaila, the previous publisher, who had a dormant magazine. Half jokingly he offered it to us since it hadn't been published for over a year. Matthew took him up on the offer, and with Richard's boating background it seemed like a logical publication to start off with. In time we bought out the magazine and turned it into the successful venture you know today.

Why did the magazine move to The Times (distribution wise)?
With the previous format & distribution of B&Y we had 6,000 happy readers but we were finding that the scope for growth was quite limited. The magazine was always supported solely by advertising (our previous cover price of EUR 3.5 hardly covered the printing cost, let alone all the other expenses) so we thought we'd move to a medium which can attract a wider base of advertisers related to the boating and luxury industry. The change was much more radical than simply moving distribution to The Times as the change was a major conceptual upheaval. B&Y lost its news and brokerage (boats for sale to landlubbers) completely and was turned into a feature magazine, with longer articles which are not time sensitive in nature. This was backed with a change in frequency, which went down from bimonthly to quarterly. A new product was launched together with B&Y's first issue in The Times - On Deck. This is a newspaper supplement printed on thick white paper which will cover current boating news and brokerage more frequently and with very flexible advertising options.

Any plans for your agency and other work you do?
Our agency is currently growing and changing at the same time. We are focusing our sights on 2 main fields: publications and web media. In the field of publications we currently have 3 regular ones and are working on some others. The first two are Boats and Yachting and On Deck, which we've spoken about already, while the third is Nitro ( www.nitro.com.mt) - Malta's first free motorsport magazine. We've been publishing As for web media, we are specialising in rich media content - interactive games and software to enhance web advertising and the web presence of clients who want something more for their visitors.

What to expect from BMA in 2008?
A lot. We are currently working on two brand new publications - Nomads (A travel magazine) and InPulZ (a health and wellbeing magazine) to be published first in March and April respectively. These shall be distributed with The Times and will be similar to B&Y in production values and size. In addition to these magazines which have already been confirmed, we're closing in on deals to publish another couple of magazines, while we also aim to put Drive (our own new car magazine - there was a 16 page preview in Issue 76 of B&Y) into gear (excuse the pun) and publish it throughout the course of this year. That is not to mention expansion in the rich media design business thanks to some major international clients we are currently courting, a probable move to a larger office and further recruitment.