Challenge

The Hearst portfolio contains some of the world’s most iconic magazine brands. As part of an extensive programme of transformative initiatives to enhance their brands’ propositions, as well as to increase and diversify revenue streams, Clock was engaged to design and develop a platform for housing membership programmes for Hearst’s brands.

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Solution

Clock has extensive experience in the publishing space, building loyalty and rewards platforms for publishers globally for the past 15 years. For the Hearst project, the starting point was the iconic Elle brand. The goal? Create a membership programme called Elle Collective, that sits above the standard digital and print subscription propositions, by offering members access to curated promotions, offers, and experiences as well as exclusive fashion and beauty content, inspiring advice from industry experts.

Working closely with Hearst’s team, Clock designed, built and architected the platform to enable the Hearst team to drive engagement and acquisition strategies, all from one place. An intuitive CMS was built to facilitate easy management of the programme, with a host of redemption types and options available to engage members. 

Whilst the front-end experience was customised to ensure it is on-brand for Elle Collective initially, the back-end was built to enable Hearst’s business’ strategy of adding more brand membership programmes in the future, with all programmes being controlled and managed from the same place. 

Integrating with Hearst’s identity provider, we built a seamless experience that allowed members to simply access and interact with the new programme, without the need for multiple email and passwords. At the same time, the platform delivers more first party data to give Hearst additional insight into the wants and needs of its members.

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Results

With Elle Collective successfully launched late 2023, the programme is already making great strides and the next phase of development is well under way. The platform Clock has built is enabling Hearst UK to drive and create new revenue streams by delivering greater and wider value to fans of its iconic brands. An exciting progression in the history of one of the UK’s most well known media companies.