The Jackal

Idea

Introduction

The Jackal is an upmarket lifestyle media brand aimed at an affluent, urban male audience. We believe our smart-dressing, smart-living, smart-thinking content offers approachable and intelligent advice with curated content ‘for stylish minds’. Launched into a stale men’s magazine market, The Jackal provides luxury brands with a dynamic new communication channel to communicate with this elusive audience.

The free distribution model allows us to deliver scale (currently over 99k copies which already makes us the UK’s second biggest upmarket men’s magazine), and avoids the historical challenges associated with newsstand magazines and their declining circulations. This allows us to blend together the quality of print, the dynamism of free distribution and the scale of digital.

In addition to the media brand we also run a creative content studio that specialises in working with luxury brands who want to engage with an affluent, urban audience.

Intended impact

The Jackal was conceived to fill a gap in the market for a title aimed at affluent, intelligent, urban men who are no longer buying newsstand magazines. Our free distribution model allows us to reach this elusive audience by targeting them via ‘brand-to-hand’ at 25 London transport hubs; and ‘in-venue’ at five airports, the Eurostar, corporate businesses, 5-star hotels, private members’ clubs, menswear stores and other upmarket establishments.

We’ve already partnered with over 40 luxury and premium brands who are keen to engage with our audience.

With luxury ad-spend in magazines, online, video and social set to reach £251m in 2019, we have a huge opportunity for growth.

Our ambition is to make The Jackal the UK’s most influential upmarket men’s lifestyle media brand. This investment will allow us to increase our publishing frequency, grow our digital audience, build up the creative content studio and ready the business for an e-commerce launch.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We launched The Jackal in March 2017 and since then we have:
- published eight magazines, with an audited circulation of 99,568 (ABC Jan-Dec 2017) and one newspaper
- built a digital following of over 27,800 subscribers
- hosted six reader events.

We’ve been commercially successful having worked with over 40 luxury and premium advertisers, either through traditional media advertising or through the production of creative content under the studio. These include:
- Cartier
- Rolex
- Bentley
- Omega
- Hugo Boss
- Chopard
- Floris London
- Audi
- Gieves & Hawkes.

Alongside the fortune, The Jackal is delivering fame too. Walpole, the UK’s official sector body for UK luxury, named us as one of their twelve Brands of Tomorrow for 2018 (Feb 2018). We were a finalist for Launch of the Year at the 2018 British Media Awards (May 2018). We’ve also been featured on the FT.com and in the Evening Standard (September 2018).

And we’ve achieved all of this without any investment.

Monetisation strategy

The Jackal is the primary revenue generator representing 72% of our total earnings, primarily driven by display advertising which accounts for 86%. The remaining 14% is generated by creative partnerships - sponsored shoots/content, film production, social amplification and events; however our strategy will be to focus on creative partnerships and reverse the split. We plan for additional revenue streams to come from magazine subscriptions, affiliates and eventually ecommerce.

The studio generates revenues through branded content for the luxury sector including content creation, customer publishing, film and shoot production, brand identity, art direction, digital design, brand positioning and consultancy.

The Jackal and the studio are extremely effective at raising awareness of the other which serves to create many more commercial opportunities than either one could do alone.

Our ambition to exit through sale of the business will provide investors with a return on their original investment.

Use of proceeds

The investment we’re seeking in this round will be spent in three areas:

1 - Adding to the commercial team to build on our success with media agencies and client direct relationships. We'll focus on creative media partnerships for The Jackal and strengthen the content and strategic services we already offer via the studio.

2 - Recruiting additional editorial resource to allow us to increase our print frequency to six issues per year in 2019 and rollout a significantly upgraded digital offering across online, email, social and audio.

3 - Upgrading our content amplification to include paid SEO and social, email marketing and content discovery platforms.

A breakdown of how we intend to use the funds is as follows:
65% Talent acquisition.
35% Content creation and amplification.

We believe this will position the company for strong growth and expansion towards our longer term objectives.

Notices

The Jackal currently has two director's loans worth £20,000 in total which accrue no interest. These loans will not be repaid from the funds raised on Seedrs.