Magazine advertising- Yesterday's Pizza?

by Bob Maxwell on 29 Oct 2008 When advertisers in the 1980’s signed magazine advertising contracts, they knew half of their advertising budget was being wasted but they just did not know which half.

That is the well-known lament by advertisers: 'I know half of my advertising spend is wasted; I just don't know which half.' It's usually attributed to one of three famous, early entrepreneurs of mass consumer product companies and retailers, John Wanamaker among them. But that was before the rise of the Internet.

For the last hundred years, leisure industry magazines have claimed audiences based on number of magazines that might have been printed and might have been read by multiple readers, who allegedly read every single magazine page.

Every method was used; magazine coupon competitions, special coded single issue, single publication offers, to try and gauge which magazines delivered and which did not.

However it was very hard to make marketing decisions, with very poor data and a 60 day lag, from signing off on an ad to seeing it print, in reality it was for many just a leap of faith.

Media commentators suggested the 4.5 readers that are supposed to read every magazine might have been recorded after surveys in Doctors surgeries and questioned just how many readers read magazines from cover to cover, except when flying on long haul 747’s.

Now, wind the clock forward 25 years and we are in a different (Internet) world.

Round the world Special Interest magazines are buckling as volumes drop away at an alarming rate, going from twice monthly to monthly, getting noticeably thinner and in many cases ceasing production.

No rocket science here.

News, pictures, video and all kinds of detailed information is available online 24x7, indexed, alerted - and the audience has voted with their mice. Smart advertisers have followed the audience and in doing so, have discovered a new world.

Launch a new product online and the marketplace knows about it in a few hours.

Online advertising and promotion analysis provides mind-blowing detail.

Now when a company uses the right internet technology, they can send a newsletter about their new products to their online mailing base and know which clients have opened that newsletter and read the introduction and which clients have read more detail on that new product.

No wonder this interactive advertising medium continues to record giant growth rates while print media is shrinking away.

A recent European survey of almost 1200 advertisers found that 40% were funding a rapidly expanding online advertising budget by slashing their print budgets and 32% from direct mail/brochure budgets.

One senior executive from a major international boating industry manufacturer, explaining while they were cancelling large slabs of print media while expanding their online advertising expenditure, put it in simple terms... '‘magazine advertising is yesterday's pizza’.