Magazine Brands Coming Second To Risk Aversion

In response to this, Stevie Spring, chief executive of Future plc, put forward her thoughts on how magazine brands have taken a back seat in a risk averse climate: “You look at the base advertising revenues and there is almost a perfect storm happening of a huge explosion of inventory, not just in magazines, not just in print, but in online, in TV, in radio.

“Inventory growth of 20%, advertising spend growth of 10% means advertising yields go down, and that means everybody having to look at different ways of producing what we produce more cost efficiently.

“I think there is also a whole generation of media planners and buyers who’ve grown up thinking that all impacts are equal, and an eyeball’s an eyeball. In the olden days we all used to spend all of our time saying ‘the value of a pair of eyeballs in my medium is enhanced because the editorial environment is appropriate, people are reading it for four hours as opposed to 40 seconds.’

“To be honest, I don’t hear a lot of those conversations anymore. I hear ‘I want a guarantee on your launch’ and ‘I want a guaranteed cost per thousand and if you wont give me that cost per thousand I can get it [for example] at Monkey online or Google click-through’. We’re going inexorably into that risk aversion and forgetting about the branding environment and the longevity of building brands.”

Mendoza was in agreement with Spring’s comments, saying: “Agencies in general are being pushed into a position where they have to argue for a premium. The marketing guy has ceded the argument to the procurement people, the procurement people then rely on audited companies and the auditors and the procurement people have a conversation with the agencies as to why they paid more for a page in whatever than another agency did. And, to be honest, you don’t put yourself in that position if you can avoid it. Why would you if you were in our shoes? You go for the guarantees.

“Having come from the Thinkbox thing yesterday, which was pushing commercial television as a medium, I would ask whether the PPA does anything for you to push magazines as a medium. From what I hear there’s too much infighting and not enough looking to the outside of the market at how you promote magazines.”

Luckily for Mendoza, fellow panelist Paul Keenan, CEO of Emap Consumer Media, is also chairman of PPA Marketing and he was happy to discuss this.

Talking about research which the PPA carried out last year, Keenan said: “The research discovered that the planning community in agencies believe that magazines and magazine companies have got some fantastic arguments to prove that magazine advertising works, but perhaps what we weren’t doing was animating those messages sufficiently to get them read and understood.

“So we’ve spent a reasonable period of time this year just thinking about the benefits of magazine advertising and it’s really interesting because were we to have invented the magazine form this year, this is what we’d be saying, we’d say ‘advertising in magazines is opted in, it’s not disruptive, you the audience choose to consume it’. Advertising in magazines gets the undivided attention of the audience and is hugely relevant.

“We have the evidence to prove that if you add magazine advertising to a mixed media schedule, the magazine advertising piece of it works. It delivers awareness, it delivers sales, it delivers brand awareness.So I take the criticism that we haven’t prosecuted our argument strongly enough, it’s not because of infighting, it’s just because we’ve been a bit busy with other things, but we intend to correct that, we intend to get out there with the sales forces that we’ve got and prosecute that argument more forcefully.”