his years American Magazine Media Conference was all about media with hardly any attention paid to the actual magazines, but I did come across two revealing quotes:
- We carry higher CPMs for our brands that are first in print and then go to digital versus those that are only digital, said David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines. The print product makes it more premium in digital.
- The people that are left on the print side are just manning the wheel, and theyre not asked to come up with any ideas, said an anonymous ad sales finance director when Digiday asked, Is anyone even trying to think in an innovative way about print anymore?
Ouch, that second one really hit home. Right after I read the
Digiday piece, as if on cue a truly awful, horribly out-of-date direct-mail piece from
TIMEmagazine was excreted into my mailbox. This Creature from the Pre-Internet Lagoon reared up to remind us that solicitations for print subscriptions are as mindless as ever and increasingly out of touch with the realities of the business.
(Dont tell me this is an isolated case. For half the industry, innovation in subscription campaigns means, Lets copy what Time Inc. did.)
The letter came packaged in a nondescript envelope with a DO NOT BEND warning and no markings to indicate the sender as if it contained a credit card.
Related story: 14 Ways to Enhance the Marketing Power of Printed Magazines
Inside were four slips of paper of various sizes and colors, touting the special Senior Citizen (Ahem!) offer 53 issues for $20, plus an additional six months if paid up front. But, wait! Theres more: a free gift (with paid subscription) of a weather station clock.
Buried amidst the marketing copy was a brief description of the magazine itself e.g. Comprehensive coverage of world news and politics and TIME Person of the Year and all other Special Issues.
But nowhere was there a single word from the magazine itself or a peek at how it looked, other than an illegible image of one of the titles less inspiring covers. And, hello 21
st Century, not a link to where us oldsters could use that Interweb thing and get a sense of whats actually in the magazine.
Lets do the math: If you assume that
TIME pays at least $4 to buy, store, and ship each weather station clock, that leaves it $16 for a subscription covering nearly 80 issues. Or about 20 cents per issue not nearly enough to cover even the cost of a copys paper and postage. And were not even talking about the cost of the direct-mail solicitation.
There was a TIME, maybe 20 years or so ago, when that kind of math made sense. Keeping the circulation numbers up was so crucial to the flow of big advertising bucks that consumer publishers were happy to get new subscribers almost no matter what the cost.
But a peak at just about any recent issue will tell you that TIME has long passed. You can see why analysts estimate the print product is losing millions of dollars annually. And the trends are not favorable, with ad pages for U.S. consumer magazines apparently declining by a double-digit percentage last year.
Why, the analysts wonder, should Time Inc. continue pouring money into
TIME?
The David Carey quote suggests the answer: Being associated with a print magazine especially a respected, iconic title like
TIME has an immensely favorable impact both on a web sites traffic and its ad rates.
TIME.com, by all accounts, has a robust web business. The site does well in Google and other search engines, indicating that people who would never dream of paying for the magazine nevertheless turn to the magazines web site for news and insights. And that no doubt makes them more responsive to ads than are people watching cat videos.
My fellow denizens of the print side, the glory days of printed magazines arent coming back. But printed consumer magazines can still thrive by doing two things well:
- Assembling niche audiences of people who are passionate enough about our magazines to pay for them, and who in turn attract advertisers eager to reach those niche audiences. (Note: Senior citizens who happen to receive a magazine because they have a propensity for mail-order weather station clocks is not exactly an attractive target audience.)
- Bolstering the premium position of our companies multi-media publishing ventures so effectively that the magazines are considered successful even if theyre just breaking even.
In other words, the future for print looks more like the niche, subscribers-actually-pay-for-their-copies path chosen by
Newsweek than the mass, hit-the-ratebase-no-matter-what strategy that
TIME refuses to abandon. And it certainly doesnt involve pitching subscriptions to millions of people while giving them the impression that the magazine itself isnt worth looking at.
Written by D Edward Tree, February 21st 2017, published on Pubexec.com
Read the original article here