July 13, 2005
This is the fourth and final segment in a series which set forth the unprecedented opportunity facing magazine publishers today as a result of fragmenting media markets, as well as the major challenges which publishers must confront before the promise of this opportunity can be fully realized. The two challenges about which I wrote previously were:
- The relatively high cost of buying magazine advertising
- The need for more timely and issue specific circulation and audience data
The last major challenge is the need to embrace change and to aggressively explore new models of relating to both advertisers and consumers. According to Veronis & Suhler, consumer magazines’ share of the communications industry has declined from 3.6% to 2.9% from 1999-2003. During this same period, the internet grew from a 2.6% share to a 3.9% share, while garnering a dramatically larger share of consumer time, attention, and spending. Among consumer media, our industry’s growth rate of 3% exceeds only that for newspapers. Clearly, unless we want to go the way of gaslights or buggies, we must find ways to increase the relevance of our brands to our two principal constituencies.
As the needs – and rules – of the marketplace change, we must be ready to redefine our businesses, our relationships with our customers, and our business practices.
It seems clear to me that the best thing that publishers can do for advertisers is to maintain – and expand upon – the already highly interactive relationship that magazine brands have with their readers. Yet few, if any, magazine publishers are striving to establish platform-neutral relationships with consumers. Yes, the business models are still evolving, and the new models which rely more heavily on the electronic delivery of more timely information may not appear to be as profitable as the old ways have been. However, if publishers do not decide to adopt a more consumer-centric approach to content delivery, then the audiences that comprise the core of magazines’ value proposition are going to continue to erode over time – and our medium will be rendered increasingly irrelevant.
You have to go back less than a century to find a time in which almost all media was print media. Since the advent of commercial radio in the 1920’s, the importance of printed media has been in a state of near-continuous decline. If we persist in letting paper and ink define our product, we are doomed.
We must be willing to define our businesses more broadly and in ways that allow us to better serve our clients needs. For example, print’s low share of ad spending is often attributed to the limitations of print creative:
- The poor creative quality of print advertising
- The inherent preference of “creatives” for television
- The fact that, since it is often an afterthought, print creative is less likely to be ready by the time we need it.
The MPA’s Kelly Awards represent one of our industry’s better attempts to deal with this issue. With the unbundling of services offered by traditional advertising agencies and the emergence of media agencies, an opportunity has been created for publishers to step in and fill the void of print creative. Most of these agencies no longer care about the source of the advertising they place. Instead, they are focused on whether or not it effectively delivers an appropriate message to appropriate audiences at appropriate times. No one knows magazine audiences better than the magazines themselves. Publishers need to get into the business of creating high quality ads for advertisers that leverage their intimate knowledge of their readers and their readers’ preferences.
Where we are poorly served by existing business practices, we must change those practices. The ways in which magazines are sold have changed little in 20 years. We still fight over pages rather than magazines’ share of total spending. We continue to disparage our most direct competitors to the detriment of our industry and ourselves. We continue to avoid looking ahead to the inevitable longer-term effects of these practices, as we struggle to contain the damage already inflicted. We must start looking forward and developing more positive ways to capitalize upon the strength of our content and the relationships it allows us to forge with our readers.
Media fragmentation is presenting magazine publishers with a unique opportunity. If we are to make the most of this opportunity we must be willing to develop new ways of relating to both consumers and advertisers. In short, we must change.
