Ad Sales Blog

The Newspaper extinction timeline

Whether you agree or not with the premise of this timeline, the very fact that someone has assembled one should give all in the print media world alarm. The charts creators do not seem like bomb throwing heretics. They calmly explain,

"This schedule for newspaper extinction shows best estimates given current trends. The timeline is intended to highlight the diversity of global media markets and stimulate useful strategic conversations.

Newspapers in their current form becoming insignificant is not the same as the death of news-on-paper, which will continue in a variety of forms. Ways that newspaper publishers of today will succeed in the transition beyond newspapers in their current form” include transitioning to other channels, providing personalized news-on-paper, and tapping niche markets."

Sounds sane enough. Best advice to newspaper people? Change with the times or move to Argentina, where print newspapers are forecast to exist until until 2039.  

Download the whole chart and study

 

FREE "Print is Alive!" download

Having a tough time with print media sales? Here is some help. I've been blogging about the viability of print advertising for years now. I've compiled a compendium of 27 posts into a 36 page PDF for free download. Here is the table of contents. Click on the link below to download:

1. Print magazines have never stopped selling pg.32. The future of print magazines: fewer, but just fine pg. 5
3. How print ads help generate web leads pg.7
4. Age of magazine readers rise, but slightly pg.8
5. Print sales tip from a Nielsen analyst: let's get physical pg.9
6. Beating "print is dead" with Ron Wall's iPod story pg. 10
7. Magazines: most credible source of "information about a company" pg.11
8. Young Americans: business magazines #1,Wikipedia #2 pg. 12
9. Push vs. Pull pg. 13
10. Docs prefer print! pg. 15
11. Recommend a URL in the next ad pg.16
12. Magazines are top source of readership trust pg.17
13. Magazines are a topWeb driver pg.18
14. Pushing paper advertising in Sweden pg.19
15. B-to-B digital revenue to top print by 2009 pg. 20
16. The magazine Engagement story pg.21
17. Study: magazines lift brand favorability and purchase intent best pg.23
18. Magazines drive buying intent... more than TV! pg.24
19. Just because you're "hot" doesn't mean people trust you pg.25
20. Repositioning print pg.26
21. Magazine and search synergy pg.28
22. Who still reads magazines? Everybody pg.31
23. Are newspapers old or new media? Yes. pg.32
24. Repositioning the magazine medium pg.33
25. Need a new ad business model? Think like Rupert pg.34
26. Selling print in a digital world: talk about "intent" pg.35
27. Selling print in a digital world: use "perspective" pg.36

Download Print is Alive! for FREE

Print magazines have never stopped selling

  At the just concluded Folio show Kerry Smith, Red7Media CEO, offered a surprising view of what the future of print publishing might be. Challenged, like all publishing companies, with the decline of print ad revenue, Smith has diversified his organization's offerings to include marketing services such as research, and consulting. But even as less of his company's revenue is tied to print he is more committed to it. Why? Because he has found that his magazines are most often the the first point of contact leading to the sale of all the other services he is now selling.  

Today, publishers of all kinds are using the presence they have in their markets to start related businesses. For example: 

• Premier Guitar, sells sheet music to subscribers
• Oil and Gas Journal sells industry data and research
• Dwell, a shelter book for the modern home, sells modern prefabricated homes

But this "new" tend where publishers use a magazine presence to sell products and services to readers is not so new. Marketers have used sponsored or branded magazines to do this for years. Despite the migration of ad dollars away from print magazines, the dollars flowing into sponsored magazines are going strong as documented early this year by The Financial Times: 

"According to the UK research body Mintel, this type of “customer publishing” is booming. It estimates that the industry in the UK alone is likely to be worth £1bn by 2013. Between 2008 and 2009 it grew 16 per cent, and by 2013 it is projected to increase by a further 22 per cent – no mean feat when the rest of the glossy magazine world is in the doldrums.

What attracts companies is the direct impact on consumers. “Our research has shown that these magazines create an eight per cent uptick in sales,” says Julia Hutchison, chief operating officer of the Association of Publishing Agencies, the representative for the customer publishing industry in the UK. “On average, every customer spends 25 minutes reading these titles. That’s 25 minutes spent with the brand. Lots of companies are redirecting their ad and marketing spends to this avenue.”

In the past, some sponsored publications were little more than product promos. But now, savvy marketers are investing in quality writers, photographers, and more objective journalism to attract larger audiences. The FT article continues:

"Whereas in-house magazines used to be glorified advertorials, today the branding is much more subtle and there’s a genuine effort to tap top editorial talents and introduce original material; Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, photographic stalwarts of the fashion publications Vogue and Visionaire, shot the latest YSL manifesto.

The investment makes sense: it gives depth to a brand in an environment they can control. It pushes product without the obvious “sell”, and in many instances may be cheaper than advertising.Asos’ title, for instance, which is known for its mix of celebrity, shopping and entertainment, is now the second largest women’s fashion title in the UK with an annual circulation of 471,522.

Terri Westlake, head of media at Asos.com, says, “Customers are savvy; they understand that it’s a brand title (and not independent), but they still appreciate a very good free magazine.”

Print magazines can provide marketers with a "media marquee" that gives them consistent visibility hard to duplicate in the crowed online world. What Kerry Smith, and a growing number of publishers are taking advantage of is the same benefit marketers using sponsored publications have used for years...print magazines sell!

Read the Whole article in FT

   

The future of print magazines: fewer, but just fine.

Print magazines will be around for many years, but they will be lot fewer in number. Why do I say this? Because as part of the study, “The Case for Advertising in Interactive Digital Magazines,” I measured the percentage of print magazine and website users who were “very actively involved” in their media. When I tabulated this against the age of the respondents, I found that younger respondents were less often heavy print magazine users. I found the opposite for heavy users of websites.

Why measure seriously involved media users? Because most often they determine the future of any media. If the most active users of Facebook started leaving where would Facebook be? Looking more like MySpace.

Print magazines readers skew older. The number of respondents who subscribe to more than

 

six print magazines increases steadily with every 10 years added to a respondent’s age. Almost half (47.6%) of the sample over the age of 70 subscribe to more than six print magazines. But with each 10-year decline in respondent age group, the number of serious magazine readers drops consistently.

For respondents under the age of 20, only about one in five (21.5%) subscribe to more than six print publications. Assuming readers maintain their reading habits as they age, there will be less demand for print magazines in the future.

But print magazines will not disappear. One in five (21.5%) under the age of 20 still subscribe to more than 6 magazines. While that is less than half the number for those over 70 who do so, it is still a very significant base. Print magazines are not dead, nor will they die. The difficult transition we are in now is a question of oversupply, not ineffectiveness. When magazines get though this transition there will be fewer of them but they will be robust once again.   

Information on “The Case for Advertising in Interactive Digital Magazines” can be found HERE. The chart above combines findings #16 and 17 from the study. The study was sponsored by VIVmag and Nxtbook Media.  

Hyperlocal without the hype

This video make me shudder and think. As Local Media Guru Gordon Borrell interviews BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis all the scary things we suspect about the future of local media check out. Local newspapers not changing fast enough to survive? Check. Local news without local newspapers? Check. But Jarvis is OK with  this. Why? Because journalism will survive. His model for how this will happen is fascinating. This video is worth your time watching:   

PS: I'm very proud that Gordon Borrell will be joining me at the Digital Magazine Symposium I'll be chairing on March 9th in New York City. I've been following him a long time. Few have the kind of insight he has.  

 

How print ads help generate web leads

Let’s talk about yellow page advertising. Here’s a form of advertising designed to elicit a response. Telmetrics, an advertising call tracking company released data earlier this month demonstrating the power of a unique URL as part of a print ad.

Telmetrics measured how many solid sales leads came from yellow page ads and compared how many came from a reader picking up the phone, versus reading a URL on the ad and responding online. 

Company president Bill Dinan made the assumption that most survey respondents would say they picked up the phone to engage the advertiser. He was correct, but surprised at how close it was when only 56% of leads came in via phone calls, and 44% came through a direct response of the URL printed on the ad. The study also discovered that unique URLs like  CallFlorists2.com were more often visited than client specific domains with URL extensions like Publisher.com/florists. If you want your print ad to generate a response keep the URL in the ad and keep it unique and simple.

Read the Telmetrics report

Age of magazine readers rise, but slightly

  Between 2001 and 2009 the median age of readers of consumer magazines rose by only 3%. This was reported last week by Media Post which crunched numbers from over 90 leading  consumer publications.  

How important is this?

I think it is a great cliche buster. I have worked with many publishers who have measured the age of their online readers and compared them to the age of their print readers. Most expected a big swing for the younger readers to online. Most were surprised. About 2/3 reported no difference in age, a third showed a slightly younger audience for online.

The cliche aged print reader and the cliche online teen reader are both just that, cliches. When measurements are applied, there is a slight shift, but not a big one. Young and older readers both like magazines and online media. 

On a call you can use this study to show how print is not such an old person's media after all.

Read the original study on Media Daily News

Print sales tip from a Nielsen analyst: let's get physical

Last Friday, Nielsen Analyst Alex Burmaster shared insight, hope, and a sales tip for print media reps. Burmaster took aim at the conventional wisdom that says that print, especially newspapers, will inevitably die. "Not so," says Burmaster and uses Nielsen Research findings from a parallel industry to make his point: 

"Whilst digital has major advantages over print in terms of immediacy and depth of content, there are some things that it simply can’t replace in the minds or lives of consumers. We saw a similar story a couple of years ago when it came to the effect of the digital industry on music sales. The predictable “death of the CD” headlines followed and whilst there is little debate that traditional CD sales have been hit hard, the format is by no means extinct.

Nielsen ran a large survey looking at why consumers still planned to buy CDs and reasons included: liking to physically own something (rather than an “abstract” mp3 file), having a physical collection that included the artwork, and being easier to port the music to other areas. For the majority, is there anything as simple as just grabbing a CD from the living room and taking it with you into the car? The industry has always had a tendency to over-estimate people’s technological familiarity and competency.

Of course, CDs are a different media from newspapers, but the themes of physicality, practicality, familiarity, and convenience for the masses are consistent themes. Digital can’t replace the traditional walk to get the morning papers, reading the Sunday papers in bed, or an impulse purchase of a newspaper for a train journey - not everyone has the desire or the access to a portable electronic device at every moment of the day.

Whether it’s habit, touch and feel, familiarity, techno-illiteracy or convenience, a significant chunk of the population will still require a physical version to hold in their hands."

While print media will see some downsizing, ultimately the physicality of print media may be what saves it.

Read all of Burmaster's post   

Beating "print is dead" with Ron Wall's iPod story

Ron Wall, Sr. VP of Publishing at Canon Communications shares a great story of how he beat a "print ads are dead" objection raised by a client by making him an offer he had to refuse. The client told Ron that print ads were not responsive and therefore of little value.

Ron countered by offering a FREE spread in his magazine. But there was a catch. The ad had to make an offer, have an 800 number, and anyone who called even just to inquire about the offer would get a free iPod.

The offer of a free spread got Ron's client thinking. What would the offer be? How many callers would buy as result? How many iPods would he have to give away? Whoa! A lot of free iPods!

As the client did the math and considered the number of people who might call to get a free iPod he realized it could run into hundreds or thousands. The client started backing off from Ron's offer. Then Ron, a twinkle in his eye, asked, "But wait a minute, didn't you just say print advertising is not responsive?"

Ron's point, that the right print ad can be very responsive had been made. Print is not dead, and print ads can generate response as long as they are designed with a compelling offer. Great story. Thanks Ron!

Magazines: most credible source of "information about a company"

My 7/8 post reviewed a 2008  Edelman Study that documented how young Americans rated Business magazines as #1 in credibility as a source of company information, and Wikepedia #2.

But as Gregory Kohs correctly commented, the Edelman study is not focused on young Americans, it is a world wide study focusing on business leaders.

While the "young American" finding was interesting, the more important finding is how business leaders, world wide, perceive different media.

Posted here is chart on media credibility as it relates to this broader audience. 

As with young Americans, business magazines were #1 followed by stock or industry analyst reports, then followed by Television.

This is a great report to bring on a call to document the credibility magazine advertising can bring to a marketing program.

Download the entire Edelman study