Ad Sales Blog

Keep the “pure plays” from cleaning your clock!

It is happening right now in many many industries and sectors. Web only competitors, "pure play" online publishers, are sneaking in and winning ad sales away from the online products of print publishers. How can they do this? Don’t we have an insurmountable advantage by having a print product continually advancing our brand in the physical world? How do the pure play Internet companies even stand a chance?

"Pure plays" routinely beat the products of print based publishers because they design a new newsletter, webinar, web section, or website, by starting with a clean sheet of paper. Since they have no print vehicle to get them started the "pure plays" design a media product desperate for attention. Every click through they get has is funneled from somewhere else so there has to be an amazingly good reason for a visit. This “clean sheet of paper” approach results in a high emphasis on focus and functionality. It takes an extremely sharp content focus to stand out against the millions of online destinations and when a visitor arrives there must be a high functionality that keeps visitors coming back.               

Print people are spoiled. Too often when a magazine launches a web product the editorial focus the same or similar to the positioning as the print product. As for functionality, too often the mission statement is, “To extend the magazine brand onto to the Internet.” Big mistake. Your website needs its own editorial focus, and mission. While it should compliment your print product it cannot just extend it.

To compete, pretend your print product does not exist, then ask, "Given all online destinations and content on the web, why should anyone visit my website?" To beat the pure play publishers, you have to think like one. You too have to start with that clean sheet of paper and work your way forward.

Is magazine myopia going local?

In the late 80s while managing the sales and marketing of CableVision magazine I saw magazine myopia at its worst. As I watched, first hand, the rapid growth of many new cable networks I wondered how the opportunities they represented had slipped by my publishing peers: 

• Why didn't someone at Sports Illustrated start ESPN?
• Why didn't someone at Time or Newsweek start CNN?
• Why didn't someone at Rolling Stone start MTV?
• Whey didn't someone at National Geographic start the Discovery Channel?

The list could go on...but I fear history could be repeating itself, this time with regional magazines.

  eMarketer's August released report, "Local Online Advertising, Measuring the Market" should be a shrill alarm to local publishers that the opportunity for online product development is slipping to others. Even with established local brands they are loosing to regional "pure play" media competitors. Three charts from the eMarketer study tell the scary tale:

First, chart one, local media is growing. Good news.

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Second, national media is growing faster than local and will take market share away. Not such good news.

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Third, the scary news in growth of sales: while local publishers had flat online market share against year prior, with newspapers actually slipping, local pure play media organizations are galloping away with the prize.

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Someday, a Baltimore resident might look back and ask,

• "Why didn't someone at Baltimore magazine start BaltimoreOnlineAdventures.com?"

Read a review of the study on the IAB website

Sympatico review

Buy the entire survey at the eMarketer Website