Name just about any human endeavor you can think of, and chances are there’s a magazine devoted to it. However, the flip side of wide title choice is that many magazines don’t reach enough consumers to be effective — and survival in the competitive magazine business is tough. Witness the recent collapse of some of the best-funded and most heavily promoted publications! Magazine revenue totaled $17.7 billion in 2000, a 14 percent increase over 1999. There were 347 new magazines launched in 2000, adding to a base of nearly 18,000 titles on nearly every subject ever put to paper. Look at 2001, however, and things seem a little cloudier.
Several high-profile magazines have badly missed their circulation targets.
The magazine industry is worried about the future of reading in this country — and with good reason. The sad fact is that everyone reads less than they used to (many because they simply have less free time to devote to reading). Reaching that coveted 18-34-year-old demo by advertising in magazines is becoming increasingly difficult. Advertisers are looking at the next generation of time-challenged, seemingly print-indifferent shoppers and feeling some well-justified concerns about the nature of magazines’ readership base. Consumer magazines do mesh well with the needs of some advertisers, however. Specialty magazines, with their well-defined niches, can offer targeting opportunities for the advertiser willing to do careful research into consumer behavior and magazines’ audience composition. Moreover, magazines’ portability means that a magazine ad may in some cases be seen outside the home. Of course, the flip side of wide title choice is that many magazines serve too small a niche to be effective advertising tools for companies wishing to reach a broad market segment. Also, some magazines’ practice of clustering ads means recall of your ad may suffer unless you purchase a full-page ad — an expensive proposition.
Advantages
- Readership: According to spring 2001 Simmons data, 89 percent of adults age 18 and older say they read one or more magazines.
- Target ability: Specialty magazines allow advertisers to target consumers demographically, by product affinity, or by lifestyle.
- Strong Visuals: Magazine ads can be highly creative and aesthetically appealing through the effective use of photography, graphics, color, and copy.
- Portability: Magazines can be carried by consumers and read almost anywhere, at any time (in-car being one notable exception).
- Advertorial: An in-depth advertising message can be created to appear more like editorial copy than an advertisement, although most magazines require such advertorials to be identified as advertising rather than editorial content.
- Localizing: Regional/local editions, polygraph inserts, and local “vista” magazines offer local advertising opportunities.
Disadvantages
- Competition: There are too many magazines — and too many choices. Advertisers and consumers have nearly 18,000 magazine titles from which to choose, many of which do not survive their first year of publication.6
- Time: The average person spends only 5 or 6 percent of his or her daily media time reading magazines.
- Clutter: Magazines contain so much advertising that ad readership and recall is minimal. The typical magazine contains over 50 percent advertising, so there’s little opportunity for consumers to absorb both the editorial content and advertising.
- Reach: The proliferation in the number of magazines means audience fractionalization, and most magazines actually miss most of their avowed target audiences.
The average issue of Business Week reaches less than 3 percent of all professional managerial adults, and
Good Housekeeping misses more than 86 percent of adult women8.
- Inflexible: Because of lead time, advertising must be prepared long before publication dates, prohibiting advertisers from responding instantly to changing market conditions.
- Expensive: Increased distribution and production costs have forced magazines’ cost-per-thousand to almost double in the past 10 years.
