The timing of a nuclear meltdown on wall street and uncertainty as advertisers try to find a strategy online could not be worse for magazines:
Ad spending across the major U.S. media fell at its steepest rate since the industry’s last recession in 2001, according to new data released this morning by ad tracking service TNS Media Intelligence.– Report Here.
Maybe instead of a slow painful decline we can quickly hit the bottom and start implementing strategies for a recovery and rethink the priorities of printed magazines.
Here’s a strategy:
Time magazine has more than 3 million readers in print and currently does 82 million page views online, and president and worldwide publisher Ed McCarrick thinks the brand can “easily do 200 million page views” online in the near future. “We must be constantly innovative to earn audience back each day,” said McCarrick, who delivered the opening keynote at the FOLIO: Show here today.
Online advertising revenue currently accounts for about 10 percent of overall revenue at Time and is projected to grow by 57 percent in 2008 and another 35 percent to 40 percent in 2009, according McCarrick.
While McCarrick thinks online will eventually account for 30 percent to 35 percent of overall revenue, “offline revenue is still the big engine.” Still, one medium is leveraged with another. “We’re putting together a multifaceted approach and it’s no longer clean in terms of one media being separate from another.”– Story Here.
Here’s a rethinking of priorities:
From an interview with John P. Loughlin, executive VP and general manager for Hearst Magazines (here); listen to his mantra people:
“Clearly, the challenge given the current economy is convincing consumers that magazines as an impulse purchase are worth every penny. For publishers, it’s a double whammy. Publishers are under enormous cost pressures at the same time that unit sales are down, but it’s critical that we not react by diminishing the quality of the physical product or magazines’ content value proposition for the consumer.”
and
“The challenge for our magazine editors, and for all of us involved in maximizing our magazine sales, is to provide and convey that compelling value proposition to the consumer.”
and
“Which comes back once again to my point that magazines must provide even higher perceived value to the consumer, maybe even more so during this economic turbulence.”
Here’s web marketing guru Seth Godin on selling products to consumers:
Godin’s overarching theme is simple: Companies can no longer rely on mass-media advertising to sell average products to average consumers. Instead, they must create remarkable products and services and let consumers do the marketing themselves to generate a buzz. In the “new marketing” landscape that Godin chronicles, the balance of power has shifted from companies to consumers, thanks to TiVo, spam filters, blogs, and YouTube (GOOG). — Interview here.