Fueling Magazines’ Failures
As September drop-deads are upon us, I’m hearing a lot about tumbling circulations and ad pages continuing to fade from magazines. While it’s true that advertising budgets are trending downward, we have to remember that this started long ago. Before big government bailouts, unemployment surges, mass foreclosures, and the fall of the auto industry, the once booming magazine industry has been quietly suffering.
The strength of magazines didn’t take such an immediate pummeling from things like the mass adoption of the internet as it’s printed sibling newspapers did. But as more consumers’ dollars were allocated to cell phones and broadband connections, magazines began to see circulations decrease. In early desperation, some publications falsified audit reports or inflated verified circulations, dumping titles in unnecessary public places. They began to lose the faith of their advertising partners, and some began to close.
Planners paying attention began demanding cleaner circulations along with deeper discounts, free space, premium placement, product integration, cross-platform opportunities. With the negative press, they had to deliver greater ROI to clients. Even titles which had historically refused to negotiate began making “special exceptions” and “finding loopholes.”
While a great value for clients and making the negotiator look like hot-stuff, the additional decrease in revenue only fueled magazines’ woes. Combined with the economy’s hard fall, titles both young and old began to announce last issues. Those same planners once considered savvy are now finding themselves knocked for buying “cheap space” in a title that didn’t survive. (Shameless Plug: Check out Magazine Death Pool for more dirt.)
Today, clients are uncertain of budgets, don’t trust signing annual plans and don’t know which title is going to be cut next. Their lower budgets are still forcing even higher ROI expectations, yet the lack of commitment means positioning can rarely be negotiated, decreasing the medium’s value. Of course, that means they’ll need to balance that loss with even bigger discounts and more free pages.
As a media planner, I jokingly used to say that I was a “media fundraiser” to folks not in advertising. (Lest I be asked, again, if I write the commercials.) Today, I wonder if I should’ve spent more time focusing on getting those funds approved, and a little less time doing multiple rounds of negotiations with titles I was forcing out of business.