Targeted placement

Reaching your audience in a cost-efficient way is becoming an increasingly complex challenge. The myriad of alternative media and channels available has served to complicate the issue rather than simplify it and the promotion of magazines is no exception.

Way back when

Indeed, the magazine business faces more hurdles than most, created largely because of its recent history and current travails. For those of you who can only remember one Germany and have only seen Travolta as a portly actor rather than a dancing god, the roots of the current circumstances lie buried back in the seventies. At that time, magazines reached their audiences through a wholesale network in excess of 350, 150 of whom were independently owned. Retail Newsagent featured over 30 magazine distributors in its pages. The independent retailer universe was not very different to that of today in terms of numbers, but there were no exclusive wholesale territories (Scotland always excepted) and supermarkets were in their infancy, predominantly cut-price purveyors of core food products. Many of the major magazine brands were supplied on firm sale, so there was no need for a mechanism to trap sales data; what the wholesaler bought was what the magazine sold. The amount of copies actually purchased by the consumer was a closed book. Consequently, "marketing" was confined to low-key promotions (unpaid) at WHS railway bookstalls and publishers’ urging of wholesalers to take additional copies on sale or return and "boxing them out". In other words, an un-managed process steeped in apathy described memorably at the time as "a torpid monolith".

Fortunately, the magazine universe was only about half the current size, as many of the sectors we now take for granted didn’t exist and "me-too" publishing was in its infancy. However, by the mid-eighties, publishers, driven by cost-per-thousand orientated agency media buyers, needed more information to fight their corner in the media mix, given the growth of local radio and the sheer reach of television. The wholesale arena responded with early copy placement systems such as Newscope and MicroLink, becoming marketing companies overnight; information technology had arrived, but two events of the late eighties were to change everything forever.

NI & Tesco rock the boat

The first of these was the decision by News International in 1987 to issue a tender document to its then current wholesale network, an unprecedented move which stirred every other publisher and distributor to follow suit within the next twelve months. The politics of Maxwell ensured that a separate wholesaler to the NI appointee had to be used wherever possible, creating the "crazy patchwork quilt" of a wholesale map which took a decade to morph into today’s comparatively simple and cost-effective structure. Secondly, and in its own way rather more formative, there was the announcement by Tesco in 1989 that it would no longer handle magazine product on firm sale. This single decision ensured that information technology would become the fastest-growing department in every sector of publishing during the 1990’s. That decade saw the demise of over 100 independent wholesalers, the closure or merger of two-thirds of the distributor universe and the explosive growth of magazine titles, viewed increasingly as brands to differentiate themselves from usurpers taking advantage of cheaper entry cost thanks to desk-top publishing technology and suppressed paper prices.

Doesn’t that all sound very positive? We have a rationalized industry, thriving on new product, using the very latest technology to identify and service carefully-selected consumers. Or is it really much different from what went before? There may well be a leaner industry in structural terms, but it is still trying to cater for a volume of product which threatens to overwhelm it. Whatever your belief, you must consider a wide range of questions to allocate your marketing budget to maximum effect.

Questions to ask

What is the return on your retail promotional spend? Do you know which half is wasted? What has been the cost of unsolds on your newstrade distribution over the last twelve months? How will the OFT’s intervention affect availability and sales in the next twelve? What will be the real cost of supplying the major retail chains in the future? How should you foster alternative channels to reach your audience? What are they? Where can they fit into your business model? How will you ensure that your clients and agencies continue to put you on the schedules? What are your competitors doing to focus better on targeted distribution? More importantly, what are you doing about it?

Whatever the individual answers are to these questions, there are some generic ones. The newstrade waste bill is still over 40% on too much product. The changes proposed by the OFT to the magazine network will muddy that particular channel’s waters considerably and add to that figure, certainly in the short term. The cost of retail promotions will continue to rise inexorably, although probably unmatched by a commensurate increase in delivery. Listing fees and national distribution deals may well figure on some future agendas already. Maintaining your current levels of sale may well be in itself an achievement, especially given the rises in the cost of keeping them there.

Targeting your readers at play

The key requirement is to find more cost-effective ways of reaching your particular set of demographics, with the emphasis on additional rather than transferred awareness. With increasing workloads and time pressure in the workplace, it is becoming more valuable to reach your audience at moments when they are spending time on themselves. This does not necessarily mean selling copies per se; your advertisers are searching for awareness and response, so environments where a high readership per copy exists are at a special premium. Leisure locations are a prime answer to this challenge.

Suppose that you are a publisher in any of the following sectors: motoring or motor-cycling, home interest, health, beauty, men’s / women’s lifestyle, travel, puzzles, or indeed any individual leisure or sporting interest. There are opportunities for publications in all these sectors (and this is not an exclusive list) to gain additional exposure in areas other than the regular newsstand. How about your health and beauty title being placed in health clubs, country house hotel spas or a national chain of gymnasia? How about your motoring title being read by motor show attendees around the world, or in luxury hotels at the latest Grand Prix circuit? How about your women’s lifestyle publication being in thousands of four and five star hotels all over Europe? Or your travel magazine in airport hotels and cruise ships, your yachting magazine at boat shows worldwide and waterside hotels? How about your golfing title in the top European clubhouses or your home interest publication in bingo halls and hairdressers? Property titles in estate agents, luxury lifestyle magazines in top hotel suites everywhere from the Dorchester to Dubai? Your puzzle titles available in hairdressers or special hotel packs to keep the children entertained?

Ensuring the right profile

It is perfectly possible to drill down to even smarter levels by social demographics. There are in excess of 50,000 4 star and 12,000 5 star bedrooms in London alone; the typical guest in a 4 star hotel room has paid some £200 to be there. These comparatively high earners purchase more than their pro-rata share of luxury goods and travel and business services. One can identify niche target sectors within the hotel universe, such as the Sanderson and One Aldwych for typically younger media and publishing fashionistas and the Ritz, the Savoy and Claridges for the captains of FTSE 100 industry. If you want to reach the movers and shakers in financial circles, then the radar would select the Great Eastern, Threadneedles or Grange City. Specialised placement and sampling are able to match these differing environments to give the optimum outcome. The deliverable is that, in addition to being an auditable circulation-building tool, such activity attracts advertising clients, builds brand awareness, attracts new readers, subscribers (especially from overseas) and purchasers and offers a competitive advantage over same-sector brands. That’s just London. Add into the equation Europe, Asia and the Middle East and you are entering a very material numbers game which, with a little thought, would become a significant strand in the marketing mix.

That’s it. You have an alternative auditable channel which delivers all the above benefits in an increasingly complex and uncertain industry. Why not share the thinking with your advertising people and get their reaction? As the man said, you could sit down and do it yourself, but why bother? Gold Key Media has been doing it for prime titles for years; they could do it for your publications as well.