Prior to the recession and the heightened digital competition for advertising and audiences, all respectable magazines were sensitive about how product mentions in editorial were handled, and most went out of their way not to position display ads near such mentions. This included fashion and women's magazines, which always denied sceptics' insinuations that their editorial product picks or mentions were influenced by existing or hoped-for advertisers.
But such concerns have become quaint as business models are transformed. Putting aside the sponsored content / native advertising juggernaut for the present, we're also seeing a flourishing of magazine-branded e-commerce ventures. To date, most such ventures from large, mainstream publishers have been for fashion, décor and women's brands, and Condé Nast has been most aggressive.
Early this year, Glamour, working with e-tailer AHALife, launched a mobile phone app and site (shop.glamour.com) that lets readers buy products directly off magazine pages. More than 500 products (compiled by the editors) are available. The app's image recognition feature pulls up content when a picture with the Shop Glamour icon is recognised. Consumers can shop the products from the page or watch a video from the app. The responsive site enables aggregation of all the "shoppable" items from the magazine in a single location.
Confirming just how important e-commerce is considered to the company's future growth, in December, Condé Nast US and Condé Nast International (CNI) announced that they've teamed up to create an entire division devoted to it. “The scope of our brands and the revolution in technology are bringing about new opportunities in the e-commerce space," summed up CNI chairman / CEO Jonathan Newhouse. The concepts will be developed by the division's president, Franck Zayan, who previously oversaw e-commerce for Galeries Lafayette; he will report to a board made up of the top CNI and CN US execs.
Meanwhile, the industry is closely watching the revival of the Domino interior design brand (originally a Condé magazine that was folded in 2009) - an ambitious effort to fuse content and commerce. This time, Condé is a minority stakeholder in the venture, and is also lending resources such as its consumer marketing database to the core owners / operators, the founders of the e-commerce site Project Décor.
As Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali noted to The New York Times, e-commerce is trending away from text-based (eg. Google search) to discovery-based (photo-driven), and Domino is on the cutting edge of this trend.
The Domino model includes a quarterly, newsstand-only, print magazine (cover price $11.99), but it carries few ads and is mostly a branding tool or "barker" for the Domino site. The owners expect around 90% of the venture's revenue to come from e-commerce. Instead of just linking users to the sites of the various products' makers to purchase items, Domino is the "merchant of record", making money by taking a markup on the products (which are shipped to customers directly by the manufacturers).
The top of every online article includes buttons for reading a story (in magazine-like format), and for shopping the products in the articles through photo-viewing and other formats. Users can readily share the site's content with friends (thereby acting as unpaid marketers for its products). The goal is to produce new web content daily, as well as incorporate the magazine's archival articles - and even user-generated content - in "shoppable" format, over time.
Logistics / customer service could be the biggest challenge. But if Domino succeeds, it will have written the "playbook" for how magazines integrate e-commerce, and there will be "5,000 clones" within a year or two, predicts Mulpuru-Kodali.
Writing in Forbes, Kate Harrison went even further, suggesting that Domino could be "the media model of the future". Her basic premise: E-commerce has a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio that's 20 times higher than that of periodical publishing, making a hybrid of these two far more attractive to investors than a traditional, heavily advertising-dependent magazine property.
Threat from e-tailers
Indeed, major fashion e-tailer Net-A-Porter is already ticking off Condé Nast and Hearst by launching its own glossy, high-quality print magazine, Porter. This magazine not only has an app that lets readers point a smartphone at any page to purchase the products from the mother site, but is aggressively pursuing fashion advertising. (Net-A-Porter executives rubbed salt in the wounds by pronouncing that it's easier for a retailer to become a publisher than vice-versa.)
Condé Nast is far from alone, of course. Last year, Hearst's Harper's Bazaar launched e-commerce site ShopBazaar, and also relaunched HarpersBazaar.com. (One change in the latter: The addition of a running, editor-generated fashion trends list, in which the products of sponsoring advertisers are incorporated). Nor are all of the e-commerce ventures in women's fashion or décor. Time Inc's Golf.com, Rodale, Dennis Publishing (for Mental Floss and The Week), and many niche magazine publishers have e-tail sites, on their own or with partners.
Obviously, these ventures are lucrative, or potentially lucrative. Being able to click and buy from a page is welcomed as a convenience by many magazine readers, and - depending, of course, on how the products and their relationships to editorial are presented - that may be a refreshingly upfront approach.
Still, taking this concept too far seems unwise, at least for existing magazines (as opposed to these e-commerce-driven hybrids) that still aspire to preserving perceptions of seriousness or authority. For instance, in recent months, there's been a debate about whether women's magazines can deliver "serious" journalism. Of course they can - and some do. But doesn't any magazine risk being viewed as hucksterish - or at the very least risk distracting readers from any serious content in its pages - if it's offering cover-to-cover, smartphone-activated buying opportunities? Will we someday be treated to illustrations in The New Yorker linked to an online store?
