Print Pubs Urged to “Break the Rules”
Imagine a politician who never surveyed his constituents, a beauty contest without any judges, or a television network that decided the best way to reach a younger audience was to stick with what it did in the 1990s.
That’s just about how two top advertising executives compared efforts by print media companies to regain the trust of advertisers that are fleeing newspapers and magazines because they have no idea if their ads are effective or even reaching the right people.
“We have to keep trying ways to break the rules,” said Bob Liodice, president/CEO of the Association of National Advertisers, in response to an audience question following his co-keynote speech at the ANA’S Print Advertising Forum in New York last week.
In fact, advertisers are so hungry for print outlets to come up with innovative ways to merge clients’ products into their magazines that Mark Kaline, global media manager for Ford Motor Co.—and as chairman of the ANA’s Print Advertising Committee, Liodice’s co-keynoter–offered to let Ford underwrite the costs of researching ways to get print publications more involved with branded entertainment, similar to how the company has done so on television by integrating its cars and trucks into the plots of certain programs.
Following up the ANA’s recent annual member survey on print media issues, Liodice and Kaline praised newspapers and magazines for their strengths as cost-effective vehicles for targeting and reaching certain desirable groups. But the plaudits took a backseat to the grievances from marketers, including a lack of accountability to ensure the effectiveness of print ads, the second-class status of print as a creative medium, the industry’s deliberate embracement of digital media advancements, and the reluctance of many companies to experiment and take risks.
“Despite significant advancements in marketing research, print measurement techniques have shown little improvement over the past decade,” Kaline said, adding that recent circulation scandals at some daily newspapers had eroded confidence even further.
Marketers have long tried to get the price of ads tied to return on investment rather than to circulation (in the case of print) or ratings (in the case of TV). But the keynoters bemoaned the lack of any proven solution to gleaning real-time data as to the effectiveness of print advertising. Granted, some research companies are trying. Monroe Mendelsohn Research, for instance, has introduced in the past year a survey designed to gauge how closely readers are attuned to the content and advertising in the magazines they read.
The pair also chided print companies for being slow to embrace digital delivery of their products or for doing so in unimaginative ways. “Just think about all those elusive younger readers who are abandoning newspapers and magazines in droves. They could become devoted subscribers with the right digital business model,” Kaline maintained. He recommended that publishers sell their publications by sections, topics, writers, or news feeds and offer readers highly personalized offerings rather than forcing them to pay for entire issues or take out yearly subscriptions.
As an example of innovative marketing partnerships, Kaline pointed to CBS’s now-famous ad in the May 8 edition of “People” for its Elvis Presley telefilm. The network placed a computer chip in the magazine which, when jostled, played snippets of an Elvis song followed by a plug for the telecast.
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