Q&A: Time Inc. Brings the Power of DM to Retail
Time Inc. is using database marketing techniques to improve the company’s retail newsstand presence. Jeremy Koch, president, Time Consumer Marketing, took some time recently to talk with DIRECT about this venture and other circulation efforts.
DIRECT: It probably varies from magazine to magazine, but overall do you have more newsstand distribution or paid subscriptions?
KOCH: There’s no way to generalize. It’s everything from a magazine like Time with 5% newsstand and a magazine like people has 55% or 60% newsstand. We’re all over the board. Every magazine has a slightly different publishing formula and we have magazines that fall in every point on the scale.
DIRECT: How are things on the retail side of the business?
KOCH: It’s a very tough channel to work in right now. Because many of our wholesalers are economically challenged themselves, its hard to get the kind of support you need, in terms of marketing support, merchandising, execution, speed and responsiveness.
One exciting thing is that we’re beginning to use databases increasingly on the retail side of the business. This means we can begin to bring some of the highly sophisticated and highly quantifiable marketing techniques we use on the subscription side of the business to the retail side. We’re beginning to use good, hard, real data to refine where we send magazines at retail and how many we send. We can find where there’s an opportunity to sell a Fortune or a Time or a Real Simple where its not on sale today, figure out how many copies should be allocated to different retail locations and do it in a much faster and more accurate way. I call it bringing the discipline of direct marketing to the retail business. And that’s been pretty exciting and successful.
DIRECT: Do your direct mail efforts play heavily on branding?
KOCH: We try to make our direct marketing efforts be very efficient in terms of acquiring a new customer. If we can do that and also deliver a branding message, that’s great. In some cases we’ve been successful at that. But frequently what works is a simple voucher package or something simple that really doesn’t present a lot of information about the brand itself. It provides an order vehicle. With our mature magazines, like Time or Sports Illustrated, its pretty safe to assume the consumer is familiar with the magazine, at least on some level. There are different magazines
