Funny how the parallel universe works: the same magazine publishers who were touting digital last year because, well, print sucked, are now going to spend about $90 million talking about how print rules as the economy shows signs of an uptick. Five of the leading publishers — Time Inc. (NYSE: TWX) Hearst, Condé Nast, Wenner Media and Meredith (NYSE: MDP) — have banded together for this “power of print” campaign, reminiscent of a similar campaign by newspaper publishers a few years ago, when the world was slightly rosier. WSJ reports that the ad campaign will be launched at an industry event tomorrow in SF, and the ads will start appearing in May editions of the participating mags.
One ad says: “The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive.” Another one, to run in ESPN (NYSE: DIS) magazine, features Michael Phelps, with the headline “We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines.” Really? This is the message you want to send your own digital units? This after four of these five names are part of a digital JV Next Issue Media, meant to develop new digital formats as the print revenues keep eroding.
And of course who else but the troglodyte Jann Wenner to “orchestrate” this campaign, the guy whose magazine Rolling Stone can’t figure out how to keep a domain name up; and oh wait, who outsources the running of the mag website to *RealNetworks*, until late last year. That Wenner. Good luck, the other four.
With Apple’s recent announcement that they sold 10 billion song downloads on iTunes, it would be nice to be able to subscribe to these magazines for the iPad. Apple is already linking up with traditional book publishers to get ebooks on the iTunes store. It would seem that it’s more about the content than the paper medium.
Buddy Scalera – http://wordspicturesweb.com/?p=784
The radio industry should say the same to their digital units. The streaming audio is great, but the web page builders all seem to think they can be a destination web site. First priority: make it easy to listen. Second, third, fourth priorities: make it easy to listen,
Maybe Rolling Stone could do something really new and cool like give away a cover CD!
I seriously wish them luck. You know when a business is in trouble when the right hand doesn’t know what the left one is doing.
Could it be that having looked at the business model, the idea of monetising digital content across competing brands and only being able to attract micropayments for their troubles does not stack up?
Ultimately most of the revenues that these publication generate is from advertising. Until they figure out a way of selling this kind of content on its own merit they will struggle whether it is print or digital.
It’s interesting, and yes, let’s get back to print and save print, yes. My YouTube song, now getting over 250,000 hits per day, is called “I Just Can’t Live (without my daily snailpaper)” by “songsterhiragana” there, and you can hear and see video here: E&P briefed it today, Teleread last year, Eqentia last week, and Romensko soon:
See The New York Times advertising column from last June, when the writer interviewed the one of the smartest magazine executives around, Cathie Black. She stated quite clearly she wants 1.6 million women showing up a the newsstand to buy Cosmo. They do. The last thing Black wants is to commoditize her publications by putting them up on the Web — which, as you know, has worked out so well for the newspaper industry. This is the right.
What’s the point of advertising inside the magazines? Wouldn’t they just be preaching to the converted? It seems like a better idea to put these ads on the internet to encourage internet users to come back to print.
Did you hear the latest, by the way: More Americans get news from Internet than newspapers or radio, survey says.
Can’t you smell the job security desperation here? Seriously, where do you take strategic management skills like “breakfast” and “lunch” as print revenue fades? Whose else is gonna pay the dinosaurs those outlandish salaries?