Media buying in the '90s: trouble ahead; more competition and new technology will make for a tougher print sell - includes related article

Media buying in the '90s: Trouble ahead

New York City--The 1990s will bring magazine publishers even more headaches in the pursuit of the media buyer's dollar: More competition from existing media and from new media forms, tougher requirements to prove effectiveness, more negotiating, and more call for campaigns that are both global in scope and targeted in local markets. That was the consensus of agency media supervisors, clients and magazine publishers speaking at the recent Magazine Publishing Congress.

William Kashimer, manager of media operations for the Colgate-Palmolive Co., called the process of media planning "state," having little innovation over the past 10 years. The future holds fare more emphasis on accountability and efficiency, he predicted.

Colgate-Palmolive, he pointed out, forces magazines to compete according to a formula. Print is evaluated after broadcast, and begins with a list drawn up by the company's three ad agencies. The list shows categories of magazines prioritized for various products, with individual titles compiled within each category. Magazines high on that list must then compete by supplying information about circulation, available rate concession and value-added programs. The final report from the magazine is often 20 to 30 pages long, he said.

To sell space to this sort of sophisticated client, ad salespeople must themselves become increasingly sophisticated, said Bill Myers, publisher of Money. To succeed in the '90s, ad reps will have to understand not only their own magazine and the client's product, but marketing, negotiating, U.S. and foreign demographics--not to mention being creative. This, he said, is a far cry from the early '60s, when the only requirements for the job were to "have a clean suit, be neat, tidy, and have a pleasant personality."

Publishers, moreover, will be dealing with far more sophisticated agency media buyers, predicted Larry Cole, U.S. media director for Ogilvy & Mather. The media environment of the '90s, he said, will offer more options for international buying, a more fragmented television audience, more magazine titles, and more audience data available through new high-tech methods of collecting such information. And as new media forms appear in homes and in stores, companies will place new emphasis on cost-effectiveness and advertising efficiency, and press for more rate negotiation.

But the driving force behind media negotiations will remain the quality of the editorial product, predicted Anne Fuchs, publisher of Elle. "You have to have a good product to get readers to get advertisers--in that order."

Delivering an excellent product, she added, has been made more difficult by the trend toward negotiation, which eventually will cripple magazines' ability to financially support a quality editorial product. Taken to extremes, she maintained, "we'll be reading comic books."

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