Preserving your reputation among advertisers

Preserving your reputation among advertisers

During the 1960s, a number of famous and prestigious magazines entered a period of decline and then went out of business. In the 1970s, a similar illness infected several other great magazines; some died, but at least one recovered.

If the publishers of these magazines had been aware of their oncoming tragedies 10 years before they happened, could they have taken steps to avert them? And will history repeat itself? Are there magazines poised right now for major trouble in the next decade? Maybe your magazine?

In order to develop some possible answers to these questions, let me relate my experience with one of these disastrous situations--specifically, what happened to The New Yorker in 1967 and in the following four years.

During that time, I learned--the hard way--a great and important truth: For magazines that depend to a large degree on advertising for their financial support, the reality of their success, even their existence, is not their editorial excellence, the beauty of their art direction, the quality of their paper, or their readership statistics. The reality is what a few thousand people in advertising think it is. If those people think your magazine is great, you're in. If they decide you are passe or if they have just forgotten about you, you'll soon be out.

In 1967, at the peak of its seemingly limitless acceptance by advertisers and their agencies and after more than a decade of almost regular yearly increases in advertising (culminating in a total of 6,143 ad pages in 1966), The New Yorker stubbed its toe and then fell flat on its face--where it remained for five years struggling to regain its past glory.

During those dark years, The New Yorker lost much of its huge business reputation and its prestige as the darling of the advertising world--a buy any agency could make without fear of criticism. Instead, it became just another magazine, and one in serious trouble, to boot.

Unfortunately, the people who had been building the business side of The New Yorker for years were unable to see, at least for several years of ad page losses, that the infection was a serious one--perhaps even a fatal one-- and that the magazine had to start all over to rebuild its past image of enormous editorial prestige and business success. Not until late 1968 did we wake up to that conclusion and begin powerful efforts to build a new future as strong as the then-vanished past.

While The New Yorker carried more advertising pages than any other consumer magazine in the United States in 1968, things were going downhill fast. By 1972, it had lost 2,491 ad pages, or more than 40 percent of its 1966 peak-year total.

Suffering from overabundance

The problem that for years had been quietly but relentlessly undermining The New Yorker's relationship with its advertisers was one that is not likely to affect other magazines. Different magazines have other problems, and I point to ours simply to illustrate how destructive any ongoing business disagreement can be--especially if it actually harms an advertiser or tends to undermine the advertiser's belief in the vigor of the editorial product.

Simply put, our problem was that we were so favored by advertisers that we had literally run out of space to sell. For many years we had been forced to turn away truly large amounts of high quality advertising. One year the total turned away was close to a million dollars. Hard as we tried to be diplomatic about it, we created a great deal of resentment among advertisers and their agencies, who felt we were being high-handed and unfair.

A corollary to the problem was that we did no meaningful advertising of our own, since we couldn't appear to be publicly asking for business that we often couldn't accept when offered.

The consequences of this were very serious. The world had entered a tough and dangerous period--the Vietnam war years--and The New Yorker had responded with lean, forceful editorial to match the new world conditions. But remember, from a business standpoint, reality is what a few thousand people in advertising think it is. And because we failed to inform the business world publicly about the kind of editorial entity we had become, in the eyes of the people then buying advertising space we were old fashioned and living in the past.

And then the trigger was pulled.

The trigger for The New Yorker was the recession of 1966-1967, a quite deep one. Most good magazines lost business. The New Yorker's loss was about 500 pages--a great deal more than other well-known magazines lost, but about the same percentage loss. Although advertisers shrugged off the losses of most magazines as caused by the recession, in the single case of The New Yorker, a lot of hidden resentment surfaced and the loss was attributed to bad business practices (rejecting advertising), old-fashioned and tired editorial, and a lot of other imagined and mostly unreal criticisms.

Rumors started flying

Before the end of 1968, it began to be rumored that The New Yorker was "the next Saturday Evening Post,' which was in its final death throes at the time. The country had begun to recover from the recession late in 1967, and was pretty much back to normal in 1968. Advertisers who had dropped out in 1967 were once again buying space in magazines. But a number of The New Yorker's past advertisers decided to wait a year before returning to the magazine--just to see what developed. Perhaps the rumors were correct.

So in 1968 we again lost several hundred ad pages--and we were the only major magazine with a large, continuing loss. This "proved' to a lot of advertisers that The New Yorker really was in serious business trouble. And because few people in advertising want to back a medium that is in serious trouble, a lot of advertisers sat on their hands for a third year--creating another disaster in 1969. This self-perpetuating cycle continued until 1972, when we finally pulled out of the nose dive.

From 1972 to 1982, the magazine regained its forward momentum, with a few bad years in between.

Pulling out of this kind of tailspin is expensive, difficult and, all too often, impossible. In our case, we clearly had to reshape the thinking of the advertising world about the changes which had taken place in our editorial.

We appointed a new advertising agency, Lord, Geller, Federico, Einstein, Inc., and they produced powerful advertising that ran for years in The New York Times and the trade press. Without trying to interpret the magazine, these ads clarified what The New Yorker was in the late sixties. The advertising had a strong impact on the advertising community which began, once again, to see us as an important and meaningful editorial product.

We hired a top creative gun who had been the creative head of several major agencies to write our promotion and create presentations.

We took on a public relations agency, which saw to it that our tough and meaningful editorial was excerpted --quite literally--by hundreds of newspapers across the country.

We showed our brilliant new presentations to scores of ad agencies and advertisers.

Our sales staff, which only a few years earlier had been forced to reject advertising (diplomatically, we hoped), responded magnificently to this flood of vigorous promotion and slowly pulled us back from the brink.

Taking out life insurance

The purpose of this article is not to rehash bygone experiences or to give a lesson in recovering from massive rejection by advertisers, but to propose a methodology, a systematic yearly routine, to avoid ever getting into a position where your magazine will need resuscitation, with all its enormous costs.

In other words, this article is about a life insurance policy for magazines.

In 1975 (having left The New Yorker), I was asked by an advertising agency with a famous and successful magazine client to examine every aspect of their client's publication (not The New Yorker), looking particularly for any signs of future trouble. After considerable study, I felt there was a possibility that the same illness that had laid The New Yorker low for five years might be in the future for their client, another "impregnable' fortress of success. It seemed to me then, and it does now, that every successful, important, general-interest magazine that depends on advertising for its financial security is susceptible to this often fatal disease.

That study crystallized some thoughts that had been tumbling around in the back of my mind for years, and those thoughts have become a warning I would like to pass on to you. I hope the warning will be taken seriously by publishers of many of today's well-known and successful magazines.

The trouble--the so-called illness I have been referring to--stems from a built-in weakness that seems to be uniquely part of great popular magazines. I'm referring mainly to those publications that occupy an unusually important place in the lives of their readers and that are therefore of special interest to advertisers. Because of their editorial strengths, these magazines attract a large volume of advertising. Then, as so often happens, they come to depend blindly on those advertisers for support.

These magazines all have at least acceptable demographic and total audience figures, but much of their advertising volume comes because of their fame as leaders in their fields. Magazines with a strong prestige and sales image can become, to a degree, fads to those who select media for advertising. If for no other reason, such magazines are often over-bought because they are safe buys.

The built-in weakness in this situation is usually management's inability to see changes (subtle ones, but often devastating) that develop in the relationship between publisher and advertiser --sometimes because of negative business developments, once in a while because of changes in the very personal relationship between editor and reader. Although these changes are potentially destructive to magazines, neither publisher nor advertiser sees them, as a rule, until some major business setback calls attention to the deteriorating relationship. When that setback occurs, or a warning trigger is pulled, a whole lot of things can start to fall apart.

A generation, in magazine terms, seems to be somewhere between 25 and 50 years. At some point in that period, almost every really good, really successful general-interest magazine that is also heavily dependent on advertising has first reached a plateau where all systems are static, and then toppled off it. And the higher the perch, the louder the crash.

This happens because growth and change (which spell strength and excitement to advertisers) are no longer taking place. Instead, self-satisfaction has settled in. The magazine's past reputation will continue to support its advertising volume only until the "trigger' is pulled. And then, if the magazine hasn't been constantly renewing its famous reputation in ways other than growth and change, it is, sooner or later, in for trouble.

If this type of problem is going to afflict a magazine, it will most often begin during a recession. But there are other triggers that can generate a downward spiral--for example, the death of a founding publisher or famous editor.

I remember a year in which Time magazine was shocked when the Simmons total audience research showed that its much smaller competitor, Newsweek, had about the same total readership. This was an obvious troublemaker because any space buyers who were anxious to stretch their budgets could drop out of the larger magazine and buy the smaller and less expensive one. If anyone questioned the wisdom of this move, they could point to the Simmons study to support it. There probably was some shift of advertising, but it didn't start a downward spiral because the larger magazine had maintained its strong image.

Being prepared

There are undoubtedly other situations that can trigger these deadly chain reactions. What should a successful publication that is dependent on advertising income do to maintain its perch at the summit of success? Well, some of them are already doing it. Time Inc. regularly runs four-color pages and spreads, as well as black and white, in The New York Times and the trade press, all designed to keep the prestige image of its publications well polished. Gourmet--a true original with an excellent reputation among advertisers --runs an unusual and superior campaign in other magazines and in the trade press as well. And, of course, there are many others that, to one degree or another, see to it that their real values are constantly displayed to their business clients.

In this article, I have been referring basically to high-quality, generalinterest magazines--very successful, established magazines, some of which are working hard at preserving their reputations, and some of which, unfortunately, aren't. But it seems to me that these arguments hold to a good extent for any magazine--even special-interest or mass magazines--as long as these magazines depend on advertising for their financial support.

The problem is one of changes that influence a magazine's well-being: new generations of readers, changes in business plans, new advertising agencies, competition from new magazines or from other media, and so on. If magazines don't keep up with societal and business changes, they will, sooner or later, be in trouble. And it is up to magazine management to make clear to advertisers that they are keeping their eyes on the future and not the past.

If you are enjoying the economic rewards attendant on producing and selling a successful magazine--one that's loved by its readers and believed to be productive by advertisers--what can you do to be sure advertisers never lose the faith, never stop the checks pouring in? Following are a few of the more necessary activites to go to work on: All of these steps were implemented at The New Yorker.

Tell your advertising agency you want the best corporate ad campaign for your magazine there is anywhere. Tell the agency you want, not just for now, but for all time, the admiration, the respect and the understanding of advertisers everywhere. Even though you are successful now, you want to knock their socks off.

If they can't come up with something that makes your eyes pop, begin a search for an agency that can. Don't accept anything featuring strings of research figures. Not for this purpose. That's not where the game called survival is being played. There are plenty of failing magazines with super demographics, and you don't ever want to be one of them.

Promote this advertising to your comp or promotion list as often as you can. They may not see all your great ad messages, even if you dominate the advertising trade press.

Use the same material in presentations. If possible, get it into every major presentation you develop.

Merchandise this campaign to your own salespeople. It will invigorate sales and the morale of your troops. Convince your salespeople that your editorial strength and authority, your success in selling goods and ideas are as important, or more important, than number of readers per copy or lists of statistical data.

Drum the same message into the head of your promotion manager. And if your promotion manager isn't a genius, scour the world of publishing and advertising to find one.

If you are not yet into PR, think seriously about it. A good PR firm can get your magazine mentioned in newspapers, on radio, and on television across the country. If you subscribe to a clipping service, you'll begin to see reprints of parts of your editorial appearing in local newspapers everywhere.

It is a powerful sales message to advertisers that publishers of local newspapers across the country want their readers to know what your magazine has to say. But even more so, this is strong medicine if advertisers ever begin to wonder about the vitality of your magazine--whether anyone out there is really reading it or is just subscribing to get the clock radio. Remember, successful magazines, to remain that way, must be talked about--in the currency of business and cocktail party conversation. Magazines and even magazine dynasties can become shopworn, and good PR can help keep them brightly polished.

Does all this sound expensive? Let me assure you it isn't--not in comparison to what it will cost if you fall out of favor with the vast world of advertising. Try to think of these costs just the way you think of paper and printing costs--an expense item to be put in your budget every year.

The relationship between advertisers and magazines that are richly endowed by advertising can be likened, in human terms, to a love affair that becomes a marriage. And then the love is taken for granted, and the marriage becomes nothing but a marriage . . . and we all know what happens next.

Don't let it happen to you.

COPYRIGHT 1987 Copyright by Media Central Inc., A PRIMEDIA Company. All rights reserved.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group