PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

If any of you have saved an issue of say, Fast Company or Red Herring from late 1999 or early 2000 – my favorite issue contains an article on how Google is a completely silly name and that the company will go nowhere with it – you’ll notice how picking up the magazine may threaten to put your back out. (Best to leave it on the floor as a doorstop.) Today, only Vanity Fair, W, and Oprah seem to be infested with print ads in the way that tech publications used to be. Average issues of ComputerWorld or BIO-IT World seem as thin as the inserts that used to be tipped into the dotcom-era magazines of seven years ago.

Which is precisely why there may be more value than you think in print advertising right now. Prices, certainly, have never been more negotiable. As I mentioned in a previous post, one vendor offered to throw in the print program free if we bought the online program for a client. And though marketing may be a game of fishing where the fish are most of the time, success also is a function of standing out where your competitors aren’t. To quote my colleague Mike O’Toole, it’s all part of good marketing arbitrage.

No, print subscriptions aren’t what they used to be. Readership is down and advertising is down. But your target audience is still spending time with magazines and print publications. The eyeballs aren’t always online. And if you had the opportunity to be the only advertiser in a magazine along with Microsoft, IBM and SAP, wouldn’t you jump at the chance?

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 6:48 am and is filed under Advertising, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.