On a list of industries with too much money the leader would clearly be banking followed probably by oil. What about magazine publishing? While it is certainly ahead of typewriters (repair & manufacture of), I don’t think it would crack the top 1000. Despite this, the industry has collectively decided it is time to waste some of this precious resource. Thus the just-announced multimillion-dollar ad campaign touting the "power of print."
The campaign, funded by five leading publishers, seeks to convince people that “magazines remain an effective advertising medium in the age of the Internet because of the depth and lasting quality of print, compared with the ephemeral nature of much of the Web's content.”
And how are they going to get this message across? “Nearly 1,400 pages of the ads will be sprinkled through magazines including People, Vogue and Ladies' Home Journal this year.”
Let me get this right – you’re going to tell magazine readers that reading magazines is a good thing? Maybe it’s just me but I’m pretty sure they already know. Aren’t the people you want to reach the ones who aren’t trying to discern the difference between the ads and the articles in GQ?
And it’s not just the placement of the ads that’s the problem. It’s the idea behind the entire campaign.
Here’s a simple way to tell if your wasting marketing dollars: Advertising for a product? Good. Advertising for a class of product? Bad.
Need an example? How about detergent makers. They spend their money telling you why their product is better than the competitors, not on efforts that say: “Laundry: Still the right choice for you.”
The only time it might make sense to market for a class of product is when that class of product is first coming to the market. Then you need to make people aware that you are addressing a need they had already had but didn’t know about. TiVo is a great example. When it first came out the company had to explain why this was more than an over-priced VCR. Today the makers of DVRs don’t tell you why you need one, they tell you why you need theirs.
It is not news that advertising for a class of things doesn’t work. This type of thing has an incredibly long history of failing. Usually it has political overtones. The Brits tried it in the 1930s with their “Buy Commonwealth” campaign. Here in the US, carmakers pushed the “Buy American” meme in the ‘80s in hopes of distracting people from the fact that they were making lousy cars. Since then other industries have also tried “Buy American” marketing as a way to compete with goods made in other nations, like China.
Wonder how that turned out? Just wait, the “power of print” will tell you.
