The Downside Of The Advertorial Boom

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 2003

Byline: SARAH GONSER

When the folks from Perry Ellis contacted Travel + Leisure magazine with a $500,000 ad budget, they knew exactly what they wanted: a 20-page spread that featured the full extent of their product line, creative control, and increased foot traffic in their stores.

The publisher responded by creating a special section in T+L's September issue featuring Perry Ellis - clad cast members from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette hanging out in Jamaica. Sponsors provided locations for the shoot and 12 "Jamaican Dream Vacation" sweepstakes prizes - the reader buy-in part of the package. In-store traffic was hyped with open casting calls for the TV show, attended by former cast members, at the retailer's clothing departments.

By the beginning of October, T+L publisher Ellen Asmodeo-Giglio said the retailer reported selling more product at the ongoing in-store events than at any prior such ad-driven event. "They're very pleased with the results," she says.

From the publisher's point of view, what's not to love? The client is jazzed, and there are now 20 pages of paid advertising where there were none. From Conde Nast to tiny b-to-bs, special ad sections have become a growth business at a time when selling plain old ad pages is not that easy. Special-section pages increased 18 percent in 2002, while total ad pages for consumer magazines dropped about half a percent, according to Publishers Information Bureau.

"Advertisers love them, and they can be enormously profitable if you produce them yourself and get the markup on the creative," says Bill Curtis, CEO of Curtco-Robb Media, which produces advertorials for customers such as Rolls-Royce and Sony. "I think that the advertorial phenomenon has just started."

But media buyers are grumbling louder these days about how the glut of poorly designed special sections is weakening both magazine brands and the special-section format itself. Bad ones dilute editorial credibility, and even those with high production values raise questions about the line between church and state and the value of the magazine brand, buyers say. Finally, the buyers talk about overload: There are so many advertorials that they have lost their impact.

"Five years ago, they were used very sparingly," says Mike Neiss, executive vice president, managing media director for Lowe. "Now the well just contains a series of advertorial speed bumps. It's an epidemic. There's rarely anything objective or credible being promoted, and they run the risk of swamping legitimate editorial." For example, a recent issue of Forbes carried 64 pages of special advertising, out of a total folio of 234 pages and 74 pages of run-of-the-book ads.

A number of publishers - thought not publicly - have also started to question the potency of advertorials and the possible downside to over-relying on them. "More and more magazines are asking to have their special sections studied lately because they're doubting their effectiveness," says Philip Sawyer, senior vice president and director of Starch Communications, a RoperASW company that measures reader involvement in magazine advertising. Sawyer says that when he reviews these advertorials and special sections, he's frequently shocked by the poor quality he sees. "It amazes me sometimes how many truly ridiculous things are being done in advertorials - the same mistakes repeated over and over again." Tiny copy, all-cap fonts that are difficult to read, poor layout where a model looks off to the side and takes the reader's eye away from the copy, toll-free numbers and Web site addresses buried in the copy, are all common mistakes, Sawyer says.

"We're finding that not a lot of people are doing their research," he adds. "People are making mistakes where they should know better, had they done their research. It's the kind of stuff no ad agency would let pass. Instead, they are recreating the wheel and missing out on a lot of accumulated knowledge about these sections."

These low-rent production values pose problems for the advertising sponsors and the books they run in. "The intent of these sections is great, but in execution, we find that writers who wouldn't write for the magazine are producing editorials that the editors would not otherwise accept," says Euro RCG MVBMS executive creative director, Richard Notarianni. "We find advertising that an ad agency wouldn't typically pass off as advertising. If you spend time talking to consumers, you find that most consumers look at them for what they are: crude attempts. They don't give them a lot of credit."

"The majority of advertorials and special sections just don't cut it these days," Notarianni says. "Consequently, we must ask ourselves, is it money well-spent? From the point of view of a marketer, I don't think advertorials and special sections are an effective part of the communications mix when we get down to their real impact on consumers."

Publishers defend advertorials as an effective way to garner reader response and create additional value for clients. But there is also the economic reality: Many magazines can sell advertorials where they can't sell ads. "In soft years, magazines are looking for ways to ease entry into new categories," says Jim Berrien, president of Forbes Magazine Group. "Clearly, it's just a way to bring in additional dollars."