Online Ad Sales: Get In The Game

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Oct, 2000 by Helen Berman

"Our Web site has a huge archive of editorial and a staff that has a relationship and credibility with our audience," says Penton's Davis. "To a certain extent, a Web sale is a relationship sale. You rely on your credibility as a media company and on your understanding of the customer."

Educate advertisers on the overall effectiveness of the Web site's brand, content and community. It's important, because at this early stage in Internet history, strong, effective Web sites can look an awful lot like nice-looking, but little-traveled, start-up sites. Regardless of funding or hoopla, few dot-coin-only Web sites have yet demonstrated to advertisers the credibility and staying power of most magazines.

7 Sell integrated media buys. As Facinelli puts it, banners, links and the like are often "so long as" buys--as in, "So long as you're buying a 6X schedule, we'll add two months of banner ads." Better, he says, are integrated packages where banner ads, microsites and hyperlinks both complement print pages and cover their marketing costs.

Meredith, for instance, has made integrated ad sales a priority, committing $10 million annually to market its print, TV and Web products through a recently formed Interactive and Integrated Marketing Group. "We believe the lessons learned from the Internet are about linkage, connectivity and integration, both for our marketing partners and consumers," says CEO Bill Kerr.

Southern Living Online has also begun this year to bundle space online with space in the magazine. Says Logan, "Just in the last year we've begun to attract more advertisers, but we haven't at this point mounted as serious an effort as we probably will in the future."

As Logan and others make clear, Web advertising--barely more than five years old--is still a long way from taking over magazine buying. Pick a magazine, and most advertisers will have a sense of how well it might perform for them in the marketplace. Pick a Web site, though, and it's still a shot in the dark of cyberspace.

Fortunately, most publishers have the tools at hand to transition from selling print to selling the Web. Once sales people are on terra firma in the Web world, it's a given that advertisers will follow.