When advertisers happily pay for no advertising

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Jan, 2000 by Barbara Love

CEO, a controlled-circulation publication, has an interesting selling challenge. Clients pay a lot of money and don't get ads, logos or reader service cards. What they get is extremely subtle. They get to write a letter from their CEO that goes into a white paper that is outserted with the magazine.

It's called a CEO Brief. Here's how it works. CEO's editors come up with topics they think will be very important and compelling for the magazine's readers. The sponsor is given the list and gets to choose from the topics. Then a 16- or 24-page white paper on that topic is created by editors. The most interesting part of all, says Evans, "is that this premium product carries no ad-vertising. "Andersen Consulting is one client who sponsored a CEO Brief on "Six Business Assumptions That Information Technology Has Changed Forever." The Brief contained a letter from the CEO explaining why information technology is important to Andersen and why Andersen as a corporation cares to educate CEOs about the changes that tec hnology has brought. That's it. "These are truly editorial products," says CEO publisher Carol Evans. "Only our editors have the expertise to drill down deeply into the topics. The editors use case studies. Some involve CEOs who are Andersen clients. Some don't. That's very much the way we would do it for sections of the magazine in regular editorial. CEO has Guide products that carry advertising. "We actually sell more Briefs to advertisers than we sell Guides, which is a surprise to me," Evans says. CEO readers are very difficult to access, so having a product that breaks through is very important (and very expensive: $160,000) The sponsors don't mind that they get very little visibility Evans explains. Most of them are engaged in some kind of intellectual capital with their clients. To them the ability to showcase product advertising is much less important than the ability to showcase intellectual capital. That's the premise. "You can't sell dozens and dozens of these," she says. "It's a specialized produc t. But I think other companies could explore the idea. You say, 'Look, we are creating a product that's so reader-driven that it doesn't carry advertising, or it doesn't need to. It sounds odd now that I say it, but it works. If the Brief had Andersen Consulting advertising through it, the CEOs might toss it. It's really a matter of extending our client's identification with our readers."