Solving the partnership puzzle

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July 1, 2002

In this marketing realm, patience is a virtue. Negotiations can drag on for months. And be prepared to sign a non-disclosure agreement with your partner before you start talking specifics. "One of the things I've gotten very good at, and one of the things I'm spending a lot of time with these days, is lawyers," says David Obey, consumer marketing development director for Conde Nast Publications.

Often, publishers find that a partner is not familiar with marketing magazines, which can lead to substandard results. That was the case with Time Inc.'s bank partnership. Godshall wouldn't name names in the ill-starred bank deal, but said that, in general, banks don't appear to be ideal partners. Federal privacy laws got in the way, and there were technical problems getting the bank to communicate with the fulfillment house. "There are new privacy audits that each side does, so making sure that we're in compliance with a large institution's policy can take a lot of time and may not be worth it," Godshall says. "These are large institutions that dictate terms on how they want to work, and it takes a lot of time to accommodate our business systems to theirs."

staffing up

Because the partnerships can take so long to nail down, dedicating staff to the deals is essential, circulators say. But most publishers, even large ones, have only one person whose sole job is partnership marketing. In the case of Cincinnati-based F W Publications, that role is yet to be filled. "We need that," says David Lee, F W's vice president for corporate marketing. "We're laying new track here, and it takes a different approach."

Time Inc. has a centralized group of about 10, headed by Godshall, which helps individual magazines and provides support for partners that want to work with more than one magazine. In addition, most of Time Inc.'s magazines have someone - usually a senior-level staff member - working on partnerships.

Godshall says experience and a broad set of skills are essential to nailing down deals. "The best-suited people to work on these partnerships are people who have had experience in circulation and therefore know what works from a magazine's perspective, but are senior enough to interface successfully with people from the outside," he says. "At Time Inc., we have presidents and publishers who are former circulators, so this is a place where they can come back a little bit and use that background while doing their new job."

Although the effect has been marginal so far, Godshall says, "We do have a couple of magazines whose business is in the process of being transformed." Entertainment Weekly, which has a much publicized partnership with Ticketmaster, and Sports Illustrated have yielded "a material source" of new circulation, he says. "It's just important enough where they feel that partnership marketing is contributing to current success and will probably be more successful in the future." Godshall won't discuss how many partners or subscriptions are involved for EW and SI, but says of the partners, "I'd say it's a handful, not dozens."