Newsweek: All Budget, All the Time

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

Byline: Michael Learmonth

Last-minute inserts, short-term contracts, and geopolitical upheaval have become a fact of life at Newsweek, where advertisers are just as likely to pull out of an issue covering guerrilla warfare in Iraq as they are to jump in to a special issue on cancer.

But Newsweek worldwide publisher Greg Osberg says his budget predictions are as accurate as ever. Not because he consults a crystal ball, but because he and his staff have the tools to watch the changing numbers hour by hour, if necessary. "We watch the page counts and talk about them daily," he says. "Our forecasting is in real time."

Osberg and his sales team can update the numbers on an hourly basis, using custom desktop software. "A salesperson can go in and change it from their desktop," Osberg says. "I can go in at any time and get a number that I feel pretty confident in - because it's been updated in the last six to eight hours."

Making the budget a malleable, living document is a necessary adaptation to the market, and the only way to cope with increasing advertiser demand for "fast-close" capabilities. Osberg has pushed the ad deadline at Newsweek to the limit, allowing the magazine to take inserts as late as Friday for an issue that closes early Saturday, prints Sunday, and hits the streets Monday.

Since 9/11, Newsweek has made it a policy to allow advertisers to pull out in the face of unpleasant news. But fast-close has become the budget equalizer, enabling advertisers to jump back in, say, when the war in Iraq ended sooner than expected or when the SARS scare faded.

It also helps Newsweek cope with uncertainty in the fourth quarter, when advertisers that have played conservative release unspent funds before the end of the fiscal year, and in the first quarter, as advertisers wait longer and longer to make commitments for the coming year.