Bridal books embrace new advertisers

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August, 1998

By all rights, the bridal category should be one of the most profitable in magazine publishing. Weddings represent a $32 billion industry that's essentially recession-proof. The books are packed with ads and sell the vast majority of their copies on the newsstand. They're bimonthly, meaning reduced editorial, production and distribution expenses, and they have a consistently replenished universe of readers. After all, people are always getting married.

But it's not all roses. Of the three largest bridal books-Conde Nast Bride's, Primedia's Modern Bride and Globe Communications Corp.'s Bridal Guide-not one offers a ratebase, even though they all have circulations measured in the hundreds of thousands. Seasonal fluctuations in the single-copy market (more people get married in the spring and summer than during the rest of the year) can swing their sales numbers by as much as 15 percent.

Also, newsstand sales at the two largest, Bride's and Modern Bride, are down more than 20 percent in the 1 990s, largely due to the launch of Bridal Guide 10 years ago. With circulation revenues now split among three big books and marketshare going to a growing number of smaller ones, bridal publishers are increasing their ad efforts and moving beyond dresses and flatware into advertising markets that have nothing to do with weddings.

Deborah Fine has been the publisher of Bride's for just over a year, and in that time she's brought in 14 new ad categories, including telecommunications, automotive and even liquor. Ad pages at the title for the first six months of 1998 are up 17 percent over the year-earlier period, and its phone-book size February! March issue made it into the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest magazine measured by both total pages (1,160) and ad pages (939). For the October! November issue, Fine, a former associate publisher at Glamour, is planning to polybag a corresponding supplement for men, called Groom's.

New staff and a redesign

The category's number-two book, Primedia's Modern Bride, is also hoping to strengthen its ad performance. The title was down 5 percent in pages for the first half of t998, but group publisher Doug Fierro has already put some changes in place that could stop the slide. First, he's got a new editor in chief, 29-year-old Stacy Morrison, formerly with Conde Nast Sports for Women, who took over in February and has since redesigned the book. The August/September issue is the first to show her imprint, including a new typeface and more service editorial. "My generation is used to a certain level of quality in magazines, which bridal titles are lacking," Morrison says.

Fierro has also just hired a new publisher for Modern Bride, Ilene Rapkin, and grouped the book with Primedia's other bridal assets: modernbride.com and weddingnetwork.com, an Internet gift registry, 14 regional titles and The Great Bridal Expo, which hosts bridal events.

"Now we can give companies the option to participate in more than one of our services for a lower package rate," says Fierro, who notes that the company is looking into cable television projects as well. "Even though the number-one reason women come to these magazines is to look at ads for dresses, these affluent women are also in a prime time in their lives where they're buying more than just what they need for their wedding," he says.

While Bride's and Modem Bride have the largest share of the market, the 232,000-circulation Bridal Guide, only 10 years old, has become a competitor by positioning itself apart from them. "We have an alternate on-sale date cycle," says Susannah Pask, senior vice president and publisher of the 460-page title. "So even though bridal bimonthlies have a long shelf life, when women come back to the newsstand for more wedding ideas they see our fresh new book." Bridal Guide has also beaten Bride's to the men's market. For the past five years, it has polybagged a single-advertiser SIP, called Grooms, with the March/April issue. A tuxedo company has sponsored the supplement on its own thus far, but parent company Globe Communications is considering a multi-advertiser version tentatively called The Marrying Man.

Martha looms

Like all categories, the larger titles are seeing their marketshare erode to smaller, more tightly niched magazines, like regional bridal books and spin-offs from non-wedding magazines. The not-to-be-ignored Martha Stewart Living Weddings is currently publishing twice a year and scheduled to go quarterly in 1999, and Town & Country has devoted its February issue to weddings for the past two years.

But if the newsstand appears cluttered with these bridal books, they're still selling. 'Consumers are buying two publications now, when before they were only buying one," says Beverly Clark, a Carpinteria, California-based wedding consultant.

There's more on the way. Another demographic shift in the way people marry-or rather, remarry-is likely to be reflected next summer, when Bridal Guide plans to publish a supplement about second weddings. "Tastes change as people get older," Pask says. "They want new stuff and they're spending more money."