When the numbers go against you: editorial doesn't have to take the hit every time a key statistic heads south

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Dec 1, 1991 by Frank Finn

Editorial doesn't have to take the hit every time a key statistic heads south.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Many attribute that famous line to Mark Twain. Twain himself credited Benjamin Disraeli. My bet is that a magazine editor was the first to mutter those words upon reading the following memo from his publisher: "The numbers are down. Looks like your editorial approach isn't working. Let's meet ASAP to discuss what you're going to do about it."

Given the number of editors who have taken the fall for Poor business-side numbers lately, your first impulse on receiving a similar memo from your publisher may be to update your resume. But before you anything as drastic as that, it would pay you to scrutinize those numbers more closely.

Deploy your journalist's skepticism and ask a few Pointed questions, and you may be able to show that editorial doesn't deserve the blame for the bad news after all, and that a change of editorial direction and editors) isn't justified.

Whether the numbers in question are advertising pages, newsstand sales, renewal rates or reader service responses, every editor should be prepared to respond when the editorial product is fingered as the culprit responsible for a key statistic heading south.

Advertising pages

It is a publishing truism that the editorial product must draw and hold readers, or the magazine won't attract advertisers. So it is understandable in a way that editorial often plays the role of scapegoat when ad sales flatten out or turn down. But before you allow management to pin the blame on editorial for a decline in ad pages, several questions should be asked and answered:

Are we getting our share? in all too many magazine markets today, advertisers are buying fewer pages overall. That's why it is crucial to analyze market share, or the percentage of total ad pages each magazine in a given market captures. A publication can sell fewer pages and still maintain its market position,

Is the competition giving away pages? Deep discounting of advertising space is so widespread today that it makes page counting nearly worthless as a way success versus another. Your advertising director may wish that your editorial was more like that of a competitor to whom he is losing pages. But if the competitor is giving away ad pages, Your advertising director is barking up the wrong tree.

Is the competition more innovative editorially, or is that just an illusion? If your magazine is losing advertising market share to a competitor that has livelier editorial, you will have to rise to the challenge with content innovations of your own. But if you are creating an exciting magazine with special issues, ground-breaking articles and departments or features that involve your readers, your work can't be faulted. of course, it helps to have hard evidence to demonstrate that your editorial approach works. Two options are direct reader response and valid research.

Reader service response

Most trade magazines and many consumer titles use the number of responses to advertisements as a key measure of reader involvement. Readers may contact advertisers directly by returning a coupon or calling an 800 number. Or-they can circle numbers on a bingo card, which is returned to the publisher or a service bureau.

Whatever the mechanism, publishers promote the value of these responses as sales leads for advertisers and proof that readers make decisions about product Purchases as a result of reading ads and editorial in their magazines. And they often go a step further, making a connection between reader involvement in editorial and response to advertising.

That can be a dangerous game, however. There are at least two factors beyond the magazine's control that affect reader response to advertising: the nature of the advertiser's product, price or service, and the quality of the advertisement. So when the publisher pushes for "more involving editorial" on the grounds that reader response to advertising is declining, it is fair to ask two questions:

* How do responses from our magazine compare with those from other publications? If the response rate is down across the board, the ad may be "tired, " overexposed. The readers may be quite familiar with the product by now.

* Does our bingo card format make it easy for readers to respond? Are competitors offering services, such as Fax response, that produce higher response numbers?

Newsstand soles

Gay Bryant, editor in chief of Mirabella, recently found herself fighting the widespread assumption that newsstand sales can be linked directly to editorial's execution of the cover. At a meeting between the magazine's top editors and its business-side executives, the discussion turned to a drop in newsstand sell-through, the percentage of the copies distributed that are actually sold. Bryant, a veteran with editing stints at several major newsstand magazines including Family Circle and New Woman, asked whether the circulation department had been expanding distribution into new types of retail outlets.