Publishers like IKE, but will students?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Jan 1, 1997 by Jennifer Sucov

What if subscribing to a magazine were as easy as pressing the "fast cash" button on an ATM? That's the idea behind IKE, the Inter-active Kiosk Experience.

Since the start of the 1996 school year, Campus Interaction, a division of INTER-action Media Corporation in Coral Gables, Florida, has set up IKE stations at nearly 50 colleges nationwide, from Ohio State to the University of California at San Diego. Each school has one terminal with three touch-screens, located in a high-traffic area such as the student union. The kiosks provide students with access to campus information, movie previews, music samples and a seamless way to subscribe to magazines.

"IKE is designed to give students the immediate gratification they want," says Jeff Scult, vice president/marketing for Campus INTER-action. Because IKE functions like an ATM - users are assigned a personal identification number (PIN) - Scult expects students to feel comfortable conducting monetary transactions over the closed network. They can preview content and subscribe immediately, transmitting credit-card data directly to the publisher or the fulfillment house.

"We're very interested in the college market," says Ilene Cohen, assistant subscription director for New York City-based Conde Nast Publications. "They're a very elusive group. It's difficult to sell subscriptions to them because they're always moving."

Cohen placed Glamour, Mademoiselle, Self and Details on the IKE service to supplement her own overtures to the college market, including direct mail and agencies like American Collegiate Marketing, University Subscription Services and Campus Subscriptions.

IKE operates like a traditional agency, says Scult. Subscription revenues are either shared with the publisher or kept by IKE, depending on the arrangement. A magazine might pay production costs - $7,500 for six months of updated screen graphics, including audio - and a $200-per-campus distribution fee. IKE currently absorbs all transaction costs and supports the hardware and network.

"This was a small percentage of our direct-marketing budget," says Gigi Panehal, subscription director for New York City-based Wenner Media. "It's reasonably priced." All three Wenner titles - rolling Stone, US and Men's Journal - are available on the service.

Currently, IKE offers 12 magazines; Scult plans to install kiosks on 150 campuses by next fall. Circulators, including Entertainment Weekly consumer marketing director Andy Sareyan, are only counting on a few thousand subscriptions a year from the service. But they say IKE has other benefits.

"Beyond selling subscriptions, we also get exposure on the campuses," says Panehal. Even if students don't subscribe on IKE, she thinks they may be more likely to pick up the magazines in the campus bookstore after seeing them on the kiosks.

Eric Weil, president of Strategic Marketing Communications, Inc., a Ridgewood, New Jersey-based consultancy specializing in the college market, is more skeptical. "If you think college kids are going to stand in fine [at the one kiosk on campus] to buy a magazine, you,re naive."

Others say that when it comes to landing new subscribers, every little bit helps. According to Brooke McMurray, director of agency marketing for Time Inc., while college agency subs make up a small portion of total agency subs at the New York City-based publisher (Entertainment Weekly and People are available on IKE), the numbers are nothing to scoff at. "I'm not racking my brain every day to come up with new ways to sell subs to the college market," she says. "I'm racking my brain to figure out how to sell more subs, period. Anything that sells more is good."

IN BRIEF

IDG tests another Web title

* International Data Group,s Web Publishing Inc. introduced its fourth Web-only title, NC World, last month as a virtual insert on its three other sites. The new title will launch as a full-scale site in February at http://www.ncworldmag.com. "It will target corporate IS professionals interested in the burgeoning network computing market," says Web Publishing president Michael McCarthy. All four of Web Publishing's titles - NC World, Java World, Netscape World and Sun World - are advertiser supported and free for readers. The sites send out mid-month e-mails alerting their 30,000 to 50,000 subscribers to new issues and/or articles.

One key to Web publishing, McCarthy notes, is finding "a market in which the [demand for] information is high and the readers are ready to go online" - in other words, an audience that doesn't require costly "razzle-dazzle." Java World, the division's first title, is profitable and Sun World and Netscape World are expected to break even by the middle of this year, according to McCarthy, who adds that Java World is making enough money to pay for the current losses of Netscape World.

The titles were launched in cyberspace because publishing such highly technical magazines for such a specialized, and often limited, set of subscribers would most likely be too expensive for the print world.