'PC Week's' hard drive: will feisty marketing and editorial strategies boost advertising?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 1992 by Warren Berger

Will feisty marketing and editorial strategies boost advertising?

Publishing a weekly computer trade magazine these days is a bit like guerrilla warfare: You never know where the next attack will come from. While keeping tabs on some 25 computer magazines all vying for advertising dollars in the same high-tech market, PC Week publisher Donald Byrnes has lately encountered additional competition from the advertisers themselves (IBM has started publishing its own magazines) and even from his parent company, Ziff-Davis, which last month started a splashy new trade monthly, Corporate Computing, that is almost certain to trend on PC Week's turf.

'One step ahead of the market'

But don't fear for Byrnes of PC Week: The magazine is probably getting off more shots than anyone else in the jungle. In recent months, the eight-year-old weekly has unveiled feisty new marketing and editorial strategies that have helped PC Week to fend off competitors and boost advertising in spite of the increasingly tough market. "They seem to be one step ahead of the market," maintains Virginia Cooper," a media director at TFB/BBDO in Palo Alto, California. "While other computer magazines are reactive," she says, "they're proactive, particularly in terms in innovative new programs."

Consider a few examples: Last October, PC Week created a fax referral service linking the magazine's readers directly to its advertisers; the fax machines have been jammed ever since. The next month, the magazine flexed its target-marketing muscles by creating one issue with 26 demographic editions. The month after that, PC Week introduced an innovative editorial program that pits rival high-tech vendors - the magazine's advertisers - against one another to solve customers' computer problems. PC Week publishes results of these sessions, termed "shootouts." As different as those three programs are, they have one thing in common: All help the magazine's advertisers establish more direct communications with PC Week's readers. And it doesn't take a computer to calculate that that can pay dividends in ad pages.

The efforts are keeping PC Week atop the field in a computer ad market that has been losing some momentum. Though the computer magazine field remained go-go, even as other sectors in publishing contracted, the computer trades have now began to feel the squeeze: The trade category, which previously enjoyed annual advertising growth of as much as 30 percent, saw overall ad pages dip by 6 percent last year, according to the Larchmont, New York-based Computer Publishing & Advertising Report.

In all, there are some 15 trade titles (aimed at company managers and departmet ahead) including PC Week's primary competitors, IDG's weeklies - 205,000 controlled-circulation Infoworld and 136,000 paid-circ Computerworld - as well as Ziff's new monthly; these magazines compete indirectly with a dozen more consumer publications such as Ziff's PC Magazine and MacUser.

PC Week was not immune to the problems, and saw its own advertising pages (5,l002) dip by 4 percent in 1991. But the magazine was able to widen the lead on its two main competitors: Infoworld was down 6 percent for the year with 3,374 ad pages, while Computerworld's 3,162 ad pages amounted to a 20 percent decline. Prospect for the increasingly crowded computer magazine market aren't much better this year, but in the first quarter of 1992, PC Week's advertising is up slightly. "It's been though, but if you look at the competitive picture, we're winning," according to PC Week's publishing director, Claude Sheer.

Taking the fax to the max

Sheer and Byrnes have been winning with ideas. The fax idea occurred to them over Bloody Marys on an airplane, Byrnes says. The insertion of request-forms in each issue with a fax number enables readers to use PC Week as a clearing house of quick price quotes on equipment. The process is faster than reader-service cards, and apparently far more popular - 5,000 faxes, requesting information on some 80,000 pieces of equipment, have been received over the last three months, according to Sheer. As the faxes come in to its bank of half a dozen facsimile machines, PC Week passes the information on to the vendors, who then contact interested reader directly.

Competing publisher Gary Beach of Computerworld scoffs at the fax service as "nothing new," but PC Week is now taking the program to the next level by tracking all the exchanges between readers and vendors in a database. Sheer intends to use that information was a marketing tool when dealing with advertisers. "We'll be able to tell vendors why they've been successful or unsuccessful in sales situations," he says.

Editorial, or ad ploy?

Vendors can also learn something about themselves from the magazine's new Corporate Lab Partners Program, which brings computer-makers and computer-users together to try to solve computer applications problems. The program, run by PC Week editor in chief Sam Whitmore, signs up large non-computer companies, such as Sara Lee, as "partners" on the magazine; when any of the partners has major in-house computer network problems or challenges, PC Week invites computer equipment vendors to try to solve them.