Re: Joyce

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 1, 1991

For nearly a decade, Walter Joyce, who died after a short illness in February, enlightened readers of FOLIO: with his column on advertising promotion. His authority derived from his years of crafting campaigns for magazines as diverse as Fortune and Playboy, but his legacy will be his self-effacing wit, charming directness and occasional literary flourishes as befitting his name.

Those who consulted with him recall that he would startle his clients by beginning, "Let's make up a story," and then rattle off a series of wildly improbable ideas and scenarios that would somehow come together in a logical, conceivable - but most important-believable campaign.

Herewith, a few of our favorite Joycean stories.

MAKING ADVERTISING PAY

* The true measure of campaign effectiveness is not what people think of your advertising, but what message they internalize from it. The payoff is what gets off the page and into people's heads. You know your advertising is paying off when customers start telling you your own sales story as if they had thought of it themselves. In a just world, that has an eventual payout in advertising pages.

* Publishers have devised numerous methods for spinning advertising gold into straw. Advertising Interruptus befalls many publishers at midyear budget crunch. It leaves the objectives of advertising unsatisfied and resources wastefully spent. If you suspect you won't be able to finish, don't start.

The Widow's Mite afflicts those publishers who feel they should be doing "something" but lack the purse or the commitment or both. If you can't stack up two or three hundred grand a year over several selling seasons, than drop the bucks you've got to your bottom line, where they'll matter. Your occasional advertising pittance will not convert the heathens of Madison Avenue and, unlike the penurious widow, you won't even feel good about your donation.

* Give a medium-size idea room to grow and it will blow down walls for you. Example? How about Time's long-running "More Goes Into It"/"You Get More Out of It" advertiser/consumer one-two punch? That's your classic mediocre-but over the years, effective.

* The notion that you must respond in print to a competitor's claims, no matter how outrageous, is both wasteful and damaging. Don't fight on his ground; show him both your cheeks as you move away from him. But some night in a dark alley ...

DEFENDING TRADE ADVERTISING

* With today's economic conditions more than a little iffy, the bean counters have once again broken loose to rape, pillage and plunder sales support budgets.

No budget is more naked to the knife than trade advertising. It usually represents a relatively big number. The people who produce it are not on staff, so painful layoffs are not an issue. And it is seldom supported by sales management, which often does not appear to believe in advertising, the very product it sells.... As you read this, there are major publishing companies sucking the lifeblood out of their properties under the banner of fiscal responsibility.

* The three most essential elements of trade advertising are consistency, consistency and consistency. Forbes's Capitalist Tool is now in its mid-20s. That Cosmopolitan Girl is pushing 40. Good campaigns have staying power because their core ideas have both breadth and depth.

DEFINING MERCHANDISING

* Think of a dirty word.

That's right: merchandising. As in, "We don't do merchandising." Or "We used to, but we were ashamed of ourselves and we stopped."

Too bad. Merchandising is potentially one of the most effective weapons in your sales arsenal.

Some of the hang-up may be semantic, so let's agree on what merchandising is not.

Merchandising is not the TV set that ends up in the product manager's basement rec room. That's bribery.

Merchandising is not some bullying advertiser demanding kickbacks for his own promotional slush fund with each participating magazine getting credit in eyestrain type. That's extortion.

Merchandising is not two-fers or space credits of $500 for anything you want to do." That's card breaking. And stupid.

* Merchandising lifts the advertiser's message off the printed page and helps it shout in the marketplace. it is one of the ways magazines demonstrate that they are active marketing partners, not just carriers of advertising.

Merchandising is nothing to be ashamed of. Do it.

SELLING YOUR POSITIONING

* Believability is key to positioning-no one can buy what they don't believe.

* Salespeople will ever seek to erase the lines of your position in order to be all things to all clients. it doesn't work.

* Competitor bashing is almost never appropriate in a presentation. Maybe in a last-ditch switch pitch. Maybe down and dirty across the desk. But never in a document that aspires to statesmanship.

GETTING GOOD PROMOTION PEOPLE

* The death or at least dearth of creativity in magazine promotion is widely bemoaned, but nobody has plans to hire and train neophytes. instead, we'll continue to exhaust the gene pool by stealing from one another.

THROWING A MEDIA PARTY