The ad package payoff; Need more muscle in your market? Create a magazine ad package that will enhance your credibility and boost your sales

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August, 1989 by Daniel Ambrose

Decide if it's for you

Should you create a package for your magazine? To answer that question, ask yourself some more. Can you define an advantage your contemplated package would offer advertisers? Would it provide advertisers wider geographic coverage? Would it reach many more readers who have something in common? Executives, artists, computer technicians? Would it create an advantage advertisers can't get elsewhere? Might the advertisers in one of your magazines be prospects for the others? What key advantage might your package offer to advertisers?

If they fit together, two magazine titles are enough to create a package--for example, the combination of M and W at Fairchild Publishing, and the newly announced combination of New York Woman and L.A. Style by American Express Publishing.

CMP Publications is successful with its corporate discount structure because its titles are primarily in the same two industries: travel or computers. Many of its customers use several titles. Computer product advertisers, for instance, enhance their clout with savings in several magazines. CMP uses that clout to continue to grow in the high-tech field.

Hearst Magazines, on the other hand, offers significant reach for an advertiser in the fragmented affluent market with the Hearst Gold Buy. Hearst's seven magazines reach more than 50 percent of all households with more than $100,000 annual income. And McGraw-Hill, through its newly expanded McGraw-Hill Management Network, offers a huge cost-per-thousand advantage over broad-based magazines like the newsweeklies to advertisers seeking to reach businessmen generally.

Once you determine that there are sufficient marketing reasons to create a package, decide if the group sales approach will fit with your organizational philosophy. Will a group sales approach diminish the individuality of your magazines? Will nongeneric advertising be detrimental to the overall environment of your magazines? And of course the final question: Do you have the margin in your rates to allow additional discounts? Or can you reorganize the rate structure to allow corporate discounts on top of reduced single magazine frequency discounts?

When structuring a package, keep the following points in mind:

1. The more complex the package is, the fewer the customers and salespeople who will take time to determine the benefits. For instance, Doug Gluck, senior vice president, media director at Lintas, which handles IBM and Lever Bros., among other large advertisers, says that the Time Inc. Max Plan has so many variables that planners calculate savings after the plan is completed, rather than factor them into the planning process.

Time and time again publishers have created rate structures that are so difficult to figure out that advertisers don't factor them into their planning, but wait to calculate them till after they have finalized their plan.

The max Plan has worked, however, because Time Inc., publications already control about 25 percent of all consumer magazine advertising dollars. Time Inc. is admired by publishers for creating a package that avoided giving up discounts on existing business in favor of giving a credit for additional space. This extra space costs Time far less than the value it offers to advertisers. Gluck agrees that the Max Plan has a significant effect in reverse: stopping cancellations, rather than gaining business for Time Inc. publications up front.