Alumni titles make play for national ads; new network offers 'uncluttered' media buy

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept, 1988 by Paul Frichtl

Alumni titles make play for national ads

Montgomery, Ala.--College alumni/sports publications will carry their first national ads this fall, thanks to a new inependent advertising network, the Collegiate Sports Advertising Network (CSAN).

Introduced by Maxwell Associates, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama, (not affiliated with media conglomerate Maxwell Communication), the network has pulled together 26 alumni/sports publications across the country with a total paid subscriber base of 758,000.

Because the magazines are generally small--the largest, BYU [Brigham Young University] Today, has 203,000 subcribers--they have been unable to attract national advertising, says CSAN president Anne Maxwell. Neither have most succeeded in selling local ads: Alumni readers tend to be scattered around the country and thus unappealing to local advertisers. As a result, the magazines have subsisted mainly on subscription revenues.

Affluent readers

Yet the demographic profile of the group should be attractive to advertisers, Maxwell claims. The circulation base is virtually 100 percent college educated, mostly male, with an active interest in sports. Many subscribers are affluent: They not only pay the high subscription price--$25 to $45 per year for most titles--but also contribute regularly to their alma maters. Some subscriptions are part of college athletic department or alumni association memberships; other subscriptions are bought outright.

CSAN also offers advertisers an uncluttered alternative to television and national magazines, Maxwell claims. In fact, she says, the concept might not have worked even a year ago: During the past 12 months, she believes, advertisers have significantly stepped up their search for uncluttered media.

Maxwell acknowledges that college alumni networks have been attempted before, and have failed. In most cases, though, she notes, the publishers themselves had tried to organize, and were not equipped to handle a national sales effort.

To make CSAN work, Maxwell coordinated 26 publications--all the alumni/sport magazines currently published, except those at Ivy League schools--all with differing formats, frequencies and rate card structures. The network set its own cost per thousand (CPM) ad rates based on what most participating publications were charging for an ad page. Page prices were negotiated individually for the handful of publications whose CPMs were far from the norm. A one-time four-color page costs $42,000.

CSAN is pushign school-year schedules, selling six-time contracts. It has limited the number of contracts to 10 in order to hold down ad clutter and to maintain the editorial integrity of the publications, says Maxwell. The network will break up the schedules, if necessary, and it will accommodate regional insertions for advertisers.

CSAN takes care of all sales work, promotion, materials handling, billing and collection. The program costs the schools nothing; the publications have only to mail in tear sheets of network ads, and CSAN returns payment for the insertions. Maxwell declined to detail CSAN's share of the revenue.

CSAN has close ties to pre-press operations to handle the ads. Its ties to collegiate licensing firms, furthermore, will allow the network to support merchandising tie-ins to over 100 universities and 10 bowl games.

At press time, CSAN had signed Toyota to a schedule and expected to have contracts with two or three other major advertisers for the football season opener issues. Target categories include anything carried by other upscale male-oriented magazines, except alcohol and cigarette advertising.