Magazines - Important - Sales vs. Editorial
Just been reading a few posts and noticed a lot of people refer to the three main magazines quite a bit, namely (Pilot, Flyer and Today's Pilot). I'm going to share some info now with you all as a result.
I used to work in London for a publishing company as an event manager. We put on events relating to our publications as we already had the main players advertising with us in our publications it wasn't too hard to get them to sign up to pay £2k to £6k for an exhibition stand. We could also advertise the event to our target audience for free effectively.
Right, the above should qualify me to advise you what I learned in this job before changing my career path:
a) Magazines by and large are not editorial driven, they are sales driven by those who advertise.
b) On average subscriptions and shop sales cover the printing and distribution costs. The advertising pays the wages and is where the profit comes from.
c) You can't sell two pages of advertising facing each other, you need one of articles with a facing page of adverts. Also you'll pay more for a right-hand page than a left because you see it more easily.
d) The biggest problem with publishing is finding enough new topics to write about each month to fill up the pages so you can sell advertising. As a result we’d write any old crap, re-gurgitate old news, to fill up column inches so we could sell space opposite it.
e) Every week my previous company would have a strategy meeting and determine that certain sectors weren't spending any money. We would then ask the editorial team to write a juicy article to sell advertising around it. The sales team would then flood them with calls. I may direct your attention to the current edition of one of the magazines where headsets are reviewed or another magazine with a GPS system article at the moment. Look at the amount of related advertisers on the surrounding pages.
f) We would also not write anything too close to the bone as to alienate our principal revenue source.
g) It appears to be Oxford Aviation, Cabair, Ormond Beach, Transair etc. who appear to spend the most in UK magazines.
h) We'd also have advertisers ring us up and advise us of new products or services and attempt to get an editorial written. We'd do so based on how much they had spent in the previous year, if they were taking any ads alongside and if we wanted to throw the cat amongst the pigeons with their competitors.
Might be me being cynical, but just remember to tread carefully when reading through the magazines, don't treat them as gospel truth.
Stephen