Magazine Ad Trends: Products Advertised Equals Topics Covered

There's an old trick in the magazine business: if you want advertisers, then cover them editorially. I don't mean the ethically-challenged tit for tat we've all seen some publishers indulge. In this case, there's a more natural and obvious connection. If you never mention consumer electronics in your publication, then it becomes harder for ad salespeople to interest consumer electronics companies to advertise:

Ad salesperson: "This is really a great publication for you to reach your customers."

Corporate ad buyer: "But we sell nutritional supplements for older people and you have a magazine for kids. What interest are they going to have in geriatric products?"

Ad salesperson: "Ah, but one day they're going to be older, and think of all the mind share you would have built!"

Tough to make the sale if you can't show the natural interest. That's why you should take a look at this article from Crain's New York Business, which discusses the general state of magazine ads and which categories are up and down in the first quarter of this year as compared to the same time last year:

For the entire industry, rate-card-reported advertising revenue, which does not reflect discounting, came in at $5.2 billion, down 1.2% from the previous year. Ad pages—generally considered the more reliable industry bell weather—fell 6.4%, to 49,167.

The top advertising categories that actually showed growth were retail; transportation, hotels and resorts; financial and real estate; and food. "The category that includes the likes of Kraft’s macaroni and cheese and Lay’s potato chips almost single-handedly held up the magazine industry in the first quarter, according to numbers released Monday by the Publishers Information Bureau of the Magazine Publishers of America."

The categories getting hammered were led by automotive, which is no surprise in the combination of economic downturn and tightening credit market. It dropped 17 percent. Home furnishings and supplies lost 12%. The reporting is based on numbers from Publishers Information Bureau of the Magazine Publishers of America.

You might also check the numbers for how individual magazine titles did. Some of the big winners were All You, Backpacker, Cookie, Ducks Unlimited, Every Day with Rachel Ray, Family Fun, Field and Stream, Medizine Healthy Living, OK Weekly, Quick and Simple, ReadyMade, Remedy, Ser Padres, Transworld Snowboarding, Womens Health, Wondertime, and Relish.

Some of the big losers: ABA Journal, Auto Week, Boating, Businessweek, Coastal Living, Cycle World, Endless Vacation, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune Small Business, Golf for Women, Gourmet, Hemispheres, Kiplingers Personal Finance, Motorboating, National Journal, Reader's Digest, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, Tennis, US News & World Report, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

A caveat: these are all based on rate cards. But discounting is common, and there's no telling for sure whether the magazines that had gone up might have effectively dropped their price. (However, generally when you're selling a lot of ads, you don't have to drop rates so much.)