Nimble Magazines Adjust to Fast Pace
By DAVID CARR NY TIMES

The magazine business motored along for years on a tried-and-true roadway: find a workable editorial formula and then employ direct-mail and sweepstakes marketing to build a big enough audience to persuade advertisers to come aboard. Once an audience has been established, the thinking goes, it is just a matter of keeping the ads churning and the editorial product fresh.

But that is no longer enough. The pace of the publishing business has revved up to the point that the victories are now going to the swift, organizations that see an opportunity and pounce. Two of the biggest success stories in terms of circulation and advertising — O, the Oprah Magazine, and Maxim — did not even exist six years ago, and many of the business's once hardy perennials, Mademoiselle and McCall's among them, have been sent to that great pulp factory in the sky.

The increasingly rapid metabolism of the magazine business dictates that publishers conduct themselves more like television executives, finding hot niches and introducing quickly developed magazines. And the dictates of the advertising market often determine which magazines die and what the magazines develop (...)

"Publishing has become like show biz," said Chip Block, vice president of USA Pubs. "There is no longer the wait-and-see attitude that there used to be. If advertisers think something is connecting with consumers, they will jump right in, as they have with Real Simple."

The profitability horizon for magazines has historically been a minimum of five years, with major successes like Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated from Time Inc. taking even longer. Now because advertisers are becoming more willing to buy in, and consumers are showing little resistance to trying new publications, magazines like Maxim, published by Dennis USA, and Lucky from Condé Nast, a unit of Advance Publications, have a shot at making money much sooner than was historically possible.

But those advertising dollars will be taken from other magazines. Spending on magazine advertising was relatively constant at 17 percent of total ad spending in the 10 years from 1991 to 2001. The consumer magazine share of the market declined two percentage points to the 2001 level of 16.4 percent from a high of 18.5 percent in 1999. Executives in ad buying expect that when advertising spending comes back, magazines, which typically trail any recovery, will have as large a slice of the pie as they have always had. Even so, specific magazines will have to compete ferociously for available dollars.

"There are fewer and fewer must-buys," said Charlie Rutman, president of Carat USA, a media buying firm that is part of the Aegis Group. "There are so many magazines and an infinite number of pages, so there is no supply-side influence. Advertising pages have become much more of a commodity." Read on (free regis. needed)