Jonah Bloom Of AdAge Talks To PSFK About Skipping The Issue

Advertising Age, the leading trade magazine for the marketing industry, has pulled its March 16 issue. There has been a lot of talk about the decline of print media recently but instead of just reporting another story about how this not only impacts readers but the lives of the people who work there, PSFK decided to find out more about what’s going on internally. We asked Ad Age editor Jonah Bloom for the inside scoop:

Jonah, we’ve heard rumors that the next issue of Ad Age will be digital only – true?

Yes, it’s true. No print issue on March 16th, next one comes out on March 23rd. It’s no big secret–we stated it clearly on page 2 of this week’s issue, and indeed dated this week’s issue on the cover and throughout the book at March 9th and 16th. The fact is that in the last couple of years we’ve gone from publishing 50 issues a year to publishing 47 issues. This year my best estimate would be that we’ll publish 44 or 43 issues–cutting back on this one, a couple of the summer issues and maybe cutting one of the December issues too.

Why have the publishers made this decision?

Why do it? Well, on the most basic level, we’re doing it for the reason you’d expect–the economy is in the toilet, media is in a period of radical realignment of the business model, and that’s affecting us just as it’s affecting most everyone. At such a time it’s clearly just common-sense to cut back on print and distribution overhead, especially if that enables us to maintain staffing levels in the newsroom and our DataCenter, so that we can continue to serve our audience with the content they need/expect. Additionally we’ve been evolving the weekly print content for five or six years now, so that it’s less about splashy breaking news–which has clearly moved online–and more about smart, service-based journalism and analysis that enables our readers to do their jobs better. While I’m not pretending that journalists like me who started their careers in print find ‘double-issues’ of print weeklies a little scary, the fact is that today we’re able to publish the most timely content online and make use of print for the bigger, deeper stuff. We want to deliver that deeper stuff every single Monday, but we think 44 offerings every year is still pretty compelling.

The scary thing is that online publications don’t seem to be getting the same amount of advertising dollars that is leaking out of print publications. Is online advertising as we know it not failing brands, publications and therefore the reader?

Online advertising as it’s executed is clearly failing brands–and, yes, I guess you could therefore say it’s failing media owners who are looking to it to justify the money they spend aggregating audiences using content. There’s pathetically little creativity in the online ad arena and a commensurate lack of effectiveness for many scalable campaigns. Probably more damaging, as Ad Age has documented extensively, is the legacy notion that online advertising should be measured in clicks. That’s great for those looking only for direct response, but fails to recognize the potential role of online ads further up the purchase funnel. And then there’s the infinite-supply-finite-demand issue that’s led to rapid commoditization of/depreciation in online ad cpms. Yep, it adds up to a nightmare for all concerned.

That said, and again Ad Age has been banging this drum for too many years, the more fundamental problem is that so many media owners have built online ‘business’ models based on the idea that the internet is an ad medium that was just going to suck every last dollar from every other medium. Yeah, it is an medium, but it’s so, so much more than that. It’s a way of life and as marketers realize that, as they realize that it’s a whole way of being conversationally and transactionally involved with their customers, they’re going to be more and more focused on that aspect of digital marketing and less and less focused on simply putting ads next to content.

What does that mean for media owners like you?

Well, two things, first that we have to build customized solutions for advertisers that go beyond just traditional ad units and really work for them and are measured in business results, and, secondly, that we have to look at other ways of monetizing our content. If we believe it’s sufficiently valuable that people will pay for it, we have to find ways to unearth that value that don’t involve advertising.

Everyone’s looking for a silver bullet in that arena, and my best guess is there isn’t one. There’s just good old fashioned diversification. Diversification into paid-content and events and services such as custom publishing, research and so on. That’s why we recently implemented a new special subscription model for our online DataCenter; it’s why we continue to keep our deep archives of info accessible to subscribers only; it’s why we run our Ad Age on Campus program for educators; it’s why we put our most in-depth research into white papers and charge for them. None of these things are necessarily sexy–(many people insist everything has to be free, which, of course means everything has to be ‘ad supported’)–but they’re important if original journalistic content is going to have the bright future it ought to have.

Sadly, we’re seeing a trend of news publishers closing down their print publications. Do you think this is a short-medium term thing while the world goes through this shake-up or that the downturn has accelerated change in publishing that was due to happen?

This is going to sound incredibly cruel–anyone who’s ever been fired, or even had to fire someone will say it’s a horrible experience from both sides and I’m not underestimating that–but the horribly truth is we probably needed a shakeout and that’s what we’re getting. Some print products will survive because there are a lot of drivers of purchase behavior and they’re not all digital–at least not yet–so advertisers will continue to value some of the more powerful print offerings for a while yet. But they’ll be the top players in their markets, who are able to offer customized programs that enable an advertiser to really engage with a key, influential demographic or psychographic across multiple-platforms. It’s hard to imagine a number three or four print product in its category existing by the end of 2011 if you examine current trends. And, simultaneously, both the leading publications and some of the smarter small ones will work out how to reinvent themselves as digital-only operations, or they’ll be replaced by other digital operators. Clearly the recession (depression?) is, in that respect, a catalyst for major, unstoppable forces that were already at work. We’ve been saying for six years now that the media world is reaching a change or die moment. Maybe we were getting a little ahead of ourselves, but I think today it’s pretty obvious that if you haven’t already laid some strong digital foundations, you’re going to struggle to swim in the stream of continuous information and entertainment that’s sweeping up more and more consumers by the day.

OK, let’s imagine that AdAge went all-digital: What areas of the content would you expand upon to gain readership, what areas of the print publication would you be less interested in.

I don’t mean to sound like an asshole, but we try not to think like that. The game for us isn’t about volume, because our value is tied up in our particular kind of audience and advertiser. We do about a million views a week and sometimes quite a lot more. I don’t deny that I’d love to bring in more people, because I think we have some really interesting content that’s accessible to just about anyone anywhere in the world. But the truth is that we’re not going to do much to monetize some religious extremist from, let’s say, Brazil, who has come to our site to leave angry comments on a story about, let’s say, P&G supporting LGBT-media. That reader or viewer isn’t someone our advertisers value that highly, or someone for whom we edit content. We are fortunate in that our core audience, brand marketers, media agencies and ad agency execs, is very interested in understanding how emerging media and technology can help them–and that’s something that happens to also get traffic. But we continue to write a lot about lots of other less traffic-friendly topics (in fact anything that could be covered by the 4Ps–product, price, place and promotion), because we believe they’re still very important to brand managers. It was never all about TV ads–even if it used to feel that way–and today it’s not all about Facebook and Twitter–even if sometimes it feels that way. It’s about what works for big brands and their consumers. We wanna uncover how you move product in both short and long term. That’s Ad Age’s subject, and I like to think we’ve already shown that we have a consistent voice across print and online and don’t just play traffic games. (Not that we won’t throw in the odd Twitter-porn story too ;)

Many thanks, Jonah!

Advertising Age