Editorial Solutions for Advertising Problems: A Two-Way Street

Advertising and editorial: Is it really like this?

The editorial department vs. the advertising department: historically, these two arms of the magazine corpus have been perceived to be in a constant wrestling match. Salespeople and their clients — the advertisers — often believe that, while they may not have created the value in a publication, it’s nevertheless their efforts that keep the entity alive. The editorial staff, in contrast, views the advertisers as a necessary evil, to be tolerated more than embraced, especially when late or missing ads force a last-minute revision before publication.

As in most zero-sum games, the truth is somewhere in the grays. It’s true that advertisers’ meddling with editorial content is still as welcome as an emergency root canal, but most editorial staffs are savvy enough to appreciate the content value that well-crafted advertisements can deliver to their readers. And the readers notice. Surveys have repeatedly demonstrated that 80%+ of readers will act on a magazine ad — numbers that digital media outlets can’t even dream of.

So, where’s the middle ground? How can the two sides of the magazine office support each other to everyone’s benefit?

Editorial: Create valuable positions. The quickest way to avoid an advertiser’s request for disruptive or unreasonable placement is to have the position ready in advance. Usually, this means carving out more favorable placement opportunities in the front-of-book. Is your table of contents a spread? Break it into two singles. Most publications that don’t include a letters page make that decision based on a dearth of reader communication. But if they don’t see a space for it, why should readers contribute? You may have to “fake it till you make it,” but you’ll have opened up a favorable advertising location on the opposite page.

Sales: Cultivate special sections. The most successful salespeople I’ve worked with over my career knew how to use the best elements of magazine publishing to appeal to potential advertisers. While a company might not employ a stellar marketing department, capable of producing winning advertisements, engaging copy and design should be leaking from the magazine’s editorial department. Put them to work on a self-contained feature story that is distinct from the style of the magazine but displays the same keen sense of audience engagement. Advertorials are usually easy to slot into a pagination, and readers rarely confuse them with unpaid content, while still valuing the information.

Editorial: Treat your ads with respect. With densely packed books, it can be challenging to coordinate editorial content into reflecting the available advertising space, let alone placing the ads with positioning that favors both the advertiser and the adjacent content. But consider the few gestures you can make. How about taking off the folios on fractional ad pages? This may be an old-fashioned notion, but I was taught that, when advertisers buy space in your magazine, they buy the entire space, not 80% minus a strip of editorial content that runs along the bottom of their ads. You wouldn’t slap a folio across a full-page ad; why treat your fractional advertisers so differently? Some would argue that there’s value for the advertiser in being associated with editorial content, or that, if the fractional advertisers want more space, they can pay for it. There may be logic in that, but I’d argue the point from the readers’ perspectives. Ads are ads, and editorial is editorial and it should be easy to distinguish one from the other. I’ve seen too many fractional ads that have been designed as short articles; putting folios next to some ads is asking for trouble.

Sales: Be open minded. Traditional ideas about favorable placement can easily be upended by a forward-thinking department structure. Suppose the editorial team has developed a set of interior “covers,” i.e. right-hand page openers to discrete sections of the book. Don’t think of those as a net loss of right-hand ad pages; think of those as a new set of paid positions. Your editorial team has built a system which is designed to stop readers in their tracks. That left-hand page opposite just became prime real estate.

And a final word to the production department: I strongly urge you to resist the impulse to repair faulty ad files. Way, way, way too many companies distribute ad files that fail any number of printer specifications, from spot colors to low-res, RGB imagery to missing bleed and much more. Unless the advertiser has specifically requested (and, hopefully, paid for) the use of your services, it’s not your job to fix those ads. It may be expedient. It may even go unnoticed. But you don’t possess the ability to read the minds of your advertisers, and you have no idea how they feel about having their corporate color converted into CMYK. Maybe they’ll be fine with it; then again, I’ve known companies that cared deeply about such things. It’s simply not worth the risk.

We can help your team put together a winning strategy for serving advertisers of every size and budget without compromising your magazine’s integrity. Let’s talk about the possibilities: contact@quartocreative.com.