Magazines Heavy in Ads

All advertising sucks, right? We should avoid ads, marketing and campaigning at all cost? A friend said this to me on the weekend, “Advertising is lame. It’s so manipulative. I hate ads, I hate being advertised to and I try to avoid seeing any ads at all if I can”

Now I don’t want to get too defensive of something that I spend a lot of time doing. An Ex girlfriend of mine stopped watching TV with me because I was constantly yelling at the TV with is dumb, lame-ass commercials (I sometimes think I am turning into an old man). So I hate Ads as much as the next guy.

Someone sent me these bunch of statistics the other day. An analysis done by Folio, a US based magazine for magazine management (what a niche), compares the percentage of content that are Ads across the top fashion magazines for the 2007 Fall season. The results are insane.

Maire Claire starts off with an average of 340 pages, of which 170 are Ad content, 50% (the remaining editorial content). Elle magazine comes in next with 67% of their page content that are Ads. Taking out the top prize, Vogue with a total of 840 pages. Of those 840 pages, 727 pages where Ad content. 727! 86%. Add that to the fact that over half of the women surveyed read fashion magazines for fashion tips and Advertisements. These magazine people are onto something. Paid advertisements that people actually enjoy viewing.

So not all commercials are bad and not all Ads are a waste of time. Think how many times you have done one of the following:

• Read a magazine that consist most of Ads.
• Watched a funny commercial that you have been forwarded by email or on youtube.
  Watched the Super bowl for the Ads.
• Seen one of those “world’s funniest Ads” TV shows

In these cases (and like youtube, best of ads website and TV shows) the advertising content is so good and entertaining and at times provides such valuable information – like showing fashion trends and new products, that it moves beyond a sales pitch and becomes the content itself.

I am just suprised that people still buy magazines in the first place, and not just read everything online!