The Great Decoupling - Part I

The good ol' days of niche interests and publisher-cultivated audiences

“Why not Guitar World?”

I was sitting in the office of a media planner at Young & Rubicam, where I got my first real advertising job.  We all worked at 285 Madison Avenue on the U.S. Army Recruiting account.  I was an admin – really a glorified secretary – working to support the media group, which planned all of the media campaigns that pitched “Be All You Can Be” to young people in the U.S.

That group I was in was responsible for planning and buying all of the magazine ads for the campaign.  While we leveraged Y&R’s broadcast buying powerhouse to buy radio and television, all of the print was both planned and bought by the same group that put the media strategy together.  So, as sole stewards for the print campaign, our group felt special ownership when it came to the print plan.

“It’s good you’re asking these questions,” said the planner, who was probably thinking I didn’t want to make my living transcribing memos from yellow legal paper into Microsoft Word.  Maybe I wanted to do what he did for a living.  That’s part of the reason why I was in his office wanting to know why the U.S. Army hadn’t considered Guitar World for its ad plan.  It advertised regularly in all sorts of “special interest” magazines from North American Fisherman to Popular Mechanics to The Sporting News.  I kinda wanted to know why Guitar World was seemingly overlooked.

A lot of that had to do with personal interest.  As a 15-year-old kid, I had sat on the edge of my bed for countless hours, trying to hack out Back in Black or Sweet Child O’ Mine with my cheap electric guitar in my lap and an issue of Guitar World next to me.  Its transcriptions had taught me how to play some of the songs I loved dearly, and its regular columns had undoubtedly helped me become a better player.

Ads as Content

But the thing that struck me about Guitar World is that I looked forward to the ads almost as much as I did the transcriptions and the columns.  How else would I learn about hot new amps or effects pedals or stuff for cleaning my fretboard?  Readers of Guitar World looked at the ads as content, and I wondered if maybe we could put that enthusiasm for advertising to work for us.

I had taken the initiative to call a sales rep and have him send over a media kit, which also included some sample issues – that was totally great because a few of them were issues I had missed on the newsstand.  Like I said, there was certainly an aspect of personal interest at work here.

I hadn’t yet gone to Y&R’s media school and didn’t know what questions to ask.  For that matter, the planner whose office I was sitting in was right in the middle of his own training program as I was trying to understand the decision-making process.  What I did know was a few things I had been able to observe about how the Army Group made decisions about which magazines to advertise in.

Bucks over Schmucks

One of them was CPM.  From some of the people I had worked with in the group, I knew the CPM had to compare favorably with that of other special interest magazines – the magazines that dealt with a specific subject matter and not general interest publications like Time or People.  There was an easy-to-remember device for this that another planner had taught me – “Bucks over Schmucks” – that I had been using to get the formula right in Excel when constructing flowcharts that detailed our campaigns.

Guitar World’s CPM was little high, but it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be solved with a little rate negotiation.  I knew that the magazine was having some difficulty attracting non-endemic advertisers – those that weren’t advertising steel strings or tube amplifiers – and would likely give us a nice break on rates if we were serious about advertising there.

One of the other factors was audience duplication.  When the Army Group identified a content vertical that appealed to its target demographic, it tended to stick to the leading magazines in that category in order to emphasize reach over frequency.  So it might be advertising in Rolling Stone but not Spin.  North American Hunter but not Sports Afield.  You had to either be a category leader or you had to bring a unique audience to the table.

Guitar World brought both, to my mind.  No other guitar book boasted as large an audience, and there were no other magazines on the plan that specifically appealed to musicians.  It hadn’t occurred to me that the planners working on the account might consider it a music book and lump it into the same category as Rolling Stone.

Scale Trumps All

In the end, the verdict was that Guitar World wasn’t big enough.  Even with an audience between 300,000 and 400,000 guitarists, the book simply wasn’t big enough to justify being on the Army’s radar.  I had to chalk that up to inexperience and explain it to the ad sales rep who had sent me the media kit.  But hey, at least now I knew.

I walked away from that meeting learning an important new lesson: For as much as media planners liked to talk about how unique a publisher’s audience was, scale was an overriding issue.  Publishers could put a lot of effort into developing audiences, but it could all be for nothing if that audience wasn’t big enough.

I thought about that meeting a lot over the years, but especially after stints at a handful of digital agencies (and a crypto startup that doesn’t appear on my resume).  But that Guitar World meeting was front and center in my mind when in 1999 I found myself in a meeting with Dave Morgan.

Enter the Mentor

If you know Dave, you probably know him as the CEO and Founder of Simulmedia.  Turns out Dave did a lot in the formative days of digital’s ad-supported model, first at ad network Real Media and then at audience development company Tacoda, to reorient my view about how advertisers think about audience.  It also turns out he did that for a lot of other people in the digital media business, too.

Next week: A meeting with Dave Morgan that changed my view about the scale problem.