Online Experiment for Print Magazine

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“There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes”
Richard Buckminster Fuller (US engineer and architect, 1895-1983 )


Online Experiment for Print Magazine
By STUART ELLIOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/business/media/0 5adco.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

READERS of a weekly newsmagazine will soon be getting a bonus issue, but they will miss it if they look in mailboxes or on newsstands.

The magazine, The Week, will publish the extra issue online, rather than in its regular printed format. The special issue will feature articles on the environment — hence the decision to spare trees by publishing it just on the Internet (theweekmagazine.com).

“Bringing our readers an extra issue in a digital format echoes the environmental issues we’re trying to highlight,” said Justin Smith, president and publisher of The Week in New York, which is part of Dennis Publishing.

The project represents the first time The Week has produced a themed issue as well as its first online- only issue. The bonus issue will also serve as a kind of Web-based sampling program for The Week, because nonsubscribers will be able to read it on the Web site.

The extra issue is scheduled to be posted on April 20 and remain online for a week. It does not replace a print issue because the magazine, which prints 48 issues a year, had originally planned not to come out that week. (A double issue, dated April 20-27, is to appear on April 13.)

The special issue is being sponsored solely by the Lexus division of Toyota Motor, as a showcase for its hybrid products. It will be Lexus’s first time to advertise with The Week, and the online ads are be followed by ads in print issues the rest of the year.

The project includes an event in Los Angeles on April 25, also sponsored by Lexus, centered on a discussion of environmental topics. The cost of the sponsorship package for Lexus is estimated at more than $500,000.

The project offers another example of efforts by the print media to expand their digital presence in response to changing habits of both readers and advertisers. Last week, Lauren Rich Fine, who follows advertising and media stocks for Merrill Lynch, raised her estimates for the worldwide growth of online ad revenue for 2007 as well as 2008.

For example, morning newspapers like The Chicago Sun-Times and The Toronto Star have started publishing online-only afternoon editions, which can also be downloaded.

And several publishers that have recently closed magazines or announced plans to close them are keeping the publications alive in online versions. Among them are the magazines Elle Girl and Premiere, from Hachette Filipacchi; Child, from Meredith; and Life and Teen People from the Time Inc. unit of Time Warner.

“We’re going to learn so much about our readers,” Mr. Smith said of the online-only issue. “We’ll take the learnings and apply them to the rest of our business.”

Mr. Smith estimated that The Week typically posted 30 percent to 35 percent of its print content on the Web site, which draws about 150,000 unique users a month.

By comparison, the circulation of the print edition is 440,000 to 445,000 copies a week. The rate base for 2007 — the circulation guaranteed to advertisers — is 425,000, increased from 400,000 last year and 300,000 in 2005.

“We’re trying to be as agnostic as possible about serving our readers in all the different media,” Mr. Smith said. “Some people will want it in print, some will want it in digital and some will want it in a mobile format.”

Executives at Lexus and its agency, Team One, part of the Publicis Groupe, have been meeting with many media companies, said Deborah Wahl Meyer, vice president for marketing at Lexus in Torrance, Calif., and “challenging them to help us use their media more effectively.”

The Week “jumped on it, by doing something in a very different way,” Ms. Meyer said. “We had not done business with them before, but we will now do a full schedule.”

The Lexus ads to appear in the online issue will promote three hybrid models: the RX 400h, a crossover sport utility; the GS 450h, a sport sedan; and the LS 600h L, a sedan that is to be introduced in the summer to compete with the most expensive sedans sold by BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

The ads will direct readers to a Web site (lexus.com/hybridliving), Ms. Meyer said, offering “practical tips and ideas” as well as podcasts, video clips and a forum for owners of Lexus hybrids.

Marketing messages that go beyond traditional pitches like print ads and television commercials are increasingly important, she added, as Lexus pursues its potential customers, who are typically ages 35 and up with household incomes of more than $100,000 a year.

“This is a wonderful time for advertisers,” Ms. Meyer said, adding: “It feels like an explosion of creativity among our media partners. Their willingness to go to the next level has increased exponentially.”

Lexus worked last fall with several Condé Nast and Hearst magazines, Ms. Meyer said, on a promotion in four big cities that included so-called pop-up stores, which are boutiques that sold products produced by three designers.

The project is the second time in five months that The Week has made a deal with an advertiser to be the sole sponsor of an issue.

An extra 100,000 copies of the Nov. 10 issue were distributed free to commuters in metropolitan New York as part of a promotion sponsored by Philips Electronics and arranged by the Philips media agency, Carat, part of the Aegis Group. The extra copies in the promotion, with a budget estimated at $500,000 to $600,000, carried no ads; in their place was additional editorial content.

Single sponsorships, in print and on TV, are becoming popular among marketers as they seek to stand out from the commercial clutter.

Philips, for instance, has made such sponsorship agreements with media outlets like CBS, Gourmet magazine, NBC and TBS in addition to The Week.


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