Commercial Magazines and Advertisers

The importance of Advertisers to Commercial Media Producers.

Most Commercial Media producers rely on Advertising revenue as a significant part of their profit. Some commercial producers do rely on subscription alone but these are in the minority. All lifestyle and Music Magazines would not be able to survive without advertising revenue.

Exercise

Count the number of pages of advertising content in a typical magazine. (for my example I’ll refer to Marie Clair)

Total Whole pages of advertising                              90

Cost of Full Page Ad                                                        £17,807

Total Advertising revenue 90 x 17,807                     = £1.6 million

Circulation                                                                           283,000

Cover Price                                                                         £2.70

Total Revenue from Circulation  £2.70x283,000 = £76,400

Total revenue                    £2,364,100                           68% from advertising  32% from the audience

                                                                Commercial Media Structural Triangle

The 3 sides of this triangle are made up of Advertisers, Readership and Circulation

It is these three factors that form the basis of the business model for Media Producers.

Advertisers will often want to target their products at particular audiences. Various magazines (for example) will have specific niche markets. The magazine producer will attempt to sell their readership to the advertisers.

The readership for Marie Clair is described by the magazine publisher (IPC) as

ABC1 professional women aged 25-34

So when GIVENCHY decide to buy a full page ad in Marie Clair for £17,000 they do so in the belief that the magazine will be bought by 280,000 high class women below 40 with a good level of disposable income.

The A B C1 C2 D E social scale derives from the Registrar General’s Scale of Social Class

While individual occupations have been reallocated to different classes, the overall shape of the model has changed very little during the past sixty years. The classes are now described as follows:

I               Professional etc occupations

II             Managerial and Technical occupations

III            Skilled occupations

(N)         non-manual

(M)        manual

IV            Partly-skilled occupations

V             Unskilled occupations

Advertisers and Media producers tend to refer to these categories as A B C1 C2 D E

Social Stratification

The A B C1 C2 D E is very much an economic form of dividing society up (this is referred to by social scientists as Social Stratification)

There many other ways to stratify the audience

Gender, Age, Ethnicity, Lifestyle, Sexuality, to name but a few.

Using the information above we can see there is a balance of power between Producers and Audiences. Producers cannot survive without audiences but in truth they raise more revenue from advertising than they do from selling their magazines to the public. Therefore they will always be more concerned with producing what the Advertiser wants than they will with what the audience.

 Institution                                        Content                               Audience
Who produces the text.              What it looks like                     Who buys it and why
                                                    Forms and conventions
                                                    Representation

For example if Maria Claire starting producing articles about laboratories testing cosmetics on animals, their advertisers would soon let them know they didn’t like the content regardless of what the audience thought. Editors simple would run an article like that for fear of losing advertisers. This happens in all platforms; TV, Newspapers etc.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Task

Explain how publishers make money from advertising and circulation.

Choose a publisher that would carry your magazine.

Explain why they would publish your magazine.

Develop a rate card for your magazine.