Jamaican vacation discount package

Byline: SARAH GONSER

When the folks from Perry Ellis contacted Travel + Leisure magazine with a $500,000 ad budget, they knew exactly what they wanted: a 20-page spread that featured the full extent of their product line, creative control, and increased foot traffic in their stores.

The publisher responded by creating a special section in T+L's September issue featuring Perry Ellis - clad cast members from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette hanging out in Jamaica. Sponsors provided locations for the shoot and 12 "Jamaican Dream Vacation" sweepstakes prizes - the reader buy-in part of the package. In-store traffic was hyped with open casting calls for the TV show, attended by former cast members, at the retailer's clothing departments.

By the beginning of October, T+L publisher Ellen Asmodeo-Giglio said the retailer reported selling more product at the ongoing in-store events than at any prior such ad-driven event. "They're very pleased with the results," she says.

From the publisher's point of view, what's not to love? The client is jazzed, and there are now 20 pages of paid advertising where there were none. From Conde Nast to tiny b-to-bs, special ad sections have become a growth business at a time when selling plain old ad pages is not that easy. Special-section pages increased 18 percent in 2002, while total ad pages for consumer magazines dropped about half a percent, according to Publishers Information Bureau.

"Advertisers love them, and they can be enormously profitable if you produce them yourself and get the markup on the creative," says Bill Curtis, CEO of Curtco-Robb Media, which produces advertorials for customers such as Rolls-Royce and Sony. "I think that the advertorial phenomenon has just started."

But media buyers are grumbling louder these days about how the glut of poorly designed special sections is weakening both magazine brands and the special-section format itself. Bad ones dilute editorial credibility, and even those with high production values raise questions about the line between church and state and the value of the magazine brand, buyers say. Finally, the buyers talk about overload: There are so many advertorials that they have lost their impact.

"Five years ago, they were used very sparingly," says Mike Neiss, executive vice president, managing media director for Lowe. "Now the well just contains a series of advertorial speed bumps. It's an epidemic. There's rarely anything objective or credible being promoted, and they run the risk of swamping legitimate editorial." For example, a recent issue of Forbes carried 64 pages of special advertising, out of a total folio of 234 pages and 74 pages of run-of-the-book ads.

A number of publishers - thought not publicly - have also started to question the potency of advertorials and the possible downside to over-relying on them. "More and more magazines are asking to have their special sections studied lately because they're doubting their effectiveness," says Philip Sawyer, senior vice president and director of Starch Communications, a RoperASW company that measures reader involvement in magazine advertising. Sawyer says that when he reviews these advertorials and special sections, he's frequently shocked by the poor quality he sees. "It amazes me sometimes how many truly ridiculous things are being done in advertorials - the same mistakes repeated over and over again." Tiny copy, all-cap fonts that are difficult to read, poor layout where a model looks off to the side and takes the reader's eye away from the copy, toll-free numbers and Web site addresses buried in the copy, are all common mistakes, Sawyer says.

"We're finding that not a lot of people are doing their research," he adds. "People are making mistakes where they should know better, had they done their research. It's the kind of stuff no ad agency would let pass. Instead, they are recreating the wheel and missing out on a lot of accumulated knowledge about these sections."

These low-rent production values pose problems for the advertising sponsors and the books they run in. "The intent of these sections is great, but in execution, we find that writers who wouldn't write for the magazine are producing editorials that the editors would not otherwise accept," says Euro RCG MVBMS executive creative director, Richard Notarianni. "We find advertising that an ad agency wouldn't typically pass off as advertising. If you spend time talking to consumers, you find that most consumers look at them for what they are: crude attempts. They don't give them a lot of credit."

"The majority of advertorials and special sections just don't cut it these days," Notarianni says. "Consequently, we must ask ourselves, is it money well-spent? From the point of view of a marketer, I don't think advertorials and special sections are an effective part of the communications mix when we get down to their real impact on consumers."

Publishers defend advertorials as an effective way to garner reader response and create additional value for clients. But there is also the economic reality: Many magazines can sell advertorials where they can't sell ads. "In soft years, magazines are looking for ways to ease entry into new categories," says Jim Berrien, president of Forbes Magazine Group. "Clearly, it's just a way to bring in additional dollars."

With better economic conditions, says one ad buyer who asked to remain unnamed, "More legitimate advertisers will return to the books, and we will see stronger advertising adjacencies again." The recent surge in advertorials and special sections, he notes, is a product of the times and will fade when advertisers resume normal spending patterns.

If you ask publishers, they'll tell you that special sections are discounted - only not in their books. Fortune Group's vice president of custom projects, P.J. Boatwright, says the Time Inc. group charges a 10 percent premium over the usual rate card price for special sections. "The text coverage in advertorials is worth something above and beyond regular advertising," he says. "Think about it. The advertiser gets to control the timing, the medium, and the message.

A North American page, four-color, non-bleed, costs $81,300 at Fortune Group, Boatwright says, and a special-section page costs $89,430. American Express Publishing's T+L also charges a premium for special-section pages, according to publisher Asmodeo-Giglio. "There's so much more involved in a special section," she says. "There's usually all kinds of media components. We hire an outside P.R. company, we do special events."

On the other hand, the data indicate that somebody is getting the discount. According to Publishing Information Bureau tallies, a special-section page in 2002 cost about 27 percent less than a regular ad page.

"Advertorials are Hamburger Helper for publishers. They stretch content and dollars to suit their needs and publishers are making hay of it," says Lowe's Neiss. "Conde Nast, for instance, which doesn't traditionally break rate card, will charge less money for the advertorial. It's a way for an advertiser to break in where they couldn't before. On a relative benchmark, if a run-of-the-book ad page costs X, the advertorial is X minus 50 to 60 percent." Conde Nast did not respond to requests for comment.

Publishers face a dilemma: If they spend enough to produce a high-quality insert that can command the markup, they risk diluting their editorial brand and credibility. This is where blurring the line between editorial and advertising becomes an issue.

The challenge for publishers is to create tantalizing, innovative packages for the advertiser with content that doesn't insult the reader's intelligence, but still manages to stay on the virtuous side of church and state issues.

At the same time, full-run edit pages in some pubs are straddling the ethics line, with obvious product placements and ad-friendly fare. "It would appear that in the lust for pages in the recent few years, there are companies and properties that will blur that line," says Berrien of Forbes. "There are definitely companies out there blurring the lines between what editors write and what's commercial information."

Starch's Sawyer points out that it is exactly those publishers that thumb their noses at the hallowed ad/edit line that meet with the most success in their special sections and advertorials. "The ones that do the best are the ones that look most like an article, that are easy to read, have good headlines, great art, and really exploit the line between church and state," says Sawyer.

Measuring the success of special sections is tricky. While some magazines simply gauge success based on whether the advertiser returns for future business and claim not to care much about reader interest, other publications measure success by creating events and interactive components where they can keep track of reader buy-in.