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O mag advertising overload
By admin | May 20, 2008
This week I decided to treat myself to a woman’s interest magazine - something I do very rarely - and bought an issue of The Oprah Magazine. As usual it had some interesting articles but what I found annoying was that I had to wade my way through loads of advertising to get to them.
So, I’ve made the decision that when I buy one I’ll save my self the frustration of hacking my way through a forest of pulped trees by tearing the mag in half and throwing the front half away! Well at least the first third….
It has been interesting to watch how the layout of general interest magazines has changed over the past decade to include more advertising with the display ads being pushed to the front as much as possible.
In the O mag that I bought, of the 176 pages there was the following advertising:
- 43 full pages of displays ads
- 6 pages competitions and giveaways
- 12 pages of product presentations (pics, price and maybe a brief write-up)
The first full page ‘article’ (Serena Williams’s Aha! moment) was on page 46 with the first full-scale article being presented on page 53.
This is certainly a change from magazines a decade ago when one opened the cover of say the You magazine, and the first page you looked at was the contents page. Now the reader of the popular mags often gets to wade through a few pages of ads first.
Then, the articles also tended to be more evenly spread through the mag than they are now and I suspect that the ratio of advertising to real information is growing. (Don’t have any info on this availalable so this is purely an observation.)
The question that I ask seeing this is: “Is advertising in a magazine such as this as effective as it used to be?”
© Ann Williams
Topics: Advertising, Print media |
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