Whoa, Delta.com redesign!

WTF FACEBOOK?

(It’s Kunal Shah btw.)

websides:

Boom.

Freshness Mag: Sanrio x Bape Store Opening in Singapore

Why not?

Happy Birthday!:

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ON MARCH 6TH, 2010, I WROTE THIS LONG POST ABOUT THE COST OF BUYING MEDIA IN A MAGAZINE VERSUS ONLINE. WE THOUGHT ABOUT PUTTING IT ON THE AWL BUT I NEVER GOT AROUND TO MAKING IT “AWL FRIENDLY” (AKA COGENT) BUT IT’S BEEN SAVED AS A DRAFT SINCE THEN. PUBLISHING IT NOW FOR KICKS (MY ENJOYMENT, NOT SNEAKERS).

This is a TL;DR post that is mostly about magazines that sell a lot of ads and the brands that enable them.

I got a haircut this week and had a chance to read the new issue of GQ with Kobe on the cover. As I was flipping through the first 70 or so pages (the TOC didn’t start until page 70), I thought to myself, “Holy shit, there sure are a lot of ads this month!” which is great, because I like GQ and think that their front of book stuff is great and I normally really enjoy most of their features and profiles, so, yay, a magazine I like is making money and not going out of business. But, the other thing I couldn’t help thinking how big a waste of money advertising in GQ must be.

Now, this is an assumption, but I figure I’m probably right in thinking that I’m right in the sweet spot of their target demographic: I’m a 26-year-old urban (in that I live in a city, not in that I’m Black) male who likes buying stuff, specifically clothes, foods, and gadgets, but also consumes a pretty decent amount of media, etc. And despite this high overlap in the venn diagram that is my interest sets and the person who they are probably selling as their primary reach when pitching the magazine to advertisers, even I could not have any less interest in that 70 page money pit that was the whole bit before the table of contents.

My initial reaction was that I was probably just doing it wrong, like maybe the way that I read and approached the magazine was very neanderthal-ish, and more refined people weren’t just skipping through to the content, but actually going through every single page to appreciate the brands who had chosen to advertise with the magazine, I mean, I’d heard that girls did this with Vogue or something (in the Devil Wears Prada right?). But no, a very informal and unrepresentative survey of my friends showed that no one did this, not even my friends who worked in magazines.

So, okay, maybe a very small percentage of people actually does pay attention to these ads and the ads themselves aren’t really THAT expensive, but upon further review, apparently these one of these pages can go for $50k-100k/month. Wait, what?! Okay, so if there’s 70 pages of this, NOTE: JUST BETWEEN THE COVER AND THE TABLE OF CONTENTS, and a very conservative assumption is that one of these pages costs $50 grand, then 70 pages means that this money pit is about $3.5 million deep. So let’s assume there are discounts and whatever, maybe some of those pages are added value as part of bigger packages involving parties or advertorial pages or whatever, even if we reduce it by a third it’s still more than $2 million! Again, this is just for the front chunk of ads before the table of contents.

When it comes down to it, there’s two parts to this that really annoy me. First, let’s say that this issue of GQ ends up earning something like $3.5 million in gross revenue per issue (which is still a pretty conservative estimate based on the prices I was quoted), it still doesn’t necessarily mean that it made money(!!!). And, I acknowledge, that a lot of what they do, especially the fashion shoots, they have to pay someone to shoot every single boat shoe and skinny tie, just cost a lot of money. And granted, again from an informal survey, it sounds like CondeNast editorial T&E budgets have been cut by 2/3’s, so they’re clearly trying to trim the fat and not have so much excess, and maybe this is very “I work on the internet and content/distribution is much cheaper” of me, but the fact that they’re not making money hand over fist really befuddles me.

But what really burns me up about this whole thing is the fact that this is taking money out of my pocket. These advertisers who are paying out the ass for ads in print are the same people (moreso the people higher up who divvy up the budgets between print and online) who are pinching pennies and looking for all sorts of value and ROI on ad spends online.

Wait, so you were willing to throw (at least) $40k easy towards a page in GQ, realistically as a package of at least 5-8 more pages for the rest of the year for a total of at least $250k, that no one’s going to look at, much less notice, but spending a smaller amount of online for a probably comparable reach (if not greater reach considering the overestimated pass along audience of magazines) and significantly larger share of voice is ridiculous? All of a sudden now you’re being discriminating about making sure there’s no waste, after having - in print - just thrown all of this money into a trash barrel and lighting it on fire?

There’s a lot of eyeball studies that show that people ignore banner ads when they browse websites, most of which I agree with, and clearly IAB banners (the standard sized ones you see when browsing any website) aren’t the most effective way to advertise online, but you can’t tell me that these are less effective than an advertisement that you can literally completely avoid without knowing that you’re even doing it - THE FRONT SECTION WAS 70 PAGES OF NO CONTENT AND JUST ADS.

It’s not that I don’t acknowledge that a lot of times print content is of a higher and more painstakingly curated quality, I’m much moreso speaking on behalf the disparity of value/cost efficiency between the two mediums from the perspective of the advertiser.

I don’t mean to be so rant-y about the whole thing, but it’s just annoying that brands expect digital publishers to be held so accountable while being all willy nilly with the print people. It’s like if your parents were buying you generic Oreos to eat while taking your brother to Per Se multiple times a year (seriously, it’s exactly like that). I guess it’s just that, as the son who’s eating generic Oreos, I wouldn’t mind going out to eat every now and again.

NiceKicks: NIKE FILES PATENT FOR AUTO LACING SYSTEM PATENT A LA MARTY MCFLY

OH SHITTTTTTTTT

More pictures of the patent filed if you click the image -

http://foundercollective.com/companies

Hm! This is curious!

Does anyone have more deets?