The Non-Future of Advertising

Print advertising

Every single newspaper or magazine relies on advertising first to stay in business. Sure, they also have subscriptions and newsstand sales, but advertising makes up the bulk of the revenue.

For the New York Times, for instance, advertising makes up 60% of the total revenue (subscriptions/single copy sales make up 31%).

The problem of course is that print advertising revenue has declined dramatically over the past couple of years. The New York Times advertising revenue has dropped from $1.7 billion to $1.3 billion from 2008 to 2010 (25%). Vogue has dropped 48% from 2009 to 2011.

Of course it is not all bad. The Financial Times says that advertising decline has flat lined for most of 2011 after a catastrophic summer of 2010.

So ...maybe it will stabilize? Right? ....Please?

I'm sorry. It is too late for that, and here is why.

Who is buying the advertising? It's the brands. What do brands care about? Well, if you ask the CEO he would say *sales!!*. But if you ask the person actually buying the ads, the CMOs (marketing executives), most of them have no clue. They still believe that exposure equals sales.

For the past 100 years, marketing executives have been living a lie. They believe that when they buy a full page ad in a popular magazine, the numbers they are given are actually something useful.

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