MPA President cites Websites as future revenue source

Speaking at a Magazine Publishers of America breakfast this week, John Griffin cited magazine websites as an important area for future advertising revenue. That's probably true. But I have to wonder what that says about the state of magazine industry.

One of the main reasons for buying advertising space in magazines is because the advertising is supposed to benefit from the relationship that a reader has with the title. I don't believe that a website is currently able to duplicate that kind of relationship. Without that relationship, website traffic may suffer. So why advertise on the website?

There seems to be a Catch-22 developing that media planners will have to be especially careful about. Future demographic research must account for the different relationships that online and paper-based readers have with magazines.

You can read the whole article at http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003696620

Welcome to COMM 422!

This semester, both of my sections of 422 will be participating in an active learning project, the Advertising Forensics blog. We'll be looking at current media plans that we read about in trade magazines and in the news, and discussing audience and media selection choices, geographic strategy, scheduling, costs, and a whole lot more.

Your participation in this blog will count for 25 points during the class. You will be assigned weeks to post to the blog. However, you may post additional items at any time, and comment to any posts. I'll be explaining more about this project in class! For now, you need to become a blogspot member if you aren't already, and join this blog by 1/16/08.

Also, you'll notice I've left some of the better posts from last year's class in the archive. These are to give you an idea of the kinds of media-oriented issues that we can cover in this blog. Enjoy!