If Time Inc wants to survive, it should create its own ad agency

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/16/time-inc-magazine-advertising-agency

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I keep thinking about the existential predicament of working for Time Inc in 2014, as it gets ready to spin out of Time Warner, away from the safety of luxe cable assets, and relaunch itself as a lonely print enterprise.

The current state of print can be measured by Time Inc’s own emperor’s-new-clothes-like insistence that it isn’t just – or isn’t <em>really</em> – a print company. It is now … fill in the blank with some baloney about platforms.

With its uncountable number of magazines, and with the overwhelming amount of its revenues deriving from them, it’s print. Oh boy, is it print. And if print dies, Time Inc dies. If print shrinks, which it is dramatically doing, Time Inc shrinks – announcing last week another coming round of layoffs. It survives and thrives only if print does. Quite an if.

So here, at the end of this most dismal year in the annals of publishing, is a not-so-modest proposal for how to put a stake in the ground in defense of print.

Mostly when we talk about print, we end up talking about technology. Technology, in the telling, is not only the disrupter that’s caused print’s problems, but it’s a siren song: Time Inc, along with its brother legacy publishers, believes it too, that with a bit of heart and imagination, despite years of failing to remake itself, it can be in the technology business – at least more in it than out of it. And if they can’t claim credible tech credentials, print people say they are in the content business, a supplier to the great new digital distributors.

But print is – as hardly anybody any more will bring themselves to say – the advertising business. Not anything more than that. Publishers sell pages. That’s where the money comes from. (They try to sell digital this and that, but after 15 years of serious effort, it is still only to minor effect.)

They fudge the real nature of the business, in part because they have always been a little embarrassed by advertising (not that there isn’t a back office promising advertisers anything they want, and selling it at any price). But mostly they step delicately around the business being almost solely about advertising, because if that’s true, then, considering the ever-steeper declines in ad pages, they are looking at the inevitability of going out of business.

Flashback: Time Inc was once the most powerful company in consumer marketing. The Mad Men style and ethos is really a Time Inc style and ethos. Time was disliked and feared and envied on Madison Avenue because it was powerful enough to regularly bypass advertising agencies and go directly to brands. It was a creative force with a prestige imprimatur and distribution muscle.

That was a generation ago – all right, two generations. But, preserved in amber, this is the secret of the media business’s ability to sell ads: not salesmanship, but leverage (the precise point that Google understands).

Assertion: Time Inc (along with all consumer print media) can only avoid decimation, destruction, or reduction to minor status in the content supply chain, if it sells more print ads.

Problem: media-buying agencies, which Time Inc depends on, barely sell print media anymore. The creative agencies that it must depend on to create compelling print ads don’t have people who write print ads anymore (or they’re only written by has-beens or novices).

Solution: Time should start an advertising agency. This wouldn't just be editors reporting to publishers, as Time recently announced it will blur the historic divide between the two (in this theory, you get more ads if you suck up more). It’s building a business that can make great ads on paper – ads that belong in Time Inc titles.

What the hell. Somebody has got to create clever, beguiling, stirring or subversive pages – and if not a magazine publisher, with the incentive and the understanding of the properties of a page, who? Likewise, somebody who believes in reading and the power of the look and feel of a page (ie, that the highest engagement occurs when someone reads something), has to argue this proposition. Surely not advertising agencies, filled with bottom-of-the-class semi-literates.

A side point: most everyone in the marketing world knows that over several generations, the talent pool at ad agencies has dwindled. If you are in advertising, you failed to get into other more glamorous and higher growth businesses. Are these the people you want to be selling your product? (Conversely, people in advertising are so dumb that a smarter person ought to be able to really clean up in the business.)

The historic partnership between media enterprises and advertising agencies, in which each needed the other, has come undone. Given the rise of media-buying agencies, video production subsidiaries, digital services, and the new native advertising, it’s a competitive free-for-all. The idea that a media company might continue to blindly rely on the goodwill and mutual benefits of an advertising agency is bonkers.

Indeed, in the greater Darwinian struggle now occurring in the media business, there is no reason that it ought to be advertising agencies rather than media outlets that survive. And, surely, it will be one more than the other that does.

Traditional media is, as always, late to the party. Google, of course, represents the most transformational disintermediation of ad agencies. But digital content creators everywhere are at it too (it’s a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to throw something together and then, bypassing the agency, shoot it to a company’s CEO or chief marketing officer than it was even a few years ago).

But Time Inc and the rest of print media ought to argue that it still has the better product, that a blank page, written on, with irresistible headline and arresting image, remains the best way to sell an idea. And an idea is the only thing you really ought to be selling.

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