But all of that is pretty small beer compared with last week’s news that Time Inc., the largest magazine publisher in the United States, would be run by Laura Lang, who was the chief executive of the digital advertising agency Digitas. Talk about your loud and clear knock on the door. That digital future we are always talking about is here.
It’s a bold hire and Ms. Lang has an excellent reputation, but it’s a bracing moment for the print romantics among us. Time Inc., the home of Olympian brands like Time, People and Fortune, will be run by an executive who would not know a print run from a can of green beans.
As recently as, well, the day before Ms. Lang was hired, it would have been unthinkable that a large consumer magazine group would be run by someone with plenty of experience buying ads for clients, but with no experience selling them. But Ms. Lang knows other things that could come in handy, including how to use multimedia and social media to increase reader engagement in a way magazines rarely achieve.
As the head of Digitas, a unit of the Publicis Groupe, she was at the vanguard of a movement to direct advertising dollars toward specific audiences and away from big advertising buys adjacent to articles — in other words, away from businesses like Time Inc.
As far back as five years ago she articulated the shift.
“We’re seeing clients shift dollars into channels that can get a direct engagement, that can get a direct, accountable experience” she said in an interview with Direct, a marketing industry publication.
That doesn’t sound like a two-page ad spread in Fortune to me.
Traditional media has historically done well by selling inefficiency. In order to reach those among People magazine’s 3.5 million readers who were interested in buying a car or a coffeepot, you had to buy an ad that everyone else flipped past. As a serious practitioner of the science of audience-and-data-driven buys, Ms. Lang helped clients erase those inefficiencies through targeted buys, allowing them to get the milk without having to buy the whole cow.
A good magazine will do many things for a brand, including bestowing luster and creating awareness by osmosis. What magazines have not been able to do is to provide reliable measures of effectiveness. Part of the reason that magazine companies have so eagerly hopped on the iPad and other tablets is that those products will finally be able to provide data showing a return on the investment of advertising dollars. It isn’t a reach to bet that Ms. Lang will help magazine publishers be a part of a media age built on metrics.
In an e-mail on Friday, Ms. Lang said Time Inc.’s publications could be a great fit in a digital era.
“This role at Time Inc. affords me a significant opportunity to influence our industry from a different lens,” she said, “specifically content, brands, publishing, editorial, the consumer and the web that connects these five elements together.”
She added: “I still believe that data-driven ad purchasing has clear and tangible benefits,” but “I also believe that the ‘inventory’ must be compelling, surprising and offer customers and clients benefits that are sustainable and scalable.” She thinks that Time Inc.’s magazines more than meet these criteria.
By inventory, I take it to mean the likes of People, InStyle and Time. Maybe the time really has arrived for someone like her, a leader who is less captivated by the luster of the brands and is more attuned to explaining what they can deliver in actual results.
When a publication moves onto the iPad, it loses the shackles of the print medium. A magazine really is more than a magazine when you add video, links to advertisers, and other editorial content. That should mean that a brand like Sports Illustrated can become companion media during the Final Four, and People magazine could host a red carpet warm-up for the Oscars. Instead of covering seminal events after the fact, magazines can get right in the middle of them in real time.
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d7b6efe9cd3aeef8d315f7a2c42fa802
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