Monday, July 24, 2006
The Cover as Holy Ground?
A few days ago, I posted on the Wall Street Journal's decision to accept advertising on its front page. And predictably, the issue of cover advertising was a topic of conversation at the ASBPE national conference.Among the comments I heard at the conference:
"The cover is holy ground."
"We (editors) don't have a lot of say. You can leave, or stay involved in what you're doing."
"Our VP says the business has changed. I want to kick him in the pants, but he's right, the business has changed."
"What's the role of the cover? How does an ad get people to open the book?"
I continue to believe this is a non-issue. B2B tabloids have long chosen to run ad space on their covers. (See the example here, provided by Doug Shore, who commented to this blog that "if you go back into the archives of old b-to-b publications, you will find cover advertising to be relatively common. The concept is new and controversial only to those who have never seen it before." (See also Rex Hammock's comments, using the same link.)
And standard size books have taken advantage of french gates, gatefolds, bellybands and other forms of cover advertising, including false covers. (Our clients, Directors & Boards and Family Business, both of which are delivered in a polybag, allow some advertising on the carrier sheet, but this carrier sheet rests over cover 4, not cover 1).
I think the best answer is one I heard during the conference--as long as the magazine is consistent in its use of advertising on or around the cover, it should be okay. But a magazine that slips in a cover ad--say, a product image provided by an advertiser--among issues that don't feature an ad or product shot, are doing their readers and themselves a disservice.
UPDATE: DM News weighs in with a cogent editorial, via IWantMedia.
Grab:
These decisions...are a sacrilege to some, common sense to others and inevitable to those who made them. The announcements came the same week that Google said second-quarter earnings doubled year over year. The demand for buying keywords in Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs is seemingly insatiable. Google now accounts for almost one-fourth of all online income. Frightening. Only a silly move on its part — hubris or spreading itself too thin — can bring this company down.
