In the Headlines

Let Your Fingers Do The Walking Through The...

July/August 2004
By Linda Engel
Subscription Marketing

Most of us probably finished the headline without missing a beat. This Yellow Pages jingle helped make the phone number directory one of the most recognizable products around, with over 120 million books distributed annually to households across America.

Yet, despite the massive reach of these books, magazine marketers have generally bypassed the Yellow Pages, concentrating their test dollars on other mediums. While there has been some testing of ride-along promotions over the years, nobody tried to apply the business model of the Pages to sell magazine subscriptions.

That is, until circulation expert Cathy Beers launched MAGAZINE YELLOW PAGES.

Years of building and running various direct marketing companies had given Beers extensive experience in selling magazine subscriptions. As one of the first twelve employees of data base marketing giant Customer Development Corp. (CDC), Beers spent the early years of her career understanding and refining how marketeres select prospects and how they word their offers. She helped launch United Wire Service, Magazine Collection Bureau/National Credit Audit Corporation, WebDriver Direct and Crisis Mail - all centered on the needs of the publishing and direct marketing industries.

As she watched the magazine circulation industry go through dramatic changes (loss of stampsheets, collapse of the single copy network, to name a few) Beers realized that the challenges facing magazines were "distribution problems, not marketing problems." Like many other agents and publishers, she began searching for an effective and efficient means of distribution.

Beers was familiar with Yellow Page Publishers; she started her career at Ruppman Marketing Services (now Marquette Group), one of the largest Yellow Page placement services in the country. Having been out of the day-to-day of the YP industry for many years, she was astonished by estimates showing Yellow Page advertising growing by over 30% over the next few years, reaching $26 - $33 billion in revenue. Even more impressive were studies which showed that 92% of people who go to the Yellow Pages BUY!

Beers decided to adapt the Yellow Pages formula into a subscription agency, publishing a volume intended to be kept in the home for use throughout the year. Like its phone guide parent, MAGAZINE YELLOW PAGES will be organized alphabetically by category. Publishers can decide which categories they want to list under, as well as the size and type of promotion they want to run.

But the MAGAZINE YELLOW PAGES veers off the "parent" business model by incorporating subscription agent logic, with orders going to a central fulfillment bureau for processing. MYP will collect the monies owed and send orders and remits to the publishers. To do all this, MYP built its own fulfillment system, using the same company who developed databases for Allstate, Prudential, Met Life and Beers' former company, Magazine Collection Bureau. MYP is now set up to bill customers, process credit cards and even mail gift announcements.

Company revenues come from both advertising and commissions. Beers admits that there has been some publisher resistance to paying both ad rates and commissions, although many established catalog and school agencies have similar dual-revenue streams. Beers feels that as the business matures and the economics become clearer, the formula may change. But for now she's counting on relatively low cost advertising and an attractive remit of 50% to push publishers into the program.

"Most agents pay only for a promotion piece...we're paying in essence for a magazine to be sent out to the consumer," explains Beers.

Prices range from a low of $41/month (billed annually) for a basic, one-line listing to a high of over $10,000 for a 2-page spread with premium positioning. Ads can include one magazine or feature multiple titles.

The first 300,000 books will be mailed in early September; first orders should be to publishers within a few weeks. Thereafter, Beers plans to mail quarterly hitting different regions of the country throughout the year, adding in special mailings around the holidays to promote gift giving. MYP is also using alternative media like FSI's and catalogs to allow people to request the directory. Long-range plans: "I hope to be in every home in America within five years."

Circulators can benefit from a slew of research and quantitative data amassed by Yellow Pages companies over the years. For example:

• Display ads are referenced three times more than "in column" ads.
• "In-column ads" are referenced twice as often as a plain listing.
• Consumers were three times more likely to select a company advertised with a red-colored display ad than a black display ad.
• 88% of consumers surveyed said color made the ad easier to read.
• 3 out of 5 consumers said they were more inclined to call ad advertisers using color.
• In a B/W vs. 4/c test split, the 4/c ad produced 3.4 times more calls than the B/W ad.

Understanding the publishers' need for customer information, Beers promises monthly and quarterly reports chock full of buyer profiles and competitive analysis. MYP's on-staff research team will provide magazines with a category analysis to determine where best to list and feature a title. For example, if you're Arts & Antiques magazine, MYP will tell you if more people bought from the "Arts" section or the "Antiques" section. While many magazines will run in multiple sections, testing will help those titles with limited budgets to get the maximum response.

The agency has gotten a strong support from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (subs are classified as individual, direct-mail-sold) and the MPA. And publishers are slowly but surely coming around. To-date almost 450 magazines have signed on and many of the premium advertising positions are already taken. Authorized magazines include industry stalwarts like TV Guide and Newsweek as well as smaller, niche titles like Postcard Collector, Powersports Business and Barbie Bazaar. Category selects range from Adventure & Outdoors through to Woodworking.

Perhaps someday in the near future, fingers all over America will be walking through Magazine Yellow Pages to order magazines. It won't surprise Cathy Beers a bit. The Yellow Page brand is one of the MOST TRUSTED sources in America today. Magazines are one of the premier & trusted sources for information. It's a perfect marriage.