Time Inc. Ad Slump 'Like 1931' Just as Magazine Recalls Great Depression

Time Inc. Ad Slump 'Like 1931' Just as Magazine Recalls Great Depression
CEO Ann Moore's downbeat forecast comes out as FDR cover on stands.
By Julia A. Seymour
Business & Media Institute
Time Inc. is facing an advertising ‘depression,’ which might explain its magazine’s recent obsession with the Great Depression and the 1930s.

Time’s Oct. 27 issue – the one with FDR, Abraham Lincoln and the two presidential candidates – was on newsstands the same week CEO Ann Moore told attendees of an Oct. 30 ABC Circulation Conference that, “By this October it was looking like 1931,” Foliomag.com reported. “[Time Inc.] has never had so many advertising clients in trouble at the same time. The declines are stunning.”

Moore’s speech came just two days after she announced “dramatic restructuring” and “significant layoffs” for the company, which owns magazines including Time, Fortune/Money, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly and People among a host of others.
Like the rest of the mainstream media, Time magazine has drawn many comparisons to the Great Depression this year. A “history” column by David M. Kennedy in the same Oct. 27 issue said, “Today’s crisis isn’t a repeat of the Depression. But we can still borrow lessons from the past.”

“What is now manifestly needed is a round of creative institutional invention like what the New Deal gave us,” Kennedy, a Stanford University history professor and Pulitzer-winning author, wrote. Like others in the news media, Kennedy’s call for a new, New Deal ignored economists who say that FDR’s policies actually prolonged the Depression – extending Americans’ intense suffering for roughly seven years.

Economist Roberts Higgs told the Business & Media Institute a new, New Deal would be disastrous. “I cannot imagine a worse course of action, short of outright socialization of the entire economy. The measures comprised in a new, New Deal will not hasten general economist recovery, but will only bulk up the power of government and transfer income to privileged interest groups at the expense of taxpayers and consumers,” Higgs said.

Yet, the mainstream media have promoted that by comparing the Great Depression to the 2008 economic downturn hundreds of times. On the networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) alone, there were 70 comparisons in the first six months of 2008. Since July 1 that number more than doubled to 157.

The Consumer: Terms of Engagement

The Consumer: Terms of Engagement
by Paul Parton


Ah, the perils of a monthly column. As usual, the things that I'm reacting to in early March will seem like ancient history by the time you read this. But, at the risk of seeming redundant, I was struck by Procter & Gamble exec Jim Stengel's keynote speech at the 4A's media conference this spring.

In many ways, the speech was a fairly familiar call for advertisers, media companies and agencies to embrace the consumer more fully. (Specifically, he suggested that marketers and agencies enter into a relationship with the consumer, rather than focusing on selling and telling.)

But a couple of points stood out. First, I hadn't realized that "telling and selling" was a P&G mantra -which explains in many ways why that approach to marketing is so ingrained. What gave me more cause to think, though, was why it's taking creative and media agencies so long to wake up and smell the Folgers.

Why are the traditional approaches to marketing communications still so widespread? Why is there still so much telling and selling? Why is the media industry still driven by buying rather than planning? Why is there still so little focus on the consumer?

Granted, even the most lumbering large agencies (creative or media) will supplement their TV campaign presentation with a little online advertising these days. Hell, they might even present (or at least talk about) viral communication. But at the end of the day, those things are really just repurposed forms of traditional media. A Web banner is usually little more than an animated billboard. Viral recommendations from traditional agencies generally come down to putting commercials online.

These things, though, are examples of media neutrality - or of the idea that it doesn't matter whether you're on TV or on the Web, as long as you connect with the consumer. When agencies endorse this concept, it makes them seem more progressive than they actually are.

Unfortunately, the reality is that media neutrality is the first baby step toward engaging with people the way that people want to engage with brands. Media neutrality is really easy. Because essentially, media neutrality comes down to different forms of the same thing - advertising.

What is significantly more difficult - and yet significantly more important, too - is discipline neutrality.

Being discipline neutral means that you're just as likely to propose a direct marketing solution to a communications problem as you are to present an advertising solution, a search solution or a PR solution.

Discipline neutrality is more difficult to embrace than media neutrality because it demands a working understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of different communication strategies and the ability to execute them.

Discipline neutrality demands that everything starts with a granular understanding of the consumer how they live, what's important to them and how they engage with the category and the brand. The task, then, is to build a communications plan from that understanding with no preconceived ideas about the form that plan will take or the disciplines or channels that will be used.

Consider, for instance, an agency tasked with jump-starting the sales of a brand of canned soup. The conventional approach would involve creating a TV and print campaign that would, say, extol the benefits of soup as an aid to weight loss. The ads would run in daytime talk shows and women's lifestyle magazines.

The media-neutral approach would be to do the same thing but take it further by sponsoring a segment on "The Biggest Loser," seeding the campaign in weight-loss forums and encouraging bloggers to write about the soup.

The discipline-neutral approach would be to understand how people used the soup and what kind of relationship they had with the brand. It could turn out, for example, that the soup was generally consumed at lunchtime, but only by people with microwaves in their offices. In this case, the discipline-neutral approach could consist of designing a self-heating soup can and launching it with sampling programs at major commuting locations and in city delis.

That kind of approach is the only way brands will ever really be able to develop a relationship with consumers. It's the opposite of "telling and selling." It's understanding customers and finding ways to engage them in a relevant way with genuinely useful innovation. Who'd argue with that?


Paul Parton is the brand-planning partner at The Brooklyn Brothers, a creative collective.