I was contacted yesterday by Construction Forum Magazine who told me they were putting together a feature at the request of one of our clients, and would we like to support it?
With a bit of foresight I asked for an email with full details. The caller agreed to call me back at the end of the week for my response.
The email I received made me a little suspicious:
The feature was described as an “Annual Profile” for the client and stressed that we would be illustrating our “working partnership”, that the client had “put forward a number of companies and consultants who they have worked with over the last year and are looking to work with over 2009.”
The email also explained that distribution would be throughout “England, Northern and Republic of Ireland, Scotland and Wales”.
Firstly, this client works regionally, so putting a profile like this in a national magazine is a little unlikely. Secondly, they are also a housing association and none of the targets the email described would be remotely of interest to them. This made me look at the information a bit more closely.
The hooks in the email are great –
- Mentioning a specific client contact by name, together with a project we are proud of doing for that client
- Inviting us to publicly confirm our role in the client’s future strategy
- Casually suggesting that ‘I can let you know the most popular sizes for this addition is a half or full page’
- No need to pay now – payment not due until publication “once you have the chance to see the profile”
- Following up with ‘I will call you towards the end of the week to confirm your input’
As you can see I was already suspicious, so I posted on twitter asking for feedback from my followers. Here is what they said:
SuButcher: Construction Forum Magazine – anyone know about it? We’ve been asked to advertise. Experiences appreciated
EEPaul: @SuButcher Construction Forum = Advertorial type publication – best avoided, IMHO.
SuButcher: @EEPaul Thanks Paul, that was my hunch. I think they have conned one of our clients into giving them our details.
pf137955: @SuButcher we tend to avoid these, they want you to buy advertising, our BDT’s always tell us to ignore
SuButcher: @pf137955 Even worse it turns out the client has a policy against advertorial magazines… I wonder how they got the contact name!
martinbrown: @SuButcher CF Mag website doesn’t inspire, env policy blank http://is.gd/nQcI , only samples available online BUT cfm = center for fm
SuButcher: @martinbrown even better CF Magazine’s readership stats are percentages only – no figures!
Between us we satisfied ourselves that this was a non-marketing opportunity, dressed up as a really tasty offer.
If you get approached by a magazine offering you your client on a plate, here are a few tips:
- Check out the magazine’s full details via Google, including what people say about them. If no-one is writing about them then no-one is reading them. So why advertise?
- Interrogate everything they send you, including their website. Who are they targeting? Might it just be your advertising budget?
- Check the readership statistics of the publication – to whom and where they are circulated. Do they have subscribers? Is their content available online so others can find it – and you can include it in your own marketing activities?
- Ask your client about them. Tell them you have had a call, and show what they have sent you. If they really want you to do it you can politely explain why it isn’t worth the bother, and if they have been persuaded to hand over your details they will thank you for saving them further embarrassment and their consultants many thousands of pounds.
Everyone is thinking about marketing right now. Make sure you have a strategy and don’t bite at the first hook.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice summing-up of the whole sorry mess that we as company marketers face when advertorial-oriented publications ring us up.
Particularly for SME-level marketing budgets, the advertising rates are often considerable and provide very dubious value – not least because there is no guarantee that the publication is actually read. It may well be circulated to a wide range of organisations, but in many places such publications (little more than pages of weak features about insignificant and un-newsworthy projects surrounded by advertising) are quickly dumped, unopened and unread, into the round-shaped receptacle under the desk.
I sometimes feel they are preying on the inexperienced supplier. By using the client’s name they are implicitly suggesting that advertising may help the supplier retain that client’s future business, and no doubt some suppliers fall for this.
In many instances, if suppliers do want to advertise, they would be better advised to place their display advertising with a reputable publication, featuring proper editorial content and with ABC-regulated readership figures.
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I have to deal with these from time to time. If we’re doing our job properly we should be interesting and relevant enough for the mainstream trade press to want to cover us for free anyway.
My other pet hate is events which dress up paid-for sales pitches as a workshops. It just irritates the audience, so there is very little value to the advertisers.
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I dealt with these sorts of enquiries as a Practice/Marketing Manager in Interior Architecture and steered clear of any kind of mutual advertorials for those reasons Colm mentions in his comment: editorial based on compelling and interesting project stories and business successes are far more valuable than this kind of advertising which reeks of a “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” mentality.
How can a built environment business be seen to be unaffiliated and professionally independent, if it relies on sometime tenuous ‘working partnerships’ with suppliers and fellow consultants? Isn’t it sometimes better to be quietly confident than media hungry?
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