Rebirth of ad journals

New ad & marketing tabloids are set for a big fight to capture a slice of media advertising

The Adsert Web Solutions managing director Anurag Batra's prayers have been answered. The company, better known as the exchange4media group, has finally found the additional floor space it was desperately seeking to expand its office located in Delhi's Connaught Place.

Batra needs the space to launch the company's new publication, a weekly tabloid on the advertising, marketing and media industry. Titled Impact, the product is expected to hit the stands next month.

"It will be a 20 to 24 page publication fashioned after international products such as Ad Age and Campaign," informs Batra.

In October 2003, the company launched Pitch, a monthly advertising, marketing and media magazine after having run exchange4media.com, a website in the same domain, for four years.

Interestingly, exchange4media's weekly tabloid is coming soon after agencyfaqs!, its rival in the web space, launched a fortnightly tabloid called The Brand Reporter earlier this month.

Batra debunks the assumption that Impact is a response to The Brand Reporter: "We had been contemplating a weekly product for sometime. Impact will be positioned as a visually appealing product that can be read in half-an-hour as the readers are pressed for time these days," he says.

However, exchange4media.com will continue to be the online information dissemination vehicle while Pitch will offer serious analysis.

Editorially, even The Brand Reporter editor-publisher Sreekant Khandekar, wants to keep his web and print products separate.

"While the web is a daily and is largely about "what" happened, the magazine is about "why" something happened. The target profile of the web and the print consumer is similar though not identical," says Khandekar.

He expects the magazine to attract readers who are not comfortable with the Net, or those who, for reasons of travel or access, can't visit agencyfaqs! regularly. "As with agencyfaqs, we expect our biggest numbers to come from marketing professionals," he adds.

The Brand Reporter has started with a print run of 10,000 copies per fortnight. But Batra says Impact will start off with 20,000 copies a week.

For distribution, The Brand Reporter is targeting news stands and traffic lights and has just initiated a major subscription drive. "A year from now we will have a print run of about 25,000 copies," says Khandekar.

For starters, both Khandekar and Batra are expecting to corner media advertising, though eventually they feel consumer brands could move in "if the magazines get some serious numbers".

To be sure, the money spent by the media companies is not small either. Advertising industry experts peg the total media spends by television channels such as Star, Sony, Zee, HBO, Discovery, NDTV India, Aaj Tak, among others, to be in the range of Rs 100 crore.

Says Khandekar: "Media advertising is huge, but the bulk of it is being directed to the consumers (through newspapers and outdoor) and only about 10 to 15 per cent of it is aimed at the advertisers and accrues to niche websites and magazines."

But several print media brands such as Dainik Jagran, Amar Ujala, Dainik Bhaskar and a host of other regional players, also advertise in the niche magazines to build their brand image among planners and advertisers.

Though figures on their spends are not available, OMD India CEO Sandip Tarkas says that "advertising in verticals (read niche magazines) rather than horizontals is growing."

The Brand Reporter and Impact will face competition from a host of players "" Pitch, GR8, USP Age, to name a few, which have already entered the market. Eventually how many products will survive?

"If you mean 'survive' in the sense of not dying, I'm sure all the brands can survive "" especially, today when the advertising is looking up," says Khandekar.

The real challenge is editorial. "Giving away free copies of indifferent content, exaggerating circulation figures to get ads is a game played by innumerable B2B publications. And it works. But these are not brands, merely receptacles to hold specialised advertising," observes Khandekar.

The Brand Reporter, he claims wants to be bought on the strength of its content by every brand, agency and media executive. "We want to sell numbers within our target group. We can wait for the profits," concludes Khandekar.