The Wholly Rational Exuberance in the Magazine Sector

Trust, community, influence, expertise and context: Those are the messages that have been coming out of Magnetic since it opened its doors in 2015. According to media commentator Dominic Mills, these messages “all intertwine together to form the solid core that sits at the heart of magazine media, and they help the sector define its USP.”

In a recent post in Magnetic, Mills points out that, in this sector, we’ve got plenty of “reasons to be pretty damn cheerful.”

He points to several phenomena going on now – Facebook being bashed for its sketchy metrics; Google taking a massive hit for its YouTube debacle; the public outcry over fake news – as huge opportunities for magazine media.

“Let’s start with the Google/YouTube brand safety row. Only a hermit would be ignorant of the firestorm engulfing the digital giant following revelations (The Independent -Google apologises over adverts placed next to extremist YouTube videos) in mid-March that advertisers were inadvertently funding terrorism,” he writes.

“As advertiser after advertiser lined up to pull their ads off the platform – M&S, L’Oreal, C4, HSBC and the government, to name but a handful – they might consider where else they could invest their media budgets. Magazine media would be one obvious answer,” Mills continues.

Mills makes some spot on observations about the fallout from these digital messes, noting that “advertisers have woken up to the fact that they can no longer rely on the tech giants for independent or third-party verified media metrics.”

Maybe this is the sea change in advertising we’ve been predicting. Brands – not technology – are once again making the tough decisions about where to place their ads.

“By definition, the communities of interest that make up magazine media’s core audiences offer advertisers the opportunity to max out on both relevance and the appropriate context,” he notes.

Given the state of media today, we agree … we’ve got plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the future of magazine media.