“It’s a great marketing tool — you’re going into a meeting where you’re selling digital or solutions, and people can actually pick it up and look at it. That touch-and-feel will always be important.”
“Without the magazine, we’re nothing.”
That’s a huge statement coming as it does from the head of a multi-media agency.
“When I came here, I made a pretty bold statement: ‘I’m only here because of the magazine,” said Nylon Media’s CEO Jamie Elden in a recent interview with Jill Manoff writing in Glossy.
As Manoff notes, Elden’s attitude is surprising, especially for the head of an agency that creates multi-media content for brands from print magazines to video, TV and, most recently live events and conferences.
He’s no pie-in-the-sky print-only idealist, recognizing that the “whole print magazine market is in disarray.” Rather, he’s a strong advocate of using all available and appropriate channels, saying:
“If I was investing in Condé Nast right now, I’d be like … dead. Unless they have a plan to scale the rest of that business to match what the print revenues are doing, and within the next few years, I’d be pretty scared,” he notes.
He’s not scared for Nylon as a brand, however, noting: “We’re plugged into all the right platforms right now, all the right revenue streams, and that certainly includes Nylon magazine.”
“We have no plans to shut it down, no plans to reduce it at all in the foreseeable future, and that’s it,” Elden continued. “I originally set out to build resources and support around it, and promote it, and that’s what we did. It’s a great marketing tool — you’re going into a meeting where you’re selling digital or solutions, and people can actually pick it up and look at it. That touch-and-feel will always be important.”
Legacy brands with a solid foundation in print (he cites Cosmopolitan as a great example) are perfectly positioned to leverage their print base and expand revenue into new platforms. We see other examples of brands that are adding digital and other channels while print is still paying the bills, and it absolutely can work.
“I’m a big fan of legacy brands, and the way the media landscape is going right now, legacy brands are winning the race.”