Mar 02 2008
Magazine Advertising – An Interesting Observation
Magazine Advertising – An Observation
I read a lot. I read a lot of magazines, not only finance-oriented magazines, but magazines about politics, news, travel. And I know how these magazines stay in business, and I completely understand that it is a business, regardless of anything else. But sometimes I do get a desire to see who may (or may not) have influence on the content that’s included (meaning articles, etc.) in magazines, and so I thought I would analyze the first magazine I could find lying around the house–and it turned out to be this week’s BusinessWeek.
As you may have guessed (or, more likely, not have guessed because there wasn’t any real reason for you to try), I read a lot of magazines and online news and watch a good amount of news on regular and cable television channels. I watch Fox News, and I watch CNN, and I watch any other news programs I can that will give me the different slantings, whatever those slanting may be. I want to know everything–how the left perceives something, how the right perceives something, how the middle perceives something, and so on. I like having all information on a topic before me, then making my own judgments based on all of the data.
One of the publications that I get packed into my mailbox during the course of the month is Businessweek. Today, while reading through the articles that I wanted to read through, I noticed a couple of advertisements; being in marketing I tend to do that. So today I thought I would analyze the entire magazine, front cover to back, not only the advertisements that are included on the pages, but also the stories that make up most of the magazine’s pages. Below is how they are listed, page by page–titles and subtitles. I won’t make any comments on any of it–I’ll let you do that. I want to be as objective as possible here (and yes, obviously this is BusinessWeek, so I know that companies being mentioned is to be expected). Let me know what you think.
Cover:
“Multinationals: Are They Good For America?”
“The Cuban Suprise: Its Economy is stronger than you think”
“IBM’s R&D Gamble: How Big Blue is stoking its research machine”
An ad for IBM
Page 2
An ad for Nuance Communications
Page 3
Contents
Page 4-5
Contents continued
Page 5
An ad for Sprint
Page 6
Contents continued
Page 7
An ad for Salesforce.com
Page 8
News You Need to Know (general news, with Vanguard, UBS, Hallmark/Westland Meat, ad agency Cyclops, and the Deutsch agency mentioned)
Page 9
An ad for BMW
Page 10
Why Bernanke Faces Stiff Headwinds
Page 11
An ad for GE
Page 12
An ad for Grant Thornton
Page 13
Numbers: The Cost of Cutting Emissions
Page 14
Businessweek editorial staff, etc.
Page 15
An ad for Fidelity Investments
Page 16
An ad for Smartway (A new voluntary program from the US EPA), and the Next BusinessWeek Calendar
Companies mentioned: Pearson, HSBC, Costco, H&R Block, Ciena.
Page 17
An ad for The XL Capital Group
Page 18
An ad for Michigan’s Ross School of Business
Page 19
A BTW column with some interesting facts about Pigs as well as a measurement of psychological health
Page 20
BTW continued
Companies mentioned: Facebook, LinkedIn, Heidrick & Struggles
Page 21
An ad for Singapore Airlines
Page 22
An ad for ENI (Some sort of award for research and technology innovation)
Page 23-24
Facetime: Joe Kennedy on $100 Oil and his Deal with Hugo Chavez
This is Maria Bartiromo’s column
Page 25
An ad for Kyocera
Page 26-27
The New Putin: Russia’s Youth see their President–and his Handpicked Successor, Medvedev–as the Key to their Prosperity
A mention of the book, The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West, by Edward Lucas
A mention of The Economist
Page 28
The Squeeze on PetroChina
Page 29
An ad for Northern Trust
Page 30
PetroChina continued
A new article: Westling the Olympics Activists
Page 31
An ad for Columbia Business School
Page 32
Lessons from the Depression: Bernanke, a student of the era, is likely to avoid the erros made then and keep rates low–despite inflation
Page 33-34
An ad for Lunesta (a prescription drug)
Page 35
More Fodder for the Yank-Haters: The spreading U.S. credit crisis is turning up the heat on Europe’s simmering anti-Americanism
Page 36
Google: The Hollow Echo of a Click
Page 37
An ad for CA
Page 38
MGM Mirage’s Hidden Card
Page 39
An ad for Blackberry (Research in Motion)
Page 40
An ad for CIT
Page 41-46
Multinationals: Are They Good for America?
Page 47
An ad for British Airways
Page 48-51
In Ohio, It’s Really About the Economy
Page 52-55
The Cuban Economy: After the Smoke Clears
Page 56-60
The Best Undergrad B-Schools
Page 61
An ad for Verizon Wireless
Page 62
An ad for Brocade
Page 63-65
Sci Tech: Big Blue Goes for the Big Win (an article about IBM)
Page 64
An ad for Kellogg School of Management
Page 65
An ad for Kellogg School of Management
A mention of R&D Magazine and IBM
Page 66
Innovation: A New Kind of First Responder
Page 67
An ad for Vanguard
Page 68 & 70
Deals: Meet the Master of Mideast Buyouts
Page 69
An ad for BASF
Page 71
An ad for Norilsk Nickel
Page 72-74
Personal Business: Saying Goodbye to Your Money Guy
Page 72-73
An ad for The Hartford
Page 75
Investing: Funds: Grand Reopenings
Page 76
Plus: Retirement articles
Page 77
Wine: Cabs Par Excellence From Washington
Page 78
An ad for GoToMyPC
Page 79-80
Opinion: Requiem for Old-Time Radio
Page 81
An ad for Media Summit (at the McGraw-Hill building). (McGraw-Hill owns Businessweek).
Sponsors of the event: IBM, Capgemini, Swarmcast, Choice Stream, Vignette, Microsoft Silverlight, Thenewsmarket, Deloitte, entriq, the Platform, KickApps, Atempo, Virtusa, Associated Press, Zip.tv, blinkx, Teradata, Sybase, Standard & Poor’s
Page 82
Tech & You: Almost as Think as Air–and Rugged (The Thinkpad (An IBM laptop)).
There’s a mention of IBM and Apple’s MacBook, Intel, Verizon)
Page 83
An ad for CDW
Page 84
Inside Wall Street
Different articles
Page 85
Books: A review of Muhammed Yunus’s book: Creating a World Without Poverty
There’s a mention of a Blackberry.
Page 86-87
Feedback
Page 88-89
Random advertisement
Page 90
Company Index
Page 91
An ad for Middle-East Asia Leadership Forum
Run by DNMstrategies
Page 92
The Welchway: It’s Business-Bashing Time
Page 93
An ad for State Street
Back Cover
An ad for Dell
Wow. Ok, so I knew going in that there would be a lot of advertisements and advertisers, but to be honest I wasn’t truly thinking it would be that many, that often throughout the pages of the magazine. Especially when you start seeing the ads for companies being on the same pages as the articles written about the companies. I don’t know if I would feel comfortable making any assumptions here, but there has to be some sort of conflict here, no?
And yes, we have ads on Financeblogonline.com as well, which is a blog run by Level2wo. Google ads. And some other rotating ads. Unfortunately, though, I’m not making enough to even pay for the time I spent writing this short blog entry.
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