Oprah Gives It Away
Oprah once gave every single member of her audience a car, presumably just because she was feeling generous. The scene that it caused in the studio audience, of woman screaming with joy, became a thing of legend. It was very entertaining, and well worth every penny that she spent. (I thought it was funny that later, all those women were surprised to learn that they had to pay taxes on the value of the car. Talk about fine print.)
Oprah has her own magazine and, like every other magazine on the planet, it's loaded with ads. You have to flip past ten pages of ads just to get past the table of contents. I've always wondered: do the executives working at the companies that buy these ads actually sleep well at night thinking that they've given their company exposure? Aren't most women just flipping right past all of those pages to get to the content without paying them a second thought?
If Oprah wants to give something away, and a to whole bunch of her fans instead of a select few, why not run the magazine without any ads? Yes, I understand how magazines make money, and how the circulation numbers drive the magazines profitability, etc. But it's O Magazine...in terms of readership, she's got volume. Does anyone really think that she couldn't turn a profit from the magazine without any ads at all?
If you have to sell something, why not sell companies pages in which they can write articles that make the readers interested in their products. Most of the articles are ads anyway. They talk about Dr. Oz's new book or whatever else Oprah might be interested in telling her readers about that month.
As a matter of fact, why don't all magazines do this? Force the people buying ad space in your periodical to actually generate content directed at the reader about the product they're trying to hawk. It wouldn't work for everything, and the people writing the "ads" would have to try pretty hard to engage the readers. But I get the impression that ad agencies spent a lot of time in meeting developing marketing strategies...why not direct all that effort into creating "guest editorials" that talk about your product?
Individuals could buy space too. Want to write an article about your charity and have it read by the readers of O Magazine? You just need to pay the advertising fee and the space is yours.
Maybe this is a dangerous idea because it blurs the lines between the ads and the actual content of the magazine. One virtue of the existing system is that the ads are pretty easy to discern, and, therefore, easy to ignore. Maybe that's a feature in and of itself.
Oprah has her own magazine and, like every other magazine on the planet, it's loaded with ads. You have to flip past ten pages of ads just to get past the table of contents. I've always wondered: do the executives working at the companies that buy these ads actually sleep well at night thinking that they've given their company exposure? Aren't most women just flipping right past all of those pages to get to the content without paying them a second thought?
If Oprah wants to give something away, and a to whole bunch of her fans instead of a select few, why not run the magazine without any ads? Yes, I understand how magazines make money, and how the circulation numbers drive the magazines profitability, etc. But it's O Magazine...in terms of readership, she's got volume. Does anyone really think that she couldn't turn a profit from the magazine without any ads at all?
If you have to sell something, why not sell companies pages in which they can write articles that make the readers interested in their products. Most of the articles are ads anyway. They talk about Dr. Oz's new book or whatever else Oprah might be interested in telling her readers about that month.
As a matter of fact, why don't all magazines do this? Force the people buying ad space in your periodical to actually generate content directed at the reader about the product they're trying to hawk. It wouldn't work for everything, and the people writing the "ads" would have to try pretty hard to engage the readers. But I get the impression that ad agencies spent a lot of time in meeting developing marketing strategies...why not direct all that effort into creating "guest editorials" that talk about your product?
Individuals could buy space too. Want to write an article about your charity and have it read by the readers of O Magazine? You just need to pay the advertising fee and the space is yours.
Maybe this is a dangerous idea because it blurs the lines between the ads and the actual content of the magazine. One virtue of the existing system is that the ads are pretty easy to discern, and, therefore, easy to ignore. Maybe that's a feature in and of itself.