Magazines Scramble to Get Online

As the Internet continues to gain in popularity, magazine publishers are aggressively developing and expanding their online presence to hold onto advertisers.

“Marketers are coming to us and saying, ‘We want to be able to create a coordinated multimedia ad campaign in print and online,’ ” said Charles G. McCurdy, president of Primedia, which publishes Seventeen, Modern Bride and American Baby, among others. “They want to advertise with companies that can offer an integrated solution.”

Top advertisers are already directing their ad dollars to magazines that offer them Internet marketing opportunities. Earlier this year, Ford Motor Co. shocked the industry when it shifted $100 million, a third of its print advertising budget for next year, from traditional publications to the Internet, cable and outdoor.

“Magazines need to be integrated with the Internet, so they can bring their readership, both from the magazine and Internet site, into the marketing partnership,” said Dave Ropes, Ford’s director of corporate advertising. “We’re reaching out and telling them they need to be wired so they can extend the reach of their brand.”

Magazines without a strong Internet presence have become less attractive to marketers trying to reach online consumers. A magazine provides advertisers with a credible editorial platform, whereas a corporate site is viewed as a PR tool.

Compared with Internet start-ups, magazines have a clear advantage in drawing viewers to their sites, since they already have brand recognition. But magazines cannot just rely on their names to attract the visitors so coveted by advertisers.

Web surfers want more than the content of a magazine, said Michael J. Wolf, a media consultant at Booz, Allen & Hamilton. They want the interactive experience and fresh content.

“Magazines have to give a value-added experience,” Wolf said.

Entertainment Weekly Online, for example, features first-person columns about the entertainment industry written by the magazine’s reporters. These opinion pieces, generally written with less formality than magazine articles, only run online.

“It’s a very popular feature, and writers like it because they can do writing they can’t do for the magazine,” said Michael Small, the site’s executive editor. “We’re trying to create a site that supplements the magazine, not repeats it. Using the Web, it’s a more personal and interactive experience. If you don’t acknowledge that, then people are less engaged by it.”

Within the industry, Martha Stewart’s Web site is often singled out for its successful integration of her magazine, television show and catalog. Content from the magazine is just one component of the Web site. Viewers also can order catalog merchandise, take part in online discussions, ask questions and access a variety of information in Stewart’s areas of expertise--gardening, weddings, home and food.

“She’s really focused on building a multimedia company, and that’s what companies have to do,” said Wolf.

Although most magazines are far from making money on their costly Internet ventures, they hope to change that as they establish new marketing partnerships and seize upon e-commerce opportunities.

Conde Nast is expected to announce this month a new fashion site eventually incorporating e-commerce. The site will use editorial content from Conde Nast’s fashion magazines, which include Vogue, Mademoiselle and Glamour.

Conde Nast President and Chief Executive Steve Florio said recently that the publisher is in talks with leading retail chains about selling merchandise, most likely clothing, through the fashion site. He said it likely would not be involved in e-commerce until next year.

Conde Nast’s food site, Epicurious.com, includes recipes from both Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines. It began offering more than 2,000 of Williams-Sonoma’s household items this week. When a visitor calls up a recipe, all the cookware needed to make the dish is available for purchase on the site. Williams-Sonoma handles the e-commerce transactions.

Conde Nast is confident there are other revenue-generating opportunities on the Internet.

“We’re in very, very aggressive growth mode,” said Sarah Chubb, director of CondeNet, the publisher’s Internet unit.

Like its competitors, Hearst is aggressively pushing ahead with its Internet plan because of demand from advertisers, not just from traditional corporations such as Ford, but from “dot-com” start-ups.

“We are enjoying a huge increase of dot-com advertising,” said Michael Clinton, senior vice president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines, publisher of Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar and others. Forty Web-based businesses now are running ads in Hearst magazines, he said.

“And they want to create partnerships to help drive traffic to their Web sites. Advertisers are looking for relationships with magazines that have other Web sites, so they can be hooked into that,” Clinton said.

Primedia’s McCurdy said the Web works synergistically with magazines, since both cater to highly targeted interests.

“Our magazines define communities of interest,” he said. “That translates well to specialized online communities. We’re trying to use the power of our magazine brands to establish online communities.”

Primedia now operates more than 240 Web sites. McCurdy expects that number to increase and for existing sites to be enhanced. As part of its commitment to new media, the company recently named Thomas Rogers, former president of NBC cable operations who has extensive Internet experience, as its new chief executive.

During a news conference announcing his appointment, Rogers said that developing Primedia’s Internet offerings will be one of his priorities.

“Here is a traditional media company that is waiting to have its new media developed,” Rogers said of Primedia. “The magazine industry as a whole is underdeveloped on how to use its traditional media base to drive new media value.”