Volatility Convergence

Go with me on this one...

The web and print pages have been ablaze lately with the volatility in the magazine biz, with endless restructuring, streamlining and other popular corporate euphemisms

The web and print pages have been ablaze lately with the volatility in the marketing biz, with endless restructuring, turnover at the CMO level.

Put the 2 together and you have an unfortunate, natural convergence in the form of CMO Magazine closing down.

Here's the thing though...this essentially makes no sense and it makes total sense. Let's start off with the "no sense"

Michael Friedenberg, president-CEO, CXO, in a statement today said the magazine could not survive as is. “Although CMO received numerous awards and accolades, the marketplace is not of the size and scale to support the business in its present format,” he said.

EXCUSE ME? The CMO audience may not represent a large quantity, but when last I checked, they controlled the entire purse strings of the entire marketing communications business. Every single publisher from every single medium and for that matter, every single agency courts the CMO, so why the hell would this not be termed to be the highest quality audience? Thirdly, is this not the most crucial time in marketing's history - with accountability stakes at their highest; with unprecedented change; yadda yadda yadda? Surely if there's one magazine that makes total sense, it's CMO magazine...

Which brings us to the "total sense" part. This is in part a product of the fact monthly magazines are somewhat redundant at a time when daily newspapers, blogs, search engines are so pervasive..but that said, I still don't believe it's the primary reason.

More likely would have been the cold, hard economic ad-edit ratio and business decision, which is outdated, irrelevant, counter-intuitive and most importantly NOT target/consumer centric.

Ever wonder what came first? The editorial or the advertising? It's the latter which dictates how long the article is going to be and how much space is devoted to the subject at hand, not the strength of the content which in a perfect world, should stand firm and attract the advertisers like pollen to bees. But it isn't. Ironically, this proves that church-state are not as separate, nor sacrosanct as perhaps we would like or would have been led to believe. But I digress..

On another level, it is somewhat interesting to compare this dying business (mags) to the web and specifically the blogosphere/podosphere. Specifically in the case of the newer forms of emerging media (take even Jaffe Juice), they are editorially driven (genesis) and with a combination of compelling content and a growing quality audience, will attract advertisers...but I stress, that this needs to be monetized and valued in terms of quality and not quantity (for the same reason that condemned CMO magazine to its doom)

What I can't speak towards is how the magazine was run and perhaps how it was pitched in terms of the content. Perhaps its business model was flawed...take Contagious magazine for example ($1,700 for 4 x quarterly issues, with other value add in the form of online access etc), which is a shining light as to how print can flourish. Even if it were somewhat specialized i.e. by CMO's for CMO's, surely this magazine would be a the perfect insider track for anyone trying to get into the CMO's head or become the next CMO. This magazine should have been the Cosmo or Vogue of B2B magazines with advertisers lining up around the block for the opportunity to message to top marketers...

CMO really had no rivals and yet it couldn't make a go of it in its existing form. The good news is the following:

“We are currently exploring multiple options to continue the dialogue with readers and advertisers under a different business model.”

...which I think is really the whole point of this post: the need for a new business model (I cover this quite extensively in my book - pages 87-103) It is the perfect anecdotal and prescriptive lesson (ironically) for its very audience: exploring multiple options to continue the dialogue (with consumers) under a different business model. Couldn't have said it better myself...