Answer: When they're in the toilet.
A new Starch study has seemingly deflated quite a bit of wind (hot air) from the sails of the ailing magazine industry. The study concluded that ads in high-engagement magazines performed no better than ads in low-engagement ones.
The double-barrelled hypothesis was simple (paraphrased): if readers spent more time/effort/energy reading magazines, then ceteris paribus they should spent more time reading and remembering the ads in it (and thus, high engagement magazines should outperform low engagement ones in the ad stakes - all a little too incestuous for me)
Starch divided 25 magazines into high-engagement, low-engagement and middling camps, defining engagement by the frequency with which they are read, time spent with each issue and how much of each issue gets finished. When it examined the percentages of readers who remembered ads across the magazines, it found no link between those scores and levels of engagement.
Why is anyone surprised? On one hand, all it means is that all magazines are in the same boat with respect to ad recall/memorability etc....which could be good and it could be bad. On the other hand, this clearly reminds us that content (edit) and commercials (ads) are as similar as chalk and cheese (I forget which is which)
Via Ad Age
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