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When Conde Nast’s new business title, Portfolio, hits the stands next May, media executives believe it will bring new advertisers to the category. And new blood is needed: Ad pages at business magazines are down - the latest bad news has IBM pulling advertising, $9.3 million worth, out of McGraw-Hill’s BusinessWeek magazine.
Portfolio’s top business competitors include Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes. According to Publishers Information Bureau, ad pages at Business Week were down 3.7 percent and revenue down 9.3 percent from January to May 2006 compared with the same period in 2005. For the same period, Fortune’s pages were down 5.5 percent and revenue down 3.3 percent and ad pages at Forbes were down 1.3 percent and revenue up 3.7 percent.
Still, Bill Kupper, president and publisher of Business Week, looks forward to Portfolio’s launch, MediaLife reports. “It means that for all those doomsayers saying that business publications are going totally extinct, it’s just not true,” Kupper said.
Others don’t see it as a direct competitor of the Big Three business titles: “I would not expect anything that looks anything like Forbes, Fortune or BusinessWeek, which is smart because you would not want to go head-to-head with those guys,” says Reed Phillips, managing partner at the media investment bank DeSilva and Phillips, as quoted by MediaLife. “I’m expecting a very different approach to a business magazine, an approach that will say Conde Nast. It will share the high quality of The New Yorker and the more interesting in-depth profiles of Vanity Fair.”
In this way, Portfolio could merge advertisers from both lifestyle and business publications. “As long as they attract the right eyeballs, the business advertising will be there, and I think a lot of consumer advertising will be there as well. If they can crack that [cross-category advertising], then that becomes the holy grail,” said Alan Jurmain, media director at Avrett, Free & Ginsberg.
Portfolio will guarantee a 300,000 rate base for its first issue, on newsstands April 24, 2007, and will “likely broach a wealth of topics beyond business-leader profiles — from investing in high-end art and expansive villas to the best in Italian business suits,” reports Mediaweek (via Gawker).
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