Print magazines are growing despite the dominance of social media

Luxury and apparel marketing is dominated by magazines not social media. One new report put the number as high as 83% of all fashion and luxury advertising budgets are used for advertising in magazines.

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that brands are leaving print for online marketing opportunities. We are led to believe this because of stories such as a well-publicized instance where Vogue employees criticized the management for a relentless pursuit of web traffic.

However, these are not mutually exclusive because Vogue is in the print business for the long haul. Rather, they are synergistic.

The sales of the magazine have seen a steady rise compared to sales before the internet. Vogue’s circulation is 220,000, up from 135,000 in 1989. The reason that luxury magazines are doing well in the face of social media has to do with the kind of experience that their target market desires and the same is true for advertisers who see their creative content look better on a glossy sheet of paper than a digital screen.

As the international president of Vogue explained, “it is very hard to replicate the physical allure of a luxury magazine on other platforms. [It has] something to do with the sheen of the paper, the way that the ink sits on the page, the smell of money and desire that wafts off the page. Readers move into a different mode when they engage with a glossy.”

Publications are keen to exploit that by dedicating large numbers of pages to advertisements. A report revealed that pages of consumer magazines contain about half editorial content and about half advertising material. Vogue, for instance, contained 800 pages in the March 2016 issue of which more than 400 were dedicated to advertisements.

The impact of print advertising is significant. A study that measured the performance of 5 media channels including radio and TV found that print has the highest ROI at 120%.

Fashion houses are so impressed with those kinds of results that some have gone as far as launching their own publications. “The consumer is much more likely to engage with independent editorial content than with conventional, purely product-focused advertising,” said Max Vallot, marketing director for a modern denim wear brand BLK DNM, which introduced the brand and a magazine at the same time some years back. “It’s much harder to differentiate a brand through product than through advertising today, which is why we’re investing in new ways of ‘advertising.”

Advertisements in magazines have experienced continuous growth. Vogue had a 3% increase in ad pages in March 2014 from the year before. InStyle had 367 pages of advertisements in its March 2014 issue which is a 2% increase from the same time in 2013. Allure was up by 10% and Vanity Fair saw a 1.1% increase in their ad space for March 2014 against the year before. And social media has not been able to slow it down.

Another reason for the growth of magazines in the face of digital is that they cater to specialized niches, super serving their desired market. The customer buys the magazine because it allows them to experience life in an affordable way which is what fuels their devotion. They want to see beautiful pictures of the things they like in high resolution print and that is exactly what magazines offer. The readers of one specialty magazine were so loyal that they paid for issues through 2030.