A Budget Snapshot for 2010

David Blansfield, president of F+W Media, talks about his company’s priorities for circulation marketing in the coming year.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, November 9, 2009

Cost control was high on the list of priorities for 2009 and one result of that, particularly in the consumer marketing realm, has been to turn to digital sources to find and renew subscribers. F+W Media, to combat the universal decline in advertising, treats circulation as a profit center—even more so now that advertising is a less reliable source of revenue. The company’s president, David Blansfield, spoke with AD about how they’ve accomplished that and what the priorities are going into 2010.

In general terms, how has overall budget management impacted your circ operation this year?
We manage circulation as a profit center. We’ve right-sized our circulation files to achieve profitability for our magazines without relying as heavily on advertising. We’ve managed agency subscribers down aggressively and only continued programs with high remits, while reducing or eliminating outright our renewal efforts on these least profitable subscribers. For direct-to-publisher we’ve universally pushed price increases with success. The emphasis has been on online renewals and print-to-online for new business.

Are there any areas of your circulation marketing that will receive less investment next year?
As noted, the least profitable subscribers by source will get the least new investment. Our goal is to ensure every marketing effort returns high-value subscribers.

What areas of your circulation marketing will receive more investment in 2010?
Data capture and analytics is critical, too. We’ll use all the tools available to us to grow our communities. Our focus is growing community and growing direct-to-consumer sales. Ultimately it’s to measure and grow the lifetime value of our customers. We’ll prudently invest in people and processes that will help us improve our ability to market and sell all of our content—magazines, as well as books, data, video, and events.

Hindsight is 20/20, but do you feel there were areas that you didn’t have to cut back so much in 2009? In other words, were there opportunities left on the table?
Frankly, hindsight being 20/20, I wish all the things we did in 2009 we would’ve done in 2007. Though we’re not as reliant on advertising as some other media companies, with such a significant year-to-year decline in print ad spending it would have been nice to have reduced our exposure to those declines even more than we had.

Will you be revisiting these opportunities in 2010?
We’ll stay the course as described—concentrating on growing profit per subscriber in the mail without advertising.

How will 2010’s circulation marketing budget be different than this year’s, if at all?
That hasn’t been completely determined yet, but less reliance on traditional sources, lower direct mail and fulfillment costs, and a shift of funds toward audience development with an emphasis on customer acquisition, retention and combination sales to increase customer value.

Going forward, where do you see the most opportunity for audience marketing? What are you doing to leverage that opportunity?
We see terrific opportunities for us to leverage our brands, integrate our sales and grow customer value. We want more magazine subscribers to buy books, more book buyers to subscribe to our databases, more event attendees to subscribe to our magazines. We‘ll do a better job informing and inspiring our current and future customers to experience all we offer.

Are there new initiatives that you launched recently that will mature in 2010?
Our audience development efforts are ongoing in our writing and design communities. Our full audience development roll-out will be initiated in Q1 2010. It’s a work-in-progress, but its progress we’re excited about. We are offering combination pricing packages online and through the mail.