TV Guide certainly has gone through a transformation.
The publication — a division of Gemstar-TV Guide International, a leading media company based in New York — has morphed from a journal used by consumers solely to check TV listings into a full-on entertainment publication.
Today, the magazine is one of the most popular weekly magazines in the country, with 20 million readers and 3.2 million circulation. It features editorial about everything from broadcast and cable programming to syndicated shows and celebrities. What’s more, its advertising pages are up 23 percent this year. Other related divisions include the TV Guide Network, a cable channel reaching 82 million cable and satellite households and TVGuide.com, a Web site with more than 5.7 million unique monthly users.
Vice president of circulation marketing for Gemstar-TV Guide International Susan M. Allyn, who steers the company’s consumer marketing effort, says the major transformation happened in October 2005, “when we were no longer the Yellow Pages of TV listings, and we actually became an entertainment magazine.”
“That drove really strong, really fundamental change in our marketing efforts,” she says.
The magazine’s direct and interactive marketing, for example, began focusing on communicating to readers that TV Guide was, indeed, a brand-new magazine. In addition — since through market research the company learned that its audience was getting younger — it realized it would get more subscribers from the interactive arena and began focusing more heavily there.
However, Allyn — who was inducted into the DMA Circulation Hall of Fame this year — says interactive marketing follows the same best practices and common sense as traditional direct mail.
“How is having an e-mail that grabs you any different from an envelope that breaks out of the rest of the mail at home?” Allyn says. “It’s just the same rules.”
Online promotions
One interactive area TV Guide is focusing on is online promotions, especially since the Internet provides the magazine with a steady stream of highly sought-after consumers with excellent demographics, says Tom Augeri, executive marketing director for new business at Gemstar-TV Guide International.
To reach prospects online, TV Guide places advertisements throughout its Web site in various forms: banners, small header ads, larger form ads and links.
“We measure the response on each position within our site to make sure the creative and the offer is maximizing response,” Augeri says. “We are constantly testing offer and creative — both upfront creative and the order forms that follow the clickthrough — to maximize profitability.”
In addition, Augeri says, TV Guide regularly tests various online credit card incentives to close the transaction before visitors leave the site. It also is testing co-registration programs and targeted banner ads to outside sites.
However, while Augeri says all of TV Guide’s internal ad deliveries perform with sterling ROI, “the outside sites are harder to make work due to cost structure and the difficulty in finding the right audience.”
Augeri explains that within their offers, most outside sites offer competitive information that the audience perceives as being free, and when TV Guide promotes in that environment, “we are asking for trial and payment from a customer who is not in the right frame of mind for that type of sell.”
“In addition, we sell a [low-cost] product, which means our response rates have to be high to cover [cost-per-thousand] costs to produce an acceptable ROI,” he says.
Augeri also says that while TV Guide is not moving away from its traditional direct response marketing channels, it is “incorporating Web addresses into these sources, making it easier for some customers to subscribe, [which] lowers our costs while increasing response and ROI from these sources.”
TV Guide, Digitally
TV Guide magazine is digital, thanks to a partnership it has with Zinio (www.zinio.com), a San Francisco-based digital magazine service that has partnerships with more than 850 major consumer magazines that are delivered digitally on behalf of more than 300 leading publishers.
TV Guide has been working with Zinio for more than a year and a half.
“We’ve found that this is a great way for ex-pats to be able to easily and quickly get the magazines they are used to,” says Susan M. Allyn, vice president of circulation marketing for Gemstar-TV Guide International. “They can go and get a digital, page-by-page representation of the magazine, up to and including ads.”
Allyn also says the service is popular with younger consumers who are used to reading publications online.
