Friday, November 16, 2007

The ad supplements that ate Toronto Life


Torontoist, a popular blog about all things Toronto, has had it with the baggage that comes with every issue of Toronto Life magazine. In a post today, Mark Lostracco says that while he thinks the subscription price is worth every penny, the magazine's heavy burden of advertising ride-alongs and inserts is too much.
Subscription card "fly-ins" and heavy-stock ad inserts are extremely unpopular with readers, but those snot-glued supplements are incredibly lucrative, with advertisers able to attach anything from promotional DVDs to shampoo samples. Obviously, this is incredibly disruptive to the reading experience unless the consumer sifts through the magazine before reading to shake out subscription cards and tear away thick, folded perfume strips. In the case of Toronto Life's December issue, the additional advertising supplements are thicker than the actual magazine when piled side-by-side.

Packaged and mailed inside a plastic bag, the majority of the bulk comes from faux "magazines" like Vintages and Abode, which are impeccably-designed and printed on quality stock. Abode, for example, is laid-out very intentionally to confuse consumers into thinking that it's one of Toronto Life's useful monthly CityGuide magazines (which are also included in the subscription package). The LCBO's expensive Vintages supplement features three pages of fold-outs—closing the thing is a sisyphean task worthy only of those with the longest of fuses.

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6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

D.B., do you know of any studies examining the effect of ad-edit ratio, inserts and outserts, and perhaps advertorials, on reader engagement?

3:34 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, this reader certainly becomes disengaged by all the bumpf. It took me a good five minutes to pull all the inserts/outserts out of my Toronto Life before I actually got to my magazine. The worst offence has to be those glued-in inserts like Abode: they leave a clump of icky, goopy glue in the magazine. Unappealing!

1:32 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

When I did subscribe I got so much extra mail, guides and supplements that I was happy when my subscription ran out. There's a good magazine buried under there somewhere, but it wasn't worth all the aggravation.

5:18 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I "fillet" every magazine I buy & subscribe to -- from Tor Life to & The New Yorker to Vanity Fair & Mojo -- flipping through it to rip out inserts & peel off the glued-in ones. The glued-in ones are most annoying, because if I'm not incredibly slow & patient they often rip the page, obliterating part of a story's text on the other side. If I had an option of getting magazines without all this stuff (like you can opt out of scented inserts) I would.

9:51 am  
Blogger Unknown said...

The other issue with Toronto Life is how a subscription is used to inflate circ number for Fashion magazine, which suddenly starts arriving.

10:39 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This problem isn't isolated to Toronto Life. I often want to throw away the entire polybagged Marketing Magazine that I receive almost weekly. This thing is a mess. And as someone mentioned, the glue-ins are difficult to deal with, and have even caused pages to rip. Is this what readers are PAYING for?

10:55 am  

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