The Enduring Power Of Magazines

Submitted by: Two Sides Nordics December 15, 2024

With a number of reports showing the popularity of print magazines, it’s clear they remain a solid investment for brands and publishers.

Take a look around any train carriage, on any park bench, in any café, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that magazine reading is a dying art. The increase in competing media such as social media, podcasts, online stores and the wealth of digital news sources are constantly threatening to drown out print magazines entirely. But a number of studies and reports show that not only are print magazines holding out against their online cousins, but positively thriving.

The latest PwC Media & Entertainment Outlook 2022-2026 report shows that print accounts for around 80% of consumer magazine revenues globally, a figure that’s projected to decline by just 5% by 2026. For a medium that many predicted was going to be wiped out by 2020, that’s not bad going.

Deep Engagement

Part of the reason why print magazines remain so resilient is their attraction for brands who want to spend significant chunks of their advertising budgets on having a presence within their pages. While social media provides a fleeting glimpse of a brand or product, magazines deliver a much more immersive experience, with adverts created especially to engage with specific magazine audiences. “Magazines can target very specific and engaged audiences, which in turn can enhance a brand’s credibility,” Andrew Davies, Media Planning Manager of OMD UK, told Campaign recently. “We know that readers are invested in the magazines they read and often spend a significant time reading with no other distractions. We’ve seen magazine campaigns deliver over 13-times ROI for our clients.”

Print magazines also offer brands the opportunity to get creative with their work. Whether it’s cover wraps, special papers, inks and treatments, or even 3D pop-up ads, brands have a huge number of ways to capture the attention of the reader and fire their imagination.

“The tangible aspect makes magazine media unlike other channels,” says Rachel Haron, Publishing Director of media agency Goodstuff. “Monthlies will have particularly high readerships due to being in the home for longer, and that ad that may be on the outside back cover of a mag will be visible for a while.”

Action Plan

Of course, the point of all this customer engagement is sales, and magazines are proven to be effective in prompting readers to take action after seeing an advert. A new report by the News/Media Alliance in the US found that magazine readers are consistently positive toward advertisements they see in magazine media, with almost eight in 10 (78%) magazine readers taking an action as a result of seeing an ad in a magazine. Going further, one in four readers looked for more information about the product/service (25%) or visited the advertiser’s website (23%).

Most heartening is the continued popularity of magazines among the younger generation, with the same report concluding that 89% of 18-24-year-olds have read a magazine in the previous six months. Alastair Lewis, the new CEO of the global association for magazine publishers, FIPP, is highly optimistic about young people’s attitude towards print, and has observed a shift among Generations Z and Alpha towards print media. “I see these generations recognising the superior experience print offers for reading and retaining information,” he says.

Mind Blowing

This all boils down to print magazines remaining a key part of any publisher’s business strategy. A recent survey of FIPP members with print products in their portfolios shows that the average print revenue dependence is very significant (35% report over 75% revenues from print, with 81% of publishers agreeing that ‘Our end users/readers still want print products’ and 77% agreeing that ‘Print products have a lasting place in our product portfolio’.

Such impressive figures led media expert Peter Houston to comment: “The idea that print accounts for three-quarters of consumer magazine revenue globally blew my mind!”

To read FIPP’s Future of Print report, go to fipp.com/resource/the-future-of-print