WHEN Time Inc. and Lexus devised a project they thought could be a new business model for magazines, they discovered that new business models come with new problems.
The project is an individualized magazine called Mine. It is meant to play off the customizable features in the new Lexus 2010 RX by letting readers order the articles they want from Time Inc. and American Express Publishing magazines; the issues include Lexus ads personalized with readers’ names — along the lines of “The All New 2010 RX, Now With More John Doe” — or with references to the cities where they live.
Though the project was created as a one-time venture, Lexus executives thought a reader-assembled magazine could have wide appeal for a publisher. “When we first pitched this idea to Time Inc.,” said Paul Silverman, the executive media director of Team One, Lexus’s media agency and part of the Publicis Groupe, “one of the very first things we said to them was, we think we actually have a new business model for you, and, actually, the magazine industry.”
He said that claim might be exaggerated, “but we certainly think it’s a step in the right direction.”
But the Lexus project was not without its problems. A computer error caused subscribers to receive articles from magazines they had not chosen, and some of the articles that were included seemed outdated.
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To order the free magazine, readers can go to www.timecmg.com/mine and enter basic registration information. Subscribers pick five of eight magazines, like Food & Wine or Sports Illustrated, and articles from those magazines appear in their custom magazines. Readers receive several issues with an article or two from each magazine, and issues come every two weeks.
“It’s almost similar to an RSS feed or something like that, where you get a selection” of content you are interested in, said David Nordstrom, the vice president for marketing at Lexus, a division of Toyota. “It’s kind of a print way of doing what people are doing on the Internet, and for us it was to say, what is a way we can reach customers in a way that’s different?”
The car ads in the magazine are customized based on the magazines each person chose and the registration responses. Someone who picked Food & Wine articles and who lives in New York might see an ad that reads “Sunrise Highway can be tricky on your way to East Hampton” and promotes that the car has cargo space for vintage wine.
Lexus paid for the magazine as it would for an advertising supplement in any Time Inc. publication. Mr. Silverman declined to specify what the cost was, but said it “was not any more expensive or cost-prohibitive than any other program we’ve done in the past.” The automaker decided not to become too focused with its ads, asking just basic questions at registration rather than for information about income level or job title.
“We’re just trying to strike a balance: to what kind of information do we need to make it personal, without going too far,” Mr. Nordstrom said. “Longer term, if you look at what’s going on with media, whether it’s interactive or behavioral targeting, especially with the younger audience, they expect you to be talking to them. They want you to talk to them as an individual. In print, it’s much harder, but to us this was an opportunity to start experimenting with it a little bit.”
Online, digital advertisers use what they know about a person in order to show him an appropriate product, or suggest a retailer near him who carries it. Time Inc., part of Time Warner, tried to give a similar feeling of individualization in print by using digital printing, commonly used in direct mail, to create the magazines.
“It allowed for a lot more customization, so we learned that it was a great new way of working, of taking our branded content and being able to be kind of quick and nimble with it,” said Stephanie George, executive vice president of Time Inc. and president of Time Inc. sales and marketing.
In this print experiment, though, a few things went awry.
Editors of the magazines chose to include articles that were “more along the evergreen side rather than breaking news,” Ms. George said. That meant, however, some felt less than fresh — a Sports Illustrated selection about soccer that was originally published last June had references to matches from a year ago, for instance.
Then there were production problems. Time Inc. sent e-mail messages last week telling subscribers that “a computer error may have affected the first issue you received this week,” and that the editions they had received did not necessarily include articles from the magazines they had selected. Time Inc. said it would send the readers an extra issue to make up for the problems.
“A computer error caused the data regarding magazine selection to be misinterpreted,” said a Time Inc. spokeswoman, Kris Connell. “It remains unclear how many issues were affected, but we chose to reach out to everyone who subscribed to Mine.”
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Though this was the first time Lexus had worked with Time Inc. on a big project, Mr. Nordstrom said the error did not affect his view of the publisher.
“We were really trying to push the envelope. It was different for us; it was different for Time Inc. Our hope was that it would come off without any challenges, and obviously there were a couple of glitches,” Mr. Nordstrom said.
Through its Web site, Time Inc. made 200,000 digital versions and 31,000 print versions available. So far almost all the print editions have been claimed, while fewer than 30,000 digital versions have been ordered, Lexus said.
“There were several people that thought digital’s going to be on fire and sell really well,” said Mr. Silverman of Team One. “We were a little surprised as well. I think a lot of people have talked about, well, the death of print, and digital is the new print.”
“But we still think there is relevancy and need for magazines. There’s a tangibility of having something in your hands that people still enjoy,” he said.
So print executives hope. But make-your-own magazines are not, for now, a new business line for Time Inc.
“It could be the spark that could ignite something bigger, but that’s something we’re going to have to evaluate down the road,” Ms. George said.
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