Playboy, once seen as a risque adult magazine, but now a relatively tame magazine, is now launching a new website that is work safe. The persistent joke about reading Playboy for the articles has ignored the fact that it actually was a well written magazine, albeit one best known for the Centerfold. Playboy has launched a landing page with a signup on their new site, TheSmokingJacket.com, a nod to the fact that the company is as well known for it’s Smoking Jacket clad founder as for the bunnies and the naked spreads.
The idea of a non-pornographic gentleman’s lifestyle magazine being promoted by Playboy is intriguing, and definitely capitalizes on an extremely well known brand. In recent years, Playboy’s iconic magazine has been a money loser, with the value from the brand in royalties and merchandising, plus the pay per view movie channels being the dominant areas of growth. With the collapse of well known magazines in recent years, it will be interesting in Playboy can extend their brand to the non-adult fare.
In middle school, our science teacher brought in an interview conducted by Playboy, which was an extremely good interview, with much amusement from the class about the source. She told us she sent her poor embarrassed husband in to purchase the magazine for her to run off copies of the article for us to read.
While I’m certain that the school district had a copyrighted materials policy, I’m pretty sure that a purchase order for 50 – 100 copies of Playboy magazine would have raised red flags, even if they were able to cut out the pages of the interview without the “dirty bits.”
For branding, it appears that advertising on Content Sites is 21% more effective than on Portals and through Ad Networks. This seams like good news, as the consolidation of Traffic on the Internet has undermined the small is beautiful of the gold rush era. An advertiser needing to spend a $1,000,000 budget doesn’t have the ability to cherry pick places to spend ads without spending expensive employee resources finding sites, but a niche player looking to advertise can identify where their traffic is and has an edge.
Portals and Ad Networks generally charge higher CPM rates for apparently inferior results. This ought to give hope to independents that targetted advertisement can give results. Let the big guys spent $8 CPM running ads across networks, you can get 21% more effective results at $3-$4 CPM rates, and the local content players will be thrilled compared to the $1-$2 they get through the networks… it’s not that networks take a 75%, they take a 25%-50% cut and then don’t sell the inventory.
And if you like developing unique content, don’t despair, your advertising inventory is increasing in value!
Consumer Branding companies appear to be wising up that the Internet can be used for more than CPC/CPA deals for Internet dealers. Not only can you do CPM advertising deals to promote your brand like you did on television, but interactive media helps you engage your customer base.
Look at, PULL-UPS The Potty Project, with a reality TV type approach showing 6 families potty training. This follows their viral success of the Potty Dance, where families could send in their videos of the Potty Dance for a competition. They received 75 entries and over 600,000 viewers… not bad for a brand whose primary process if keeping the child from peeing over the house.
Using Social Media, companies are finding a large click rate despite not incentivizing the offers. In part because of the newness, social media interactions aren’t seen as intrusive the way email marketing has become.
