As soon as media planners returned from the long Labor Day weekend last month, media planning began in full force for 2010. Hammock Inc. provides advertising sales management services for some of our clients and part of that work includes the creation of media kits. That's why we started working on 2010 media kits back in the spring.

We've noticed that the economy has impacted some of the buying behavior of advertisers who run in the magazines we publish for our clients. One way the impact is most visible is that rather than committing to a full year of insertions, for example, some advertisers are buying on a month-by-month or quarter-by-quarter basis. While advertisers might not buy a full year of media by the end of 2009 for 2010, we still include all editorial information for the year in the 2010 magazine kit.

I was asking a friend who sells advertising about her business.

“It’s hard to swim, or even to see, with this much blood in the water,” she said.

True enough. Magazine advertising was off in 2007 and 2008. Those were historically bad years. Magazine advertising got off to an even slower start in 2009. Quarter one numbers from the Publishers Information Bureau show magazine pages off 26 percent year to year from 08 to 09.

One of the related marketing and advertising sales management services we provide to our clients is the creation, design and production of media kits. The magazine sales reps that we work with use these marketing materials to sell print, online and integrated media packages for our clients.

Despite the current economic slowdown, media planning is in full swing across the country at the moment as companies make their decisions on their media and advertising strategies for 2009.

Hammock partner Susan Weiss of the national advertising sales firm the James G. Elliott Company shares some perspective on the value of advertising in today’s environment in the latest issue of their company newsletter Ads & Ideas:

It’s a question that marketers struggle with during periods of economic unrest: cut costs by reducing or eliminating the advertising budget, or else maintain or increase the brand’s advertising exposure?

Today’s b-to-b marketing decision makers have learned the lessons taught during past economic upheavals. Meeting a recessionary climate with aggressive advertising is, historically, a way to grow business during a recession and maintain continued growth after the recessionary period ends. A study conducted by BtoB magazine earlier this year finds that most business-to-business marketers are determined to hold or increase their marketing budgets during 2008.

Mad Men, which won a Golden Globe for its first season, focuses on a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early 1960s. It chronicles what workplaces were like when smoking, drinking and womanizing were all part of the work culture. Mad Men also gives a pretty good glimpse into the creative process of developing ad campaigns.

At Hammock, we are particularly interested in advertising agencies because in addition to creative development, media buyers reside in those shops. Media buyers and their clients buy the advertising that we run in several Hammock-published magazines. Hammock manages the sale of advertising as part of the services we provide to clients.

My most senior colleague in the world of advertising, Dennis Connaughton, corporate general manager at the James G. Elliott Co., is far too young to have worked in advertising in the early 60s, but he does have more than 30 years of experience in working for agencies, as well as experience on the client side for Chevrolet, and even as a former publisher of Field & Stream.

I work with Dennis on the sale of NFIB's MyBusiness magazine to media buyers. Dennis’ perspective is particularly useful to all of our clients who carry advertising in their publications. The current advertising environment has changed dramatically in the past five years, not to mention the past 30 years.

So I decided to ask Dennis whether he’d be willing to give us a perspective on the changing dynamics of advertising over the course of his career. I doubted he would share many tales of drinking or smoking or womanizing. (If that's what you're looking for, you may want to stop reading now, and buy the first season of Mad Men on Amazon instead.)

Otherwise, tune into a Q&A podcast with Dennis here (Just over 22 minutes, 10.3 MB, mp3).

Auditing is a must for consumer and business magazines that depend on advertising and newsstand sales, but if your magazine is controlled circulation or directed at a small, well-defined group, do you really need to pay for an audit?

“Yes, an audit is necessary regardless of whether or not your circulation is controlled," says Sue Scott of James G. Elliott, Inc. "With the increased competition for audience and ROI accountability, agency media buyers are more focused on having a trusted, impartial third-party independent verify what they are paying for."

The big two circulation audit agencies are ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulations) and BPA (Business of Performing Audits International). BPA Worldwide is similar to ABC, however it tends to focus on trade publications, rather than consumer titles. BPA Worldwide audits the circulation of primarily business-to-business publications. It also provides audit services for consumer magazines, newspapers, Web sites, events, email newsletters, digital magazines and other advertiser-supported media produced by its members.

Hammock partner Jim Elliott of the national advertising sales firm the James G. Elliott Company shares some tips on how to train your magazine sales force to sell digital platforms in the latest issue of their company newsletter Ads&Ideas:

Training is, of course, necessary here to sell a brand which resides in different media platforms. But that training has to be in just the fundamentals or basics of each medium—not in the technical or mechanical aspects.

For instance, a seller should understand the fundamentals of podcasting; how it is delivered, its advantages and drawbacks and what kind of advertising works with the medium, but the seller doesn’t have to be an expert in the technology. Hopefully, the brand has a podcast traffic manager to handle the technical questions.

One of our Hammock partners is the national advertising sales firm the James G. Elliott Company. In the latest issue of their company newsletter Ads&Ideas, President Jim Elliott shares his perspective on recent news coming out of the advertising industry:

Oh, what a difference a few months can make! The first quarter of 2008 has been one of the roughest in magazine ad sales history. A quick glance at the revenue numbers for monthly magazines is sobering. The decline has been caused in part by many agencies holding back on placing 2008 schedules due to their clients not releasing budgets. But it has also been due to advertising money being diffused into various new delivery platforms.

Of course, the magazine industry has been trying to hold on to some of these dollars by creating their own multiple delivery platforms for their content. However, there is no dominant selling strategy in the way they actually sell advertising around these new platforms.