The appeal of magazine advertising is in its versatility; there are endless magazines on the market covering any number of subjects, and with loyal readership abounding the choice of using magazine advertising is a worthy consideration for any campaign.

Magazine advertising is an age-old concept that has been around since the first printed leaflets, and is very effective; you may flick over the adverts in the Sunday magazine, but it has to be said that one will take you eye every no and again. This is the general idea behind magazine advertising, but things can be much more direct than that.

The specialist magazine

The beauty of magazines is that they are varied in content, but it can also be so that a very specialised magazine is attractive as a way of utilizing magazine advertising. Consider this example: you have a classic motor car to sell, and you want to place a classified advert. Where would you put it? The logical and sensible answer is to advertise it in a specialist classic car magazine, as that is where the likely buyers will be.

The same is true of a commercial advertising campaign; nobody could consider advertising an upmarket product in a downmarket magazine, and the aforementioned classic car publication is not the place to advertise garden furniture or window replacements.

Specialist publications are a prime place for companies to advertise their wares and get straight to the heart of the desired audience; the reader – if interested in the type of product concerned – will certainly be reading that particular publication.

Getting to the audience

We mentioned the pointless exercise of putting an upmarket product advert in a downmarket magazine, and it stands to reason: there are many magazines that deal in luxury items, and these would stand as the best places to advertise expensive jewellery, luxury cars and holidays and other such up-market goods.

Just as relevant, however, is that the down-market magazine also has an audience that may be worth targeting, and often these are the biggest respondents to magazine marketing. Supermarkets find daily gossips magazines a prime advertising place, as these are read by everyday consumers and are not packed with attention grabbing in depth content. They are very effective methods of reaching a wide audience, and have been proven to be very popular indeed.

The world-wide magazine reading audience is huge, and in the UK alone represents a considerable chunk of the consumer population, and this is further reason why magazine advertising will continue to be a popular medium for getting ones product into the open market.

Many consider that advertising will go the way of the internet in time, and the user base is suitably huge, but it remains a fact that the internet user displays a shorter attention span – when on line – than the magazine reader does while perusing a publication. This is why magazine advertising will continue to be a much used medium in the face of string new media competition, and why methods of magazine advertising will be subject to greater creativity over time.