Magazines Ride Wave of Ads Aimed at Blacks
At long last, manufacturers and advertisars are paying attention to that sleeping giant: the middle-class, African-American consumer. And the evidence can be found in the pages of Black Enterprise magazine and Emerge, a general-interest news monthly.
Contrary to industry trends, which point to a severe recession-driven downturn in advertising pages for magazines throughout the country, Black Enterprise and Emerge are posting more ad pages and a cadre of new advertisers.
“We’re up about 5% (in ad pages),” said Earl G. Graves, publisher of Black Enterprise, who was in Los Angeles last week for the magazine’s national entrepreneurial conference. “But our costs could almost go up that much. . . . We’re almost staying even.”
Both Graves and Wilmer C. Ames Jr., founder and editor in chief of Emerge, credit a newfound respect for the African-American consumer. Johnson Publishing Co., the No. 2 black-owned business in the country and publisher of top-selling Ebony and Jet magazines, could not be reached for comment.
“America has finally awakened and found that there is a black, middle-class audience and it’s growing,” said Ames, whose magazine’s ad pages are up about 17% this year. “There’s no reason we shouldn’t be marketing products to them. No one’s been doing it.”
Black Entertainment Television, a national cable network and an original investor in Emerge, in late May acquired Time Warner’s interest in the magazine, bringing its stake up to about 70%. BET also plans to launch YSB (Young Sisters and Brothers), a general-interest magazine for the 13- to 19-year-old African-American reader.
Black Enterprise magazine’s own figures show that the number of pages of paid advertising has risen for the past five years--capped by a 5% increase from 848 pages in fiscal year 1990 to 888 in fiscal year 1991.
According to the Publisher’s Information Bureau, Black Enterprise magazine’s ad pages actually remained flat between 1989 and 1990. The magazine’s management, however, said that PIB counts ad pages in a different fashion and looks at a calendar year, not a fiscal year.
Roberta Garfinkle, vice president and director of print media at the New York-based ad agency McCann-Erickson, voiced surprise at the jump in ad pages for Black Enterprise and Emerge in an era when advertising in magazines nationwide has dropped about 4%.
Although Garfinkle acknowledged that “it may well be that advertisers are feeling the need to reach blacks in their own media,” she noted the importance of looking at where the increases begin.
For Emerge, a start-up magazine that began publishing less than two years ago, a 17% increase is not only expected, but necessary.
“In a start-up, if you’re not seeing double-digit inflation, they have major problems,” Garfinkle said. “If they’re not able to increase pages in that period, they might want to think about doing something else.”
In addition to an upturn in advertising pages, Black Enterprise boasts about a dozen new advertisers in the 1990-91 fiscal year, including Minolta, Sharp, 3M and high-end car manufacturers Alfa Romeo, BMW, Lexus and Audi.
Such companies are “really focusing on who is our audience,” Graves said. “We’ve made the case for the importance of the black consumer market. We’ve made the case that the black consumer is the best place to target an extremely upscale audience.”
Garfinkle called the increase in auto advertising “incredibly unusual” because auto ad pages are not growing.
“Luxury goods and services are one of the hardest-hit categories,” Garfinkle said. “People are not spending. Why (Black Enterprise is) going counterculture, I have no idea.”
Not all the signs are good, and even Black Enterprise has undergone some recessionary belt tightening. Although the magazine opened up a Los Angeles sales office this year in the middle of the recession, it also closed its Washington editorial offices in a cost-cutting move.
Graves speaks for African-American businesses and his 20-year-old magazine alike when he says: “The reason that black business has survived is that when the going gets tough, you go up another notch in your belt and tough it out.”
Nutri/System Sued Over Ads
Nutri/System Inc. of Blue Bell, Pa., has learned the hard way not to take the name of Stanford University in vain. The diet center operator was sued Monday by the university and two of its major competitors in the diet domain in separate legal actions.
All three suits complain that Nutri/System’s latest ad campaign--seen on television and in newspapers and heard on the radio nationwide--incorrectly implies that Stanford University School of Medicine endorses Nutri/System’s weight-reduction program.
Jenny Craig Inc. of Del Mar contends in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that Nutri/System’s current ads are “false, deceptive and misleading.” Weight Watcher International of Jericho, N.Y., adds another complaint; in addition to misusing Stanford’s moniker, Weight Watcher contends that the ad campaign bashes its own weight-loss program.
And Stanford’s own lawsuit gets straight to the heart of the ages-old question: What’s in a name.
“When a faculty member from Stanford says something, people listen,” said Susan K. Hoerger, senior university counsel. “When (Nutri/System says) that a Stanford medical school report says something, people believe it. They are, in their advertising, using Stanford’s name and logo and seal of the university in a way that falsely creates in the consumer an impression that Stanford endorses Nutri/System when we haven’t researched it or studied it.”
Nutri/System fired back later Monday, saying it was suing Stanford for defamation of character. The company said all its statements had been properly authorized. It called the other firms’ suits “competitive sour grapes.”
Briefly . . .
The Trump Castle casino resort in Atlantic City, N.J., has named Suissa & Associates/Santa Monica as agency of record for its $6-million advertising account . . . Hosiery maker L’eggs Products Inc. of Winston-Salem, N.C., has signed on as the first corporate sponsor in the 51-year history of the Ice Capades, the Los Angeles-based ice show . . . Fifteen Japanese ad agency heads toured BBDO Los Angeles and various other California firms Monday to learn how to bring computers into the creation of advertising.
