Just Another Game

Unless you’re talking about some porn mag, there’s just no way a magazine will survive without advertising in the Philippines. Though our land is home to the best writers and photographers in the world, that’s just how it is. Another challenge for magazines is how to make their content fresh and dynamic enough to warrant a monthly purchase. P100-P125 for a magazine can be quite a stretch for the typical C market reader.

To put it simply, a magazine doesn’t rank high on a need scale at all.

With that being said, it’s normal for media companies to bend over backwards when it comes to their treasured clients when it comes to advertisements. After all, budgets are always limited, and competition is always neck and neck.

Advertisers simply know that media companies will do whatever the former wants. With all advertising rates being equal, the completion of these deals usually depend on who can throw in more “extras”. In the case of magazines, these can range from simple mentions in one of the PR pages, to something as generous as a 10-page spread exclusively featuring the advertiser’s products. If they’re pushy, they can get the cover too. This is where everything gets tricky.

People can call it whatever they want — advertising features, value added services, etc. However, these things can only be considered as such IF the editorial inclusions are initiated by the editorial staff of a magazine. Anything else outside this condition is total disregard for the reader.

You have to ask yourself, who are you more responsible to – your readers, or your advertisers?

My biggest example involves probably the industry’s biggest spender – Unilever. Over the past few months, commercials have been running on different channels that involve no less than the magazine and newspaper industry’s key personalities. Rissa Mananquil of the Philippine Star is just one example. Her commercial starts out with a picture of her column, as she briefly narrates how Ponds is able to “get the job done” for those who use it.

Other variations of the commercial include no less than the Publisher of Mega Magazines, Sari Yap. These people have been in media long enough to know that anytime you involve yourself with your advertisers this way, editorial integrity is thrown out the window (how can they even face their other advertisers after this?). I’ve been searching for videos of these online, and was only able to find one.

“But there is money to be made, so why should we care what an upstart blogger thinks?”

My answer to that is there is a right way of doing things.

Take petronfuelsuccess.com for example. Every year for the past three, they’ve invited media personalities to participate in race to see who can go the farthest with just a full tank of gasoline. Why is this pure brilliance?

• They’re a fuel brand, which means they have to deal with motor journalists.
• They don’t tell the media people to say good things about the brand. This message is a byproduct of the race itself. See the example below.
• More importantly, they don’t put the journalists in a situation where people can doubt their editorial integrity. These people just participated in a race, plain and simple.

Forgive me for being so passionate about this, but I know of some people who belong in the media industry who have had to turn down TV commercials because these could have tainted their editorial integrity. They had to ask permission from their boss, who plain and simply said no way. It was even made company policy that any gifts from advertisers be declared at the human resources department. That’s why I admire her so much (there’s a clue right there! ).

Magazine, newspaper, and news personalities shouldn’t have to be reminded that their responsibility is always to the reader, and no one else.