Sports Illustrated is joining hands with the virtual world to auction advertising space in its pages and on its web editions. In addition, the publication will also be selling its event marketing inventory to the highest bidder and it will be all online.
The exercise is particularly aimed at special issues that have global reach and may attract advertisers far from the publisher's existing data base.
Publishers of Sports Illustrated hope the online marketplace will help gather advertisers quickly for time-sensitive products such as commemorative issues.
It is one of the most striking attempts yet to harness new media for a traditional publisher's gain, particularly among magazines where publishers have feared undermining their sales teams. Executives at Time Inc, the title owners, the first one to try an online auction, said the move was partly to lure those advertisers that are not in close touch with the sales force anyway.
"There are many advertisers out there who would like the opportunity to understand what the Sports Illustrated brand is about, what those offerings are, that we just physically can't get to," said Mark Ford, president of the Sports Illustrated Group commenting on the objective of going online for seeking global advertisers.
"We used to send e-mails out to the sales representatives in Boston saying, 'Look we're having a commemorative and you've got two days to sell into that'," Ford said. "That's not an efficient use of their time. Now, through e-mail blasts, we can say, 'Here's a great offering'."
Sports Illustrated has an average weekly circulation of more than 3.15 million paid copies and the annual swimsuit edition sells more than 4.5 million copies worldwide. The much-awaited edition sells a full page ad for as much as $375,000 (Dh1.37 million) and total ad revenue in the last commemorative issue was more than $50m. In addition, the magazine reaps in another $50m in copy sales of the swimsuit issue.
Sports Illustrated officials believe that online auction of advertising space will also relieve the sales and marketing staff of last minute ad space inventory and the magazine would rather move that inventory with its automated auctions, which use eBay technology, than by distracting a sales team trying to concentrate on bigger integrated packages.
In reality, executing the deals struck online has also turned out to require human contact, according to Ford. "A human has to talk to that client," Ford said.