New Yorker Ads Drive Eretail Web Sales

July 29th, 2008
I was reading a recent edition of The New Yorker, while fiddling away downtime on a three-hour flight. (For what’s its worth, it was the issue BEFORE the now-infamous Obama cartoon cover.) I started perusing the smallish boxy ads that vertically border many of the magazine’s stories. And I was struck by how many small dot-coms were taking up those spaces.


Appearing in that issue were wideshoes.com, maestroclassics.com, guerillatough.com, sit4less.com and tentimesfiltered.com, among others. Well, I ended up speaking with such a dot-com New Yorker advertiser – who wanted to remain anonymous and is NOT listed above – and was surprised to hear the type of spend and ROI they were getting.

The marketer says that the ads run for something “over $1,000 a week.” Now, this merchant was selling direct out of an old-school department store ….sounds kind of like a steep regular investment for such a modest Web operation, doesn’t it?

What’s more is that the merchandise they were promoting in the magazine ad ran only $10-$25 per unit. But the ads work, the marketer says.

To track response and gauge return on investment, they used key codes. The codes appeared in the ad and were plugged in by buyers at their Website.

“The ads have helped our online business grow from basically nothing to 20% of our overall sales. I wouldn’t be spending the money on those ads if we didn’t have $10 products flying out the door. And, it has helped us compete with the ‘big boys.’”

Categories: Branding, Consumer Marketing, Ecommerce Eretail, Email Marketing, Offline Marketing And Advertising, Online Advertising, Online Marketing Tags: , , , ,



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