• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, March 2, 2007

Here's a surprise: A study commissioned by Time Inc., the fast-shrinking but still leading magazine publisher in the world, has found that "spectacular magazine ads" -- meaning annoying multi-page spreads, three-dimensional pop-ups, scented ads and ads with an audio component (that they can sell at a premium) -- produce a big bump in measures like brand recall and the number of readers who read ad copy.

You would have thought that those guys would have learned something between the ill-conceived Pathfinder and the disastrous marriage to AOL. But, no, here they are jumping up and down trying to convince advertisers that by engaging in the offline equivalent of pop-ups and takeover ads, they are providing a valuable service to marketers and readers.

Was it soooo long ago that readers, especially of Condé Nast titles, gave notice that they no longer wanted their magazines to smell like the fragrance counter at a Tijuana drugstore? The "solution" was to make the ads less smelly and to limit the number of them in each issue. But here we go again.

I may be the only person in America who does this, but when I open a magazine for the first time, I tear out all the subscription cards, the heavy stock ads, the glued-in supplements and anything else that keeps me from easily turning the pages and folding them back when I find a story that says "read me!" I do this even if it means tearing up the magazine because the "special unit" is so tightly bound into the book. I suspect I am not alone. So for many of us, multi-page spreads, three-dimensional pop-ups, scented ads and ads with an audio component are in the trash before they are even examined to see if one of the kids might enjoy them.

Consumers have spoken loudly about how much they hate ads that interrupt their online navigation. The newer browsers come with pop-up blockers already built in. In less than a minute, you can download the ability to disable nearly every other kind of rich media ad that floats over copy or in any way interrupts the normal consumption of content. So what makes magazine publishers think that consumers don't react the same way to ad units that interrupt the navigation of their publications?

I appreciate the need to "break through the clutter" (although magazines seem comfortably uncluttered these days), but sometimes instead of grabbing attention, you are just pissing off the audience you sold at a premium rate CMP to the advertiser who was dumb enough to buy into "the big idea."

Instead of trusting a magazine-company-funded study that says readers like to be distracted and annoyed, trust your own instincts and ask how you'd feel if this piece of crap showed up in the middle of your next Michael Lewis story.