• Advertising Age, Thursday, May 21, 2009 9:30 AM

Only 51% of marketers rated magazines as "highly effective" for building brand equity, per the Association of National Advertisers. That's down sharply from 67% in February 2007. The April ANA survey found that TV, radio, newspapers and outdoor all slipped in marketers' eyes, along with magazines, but brand building is supposed to be magazines' strong suit.

How do magazine publishers respond? Basically they say you can't look at magazines alone anymore -- it's all about the media mix. Sally Preston, group publisher at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, maintains that the fascination with everything new, along with digital media's emphasis on metrics such as clicks, is overshadowing magazines' influence on readers. Sabine Feldmann, publisher of Shape, says the results reflect the diminishing power of any individual channel. Magazines that are cornerstones of brands that also use digital and social media are better at brand-building than ever, she says.

Howard Mittman, Wired publisher, sums it up. "Since most of our programs are integrated, we evaluate our effectiveness across a variety of mediums we offer our clients. Looking at the mediums individually and assuming that all brands have the same needs seems to undermine the potential usefulness of the data."

Read the whole story at Advertising Age »