Business 2.0 Targets Younger Readers, With Focus on Growth Opportunities, Business Strategies

Business 2.0 publisher Lisa Bentley mentions the Big Three--Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune--several times during the course of a conversation. She compares and contrasts her title with them editorially, notes how she'd like to poach some of their advertisers, and takes pains to distinguish her readers from theirs. The problem? One of those three titles, Fortune, is a Time Inc. sibling.

Asked if the situation sometimes proves uncomfortable, Bentley pauses before answering. "I'm a competitive gal and this is a competitive field," she says plainly. "They're getting business from Acura and Merrill Lynch and Accenture that we'd love to have part of. But there's always going to be a lot of business that's appropriate for them and not for us, and vice versa."

The downplayed sibling rivalry can't obscure the fact that, for a younger generation of business-minded folk, Business 2.0 has become every bit the must-read that the Big Three are. Its readers share a handful of traits with those of Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune--they're primarily male, affluent, and well-educated--but 2.0 boasts a younger average age (slightly over 40) and, according to Bentley, a different outlook.

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"I like to call them 'the people who are the leaders in the trenches,'" she says. "They have an unjaded, risk-taking attitude." Professionally, those readers tend to be mid- to senior-level execs and IT managers, as opposed to the C-level crew usually seen in airport lounges perusing one of the Big Three. While there would seem to be considerable room for overlap in readership, Bentley notes that only 13 percent of 2.0's audience also reads Fortune.

Regardless of the prevalence with which Bentley references the three stalwart business mags, it's somewhat of an accomplishment in itself that Business 2.0 is still around to make such comparisons. After all, most of its fellow chroniclers of the Internet boom--Industry Standard, Red Herring, E-Company--have gone the way of the manatee. "When Time Inc. acquired Business 2.0, they knew it wasn't just a short-term ad play. They knew the magazine was in it for the long haul," Bentley notes. "I don't think [the other new-economy titles] did a good job at marketing their differentiation."

This lesson learned, Bentley and her staff take every opportunity to note what 2.0 is doing differently and better than its biz-mag peers. Points of differentiation include a focus on business strategy and tactics, as well as frequent attempts to identify growth opportunities. Does that sound like a bit of a cliché? Perhaps, but Bentley articulates it elegantly. "We like to refer to the magazine as a playbook for business," she chirps.

According to the Publishers Information Bureau, Business 2.0 is up 16 percent in ad pages, and slightly over 21 percent in revenue during the first quarter of 2004. As opposed to conventional wisdom that page counts are the most telling gauge of a magazine's success, Bentley touts her title's revenue gains: "Anybody can sell pages, but you have to sell profitable pages. That's why revenue is more of an indication of growth."

With technology ad revenue up 35 percent for the year, categories she has targeted for expansion include liquor, automotive (especially imports), and business travel. Specific names she bandies about are Jaguar, BMW, Four Seasons, United Air Lines, and Grey Goose. "We're taking away market share from Fast Company every day," Bentley brags. "Wired--they do a good job of bringing in consumer accounts, so we're competing against them for the Tommy Hilfigers and Absoluts."

2.0's rate base currently sits at 550,000, which Bentley notes as a "very comfortable place." In the same breath, she adds: "But we're over-delivering, and Time Inc. isn't going to let us over-deliver for long." Goals for the year include "being in that number two or three position," which sounds like a call to arms against Forbes.

"We survived the craziness of 2000-2001," Bentley says. "After you've been through something like that, you feel you can handle almost anything that's thrown at you."

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