I once read that a successful PR department is one that has managed to make the press an extension of its own. As bad as this idea may sound for an independent-minded consumer, I couldn’t help thinking that it now works the other way around. With the Internet obliterating buff books’ editorial relevance, many magazines have shifted their sales focus from their readers, the traditional customers, to the PR departments of the companies whose ad bucks support their survival. In this respect Greek car magazines are hugely successful.
In the last 15 years, Greece went from one car title to almost ten; including franchises of foreign titles (Car, Car and Driver, Auto Motor und Sport, Autocar, Autobild and Top Gear.). Arguably, most of these new car magazines were created by publishing companies for the sole purpose of soaking-up new product advertising. From ’91 to ’02, car sales in Greece tripled. As did the car importers’ ad budgets. This car ad-fuelled hothouse was short-lived. As the Internet ascended, circulation numbers fell, from tens of thousands of copies monthly, to just a few thousand. Selling ads soon became more important than selling magazines; the business plan had no room to accommodate reader demands. The basic concept of a car magazine “providing information while entertaining” went out the window faster than Protestants in Prague.
In the past five years, the Greek new car market has achieved European-levels of saturation. Importers’ ad budgets hit the ceiling and bounced back, decreasing year on year. With less pie left to slice, with pistonheads migrating to electronic info sources in droves, car magazines quickly figured out the fastest (if not only) way to keep the ad bucks flowing: inflate reader circulation numbers. In Greece, there’s no official circulation watchdog. So the car magazines were free to claim an absurdly large, loyal following. [NB: Τhe only limit was/is taxation; magazines pay tax based on how many copies they “sell.”] And so they did.
Depending on a business plan based on greed, editorial prostitution and fraud has turned the vast majority of Greek car magazines into nothing more than a monthly new car catalog. Looking at it from the readers’ perspective, the buff books are filled with pages of glossy shots of cars that look little different from the ads subsidizing their dissemination. There is literally no significant demarcation between the magazine’s copy and a carmaker’s sales brochure or press kit. Editorial quality is completely beside the point.
Content has hit rock bottom so hard that franchised titles are having trouble holding on to their brand identity. Browsing a magazine with its title covered provides no clue as to which publisher’s product your perusing. The word “production” nowadays describes operations starting with the layout and ending with printing.
No wonder there are no big names in Greek automotive journalism. Greek (ex) rally drivers (as in Luxembourgian policemen) with no talent– just “fame”– provide little more than bylines. Clearly, they can’t (or won’t) tell an editorial from an advertorial, a test from a ride. Corporate and editorial is so interconnected that a parade of editorial directors or editors-in-chief are meeting one car exec after the other, seeking to establish a “spirit of cooperation.” During one such a meeting, I heard the words “you give us the car and we will make it a god.” This was a British franchise of a well-known magazine title.
When Greek car magazines were specialized, focused, technical, knowledgeable and decent, imitation was impossible. As soon as they sold their souls and became generic, vague, tedious, clueless and blunt, they sowed the seeds of their own destruction. The laws of evolution tell us that saturation in a segment opens the door to fragmentation. In other words, familiarity breeds contempt.
Bigger publishers, with more publications (including first-rate newspapers) now offer better advertisement deals for car importers. Auto-related editorial is showing up as special sections in media with hundreds of thousands of daily readers, of all sexes, ages, and classes. They offer the same level of “journalism” at a lower price for advertisers, with a huge and more honestly calculated number of readers. At least ten such publications have appeared in the last three years, bulldozing car magazines.
And yet the buff books still can’t wake-up and smell the coffee. They’re still looking for more ads, not more readers. They continue to view the Internet as a sidekick to the print issues or an extra source of advertising space, rather than an opportunity to sharpen their coverage.
Up to this point, no Greek car magazine has gone out of business. But it’s only a matter of time before they start landing on their backs. Like Detroit’s long decline, the Greek car magazines’ slide into obscurity is a sad but inevitable result of their failure to stay true to their customers’ needs with integrity, passion and long-term wisdom. I await their reinvention.
The same is almost certainly true in the US; the magazines exist purely as a medium for advertisements. That’s why we get high high school kids going door to door selling C&D subscriptions for $5 (“I only need ten more people to sign up and I might get a free trip to DisneyLand”) because the circulation count is more important than the sales income. There’s only a cover charge so that newsagents will stock and sell them.
Car and Driver is one of the biggest franchisers of its title. There are “Car and Drivers” all over the world, including in Greece, and they have absolutely nothing to do with the magazine published in Ann Arbor. All that Hachette does is sell permission to use the logo at the top of the cover. As far as I know, they don’t even use any articles from the U.S. magazine.
It’s all Greek to me.
I’m sure all of your Greek readers will care.
Does anyone make any money in the publishing business these days?
I used to buy several books and magazines a month…in the pre-Internet days. Now I buy a one or two a year.
I am not sure why TTAC constantly tells its competition what they are doing wrong. Why not take the high road (and the more effective road) and let them screw themselves more fully and faster?
Reading a paper car mag as oppossed to going on the net is like watching TV as oppossed to playing a very good video game. For me “Active” will always win out over “Passive”.
I used to enjoy reading the “letters to the editor” section in all of the magazines but today that just does not do it anymore because at TTAC any many other sites I am actually part of the discussion. Even better I can get nice little personal Email warnings from Robert if the “line” is crossed.
So, yes it is a given that the internet is a much better medium to get our “car news” fix or whatever you want to call it.
But, those damn magazines do come in handy during long flight delays. I do try to never read them outside of these situations so they can at least remotely entertaining. One look up at the flight board and I am at the newsstand picking up a copy of C&D, R&T, Automobile, Autoweek, and a European one or two.
Now I must admit that the amount of time I do spend on sites like TTAC has seriously diminished and inforamtion value that the paper publications used to have. Everything is already old news by the time I can read in in paper form. Car mags today exist solely for the “extra” content, such as better pictures and longer articles.
# Kevin :
March 4th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I’m sure all of your Greek readers will care.
I care. It’s always interesting to hear about what’s going on in other places. Many times something happening in a far off place eventually has a direct impact on us.
Sometimes it’s amazing the similarities widely disparage areas and cultures have with us.
Is there a Greek equivalent to GRM?
I’m sure all of your Greek readers will care.
It’s funny, because a lot of this is a parable for what is happening to American rags. It’s possible this was a veiled editorial about them, far be it from me to assert what the writer’s motives are.
And when it comes to American rags, I think no one can credibly argue that they are experiencing anything other than a precipitous decline in readability, content, quality and in the case of C&D, aesthetic appeal (yes, I still think the new design farking sucks).
The truth is the rags have not taken the Internet as an opportunity to branch out into things that are more suited to print than news and quick hits. The Internet is unbeatable for latest news, so why is it C&D or any other mag will feature a fat section of re-printed press releases and gloss shots with weeks-old information, every single issue? Because it’s a lot easier to create than actual content.
The new car rag should focus on deeper exposés, well-researched pieces and things you can sit down and read over an afternoon or on the crapper. In the same way radio became more serious and more substantial (in reference to content) after the advent of television, car mags should theoretically have shifted in the same manner. They didn’t.
Still room for paper: It doesn’t feel right taking a laptop into the restroom.
I appreciate the international perspective. It’s a shame that not everyone does.
I think you find it was the catholic king who jumped out the window in Prague during the reformation, saved from death only by angels (the catholic version)or a dung pile (the protestant).
incidentally the NZ version of C&D was exactly the same as the US even down to the adverts.
I think the author of the post was referring to the famous “Defenestration of Prague” in the 14th–I think–century. Without looking it up, I’m guessing they were Hutterites, but they were thrown out the second-story windows of the Prague Town Hall, onto a crowd below that was holding lances butted against the ground. Not a pretty sight, and nobody “jumped.”
“I am not sure why TTAC constantly tells its competition what they are doing wrong. “
It’s called passion for the industry. In my eyes, that’s a sign of quality. It means that the contributors to TTAC are genuinly concerned about what is happening in the industry as a whole, an not only about fighting in their own backyard. It is like mourning an old friend who has turned alcoholic and sold out wife, kids, home, the lot. The fact that he burned every bridge on his way down doesn’t mean that he hasn’t done well before, or been a less good friend in the past. It is a time of mourning absent friends. A sell-out is a sell-out, no matter what the front page looks like.
I think no-one would be more pleased than all the people who gather on this site, if the domestics started to make cars instead of crap, and if the motoring press acted like men instead of mice.
Rix :
March 4th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Still room for paper: It doesn’t feel right taking a laptop into the restroom.
Isn’t this why the office bought me a laser printer?
As others have noted, this isn’t just happening in Greece. The same forces and players are in play everywhere. The U.S. magazines seem to be putting most of their energy into figuring out new ways to prostitute the brand. To their credit, they’re also trying to build their online versions.
As for why TTAC would comment on the print “competition,” in my case it would be because I grew up reading these magazines. I feel a connection with them. And when I look at the current C&D and the only thing that makes it C&D is the title, it hurts. In every other way, the current magazine is unrecognizable.
It’s kind of like losing a good friend to drugs and craptastic plastic surgery.
Excellent editorial! Welcome to the club, Alex.
I agree with all those who say it doesn’t matter where the news comes from, as long as it is applicable to our own experience. And Alex’s certainly is.
I feel shame when I think of CAR in Greece. I wonder what Gavin Greene would say?
Alex, is Autobild in circulation in a local version in Greece and if so, is it also uncorrupted? Over here, it is pretty unbribable — ironically enough, because it belongs to a giant yellow-press corporation that has plenty of dirt (some would say blood) on its hands itself.
Autobild launched in the Greek market in October as the weekly sibling to the oldest car magazine, a local title named 4Wheels (no relevence to the italina Quattroruote). It’s mainly a car-shoppers guide, the kind that seems to be most succesfull recently as it is directly linked to purchase decisions, which translates to larger influnce in the car market and hence attracts more attention from the importers.
Given the “nobody actually reads anything” moto that weekly magazines go by, it’s extremely superficial and shallow. It’s new (i.e. “hot”) and could easy bring in some numbers. Too bad you can’t trust what the publisher actually claims, so who knows.
Let me paint the Swedish picture. Teknikens Värld and Auto Motor & Sport (swedish edition with mostly swedish material) are the traditional big car magazines. I think they’ve done OK, both beeing early into WWW and for example driving ad revenue on their site with free car reviews from the papers etc.. They usually publish all content from the magazine on WWW but with some days delay to drive up magazine sales.
Then there are the more specialized magazines for 4WD, old american cars, modifications and spoilers, trucks, etc..
But the real new star is the reborn automobil magazine. In recent years they’ve created a very readable mix of product news, nostalgia, product reviews and “car stories” – fictional or real. One of the best recent stories is about when a man decides to buy a BMW 535M in the 1980s. Or the one on a early Porsche Turbo bought and driven on “The Ring” by a photographer who knew to Ronnie Pettersson.
The car reviewing is highly scientific,
example:
http://www.automobil.se/zino.aspx?articleID=10897
done by a vehicle dynamics Ph.D.-student. One thing that he discovers is that Ferrari probably has overstated the top speed, Vmax, of the FERRARI F430. Ferrari have calculated it (not driven it) which is “industry standard”, and probably made some mistakes doing that.
Letters to and from Ferrari (some in english because italian != swedish, jump down some pages and you’ll find it) and calculations here:
http://www.automobil.se/document/Automobil_FerrariF430.pdf
The text is very interesting. Did you know that tire radius expansion at high speed, is almost totally neutralized by tire slip and downforce?
Background:
http://www.automobil.se/zino.aspx?articleID=11320
You can read some of the articles at the magazines website here:
http://www.automobil.se
The magazine sells more and more, and now you can find them in almost any store selling magazines. This proves that you still can sell magazines if you deliver a good enough product.