If you mail it, will they read it? Great Health Magazine from CVS

- by guest blogger Michael Buller

This is Michael’s second guest blog post. We received such a great response from the first one, we asked him to post again.  Thanks Michael. – Joe Pulizzi

CVS made news recently with the announcement of a new custom publication Great Health Magazine, which they aim to launch this spring. The publication, which will also have a “sister web site” and eventually an enewsletter, will be centered around health issues. On the surface, there’s no doubting the numbers that make a compelling case for the relevance:

• Women influence 80% of healthcare decisions in
  their households, wielding buying power of about $1.2 trillion.
• The initial mail list will be 500,000, picked from
  the 75 million people who have signed up for the CVS ExtraCare card. That list
  will double to 1,000,000 in 2009.
• The average reader will be a mid-50s college
  educated woman, who owns her own home and still works to support her family.

So there’s little doubt that the women who receive this publication are predisposed to care about the subject matter. And there’s
little doubt that with demographics like this, advertisers would love to talk to this target audience. But here’s the catch: there’s no truth to the saying, “if you mail it, they will read it.”

Reaching a desired demographic is one thing; getting them to engage in the publication is another.

Based on that reasoning, I’m skeptical. More than just about any other family-friendly topic, healthcare content is pervasive – online, in print, you name it. A Google search on women’s health returns 36,500,000 results. You don’t need SRDS to see how saturated the category is ‑ just visit any newsstand and look at the women’s magazine section; you’ll be inundated with cover lines selling health stories. Cutting through that clutter to get readers to not only pick up the publication, but actually spend time with it – that’s a tall order.

I hope CVS succeeds – a successful custom magazine by anyone helps all of us in the industry – but I’m worried that the content will be so generic and/or brand-centric that it will fail to capture anyone’s attention.

Even if it does, there’s another major hurdle to battle.  There’s nothing in the press release or news that indicates that CVS is funding the endeavor – but it does say that the company hopes to attract ad revenue from pharmaceutical and OTC advertisers. It’s likely that they’re counting on advertisers to flock to their alluring demographics. But what if cautious advertisers wait until the magazine proves that it is engaging readers – will CVS have the financial fortitude to invest in the publication during that time? Or will they impatiently demand a return on their investment from the start? Or worse, have they convinced a small custom publisher that the publisher should take all the risk in launching this venture, with the promise of big ad revenue returns down the line?

I hope not – that happens too often where marketers want both a content marketing program that engages
their customers, and the luxury of someone else paying for that program.

Basic Media Group is the company that’s signed on for the CVS magazine. On March 18, their one-page website said: “Updated website coming soon.”  Hmm.

Michael Buller is Vice President/General Manager of Custom Publishing for The Pohly Company, a diversified marketing and publishing services company specializing in engagement marketing and customer communications.

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