Mag brag landing publishers in hot soup

Kelvin recently showed me a segment in Marketing Magazine's Guess Who, Don't Sue section (March 2006 issue). It spoke about an 'unnamed' magazine that agreed to reimburse one of their luxury brand advertisers a large percentage of their advertising spending and slash their current rates after the advertiser found out that the magazine's actual print run was less than half of what was claimed in the media kit.

Then, reading the previous month's (February) issue this evening, I found a short write-up about how falsely inflated circulation claims could land publishers in jail. Directly below this write-up was a small section, Audit Watch, which reported that Singapore Tatler announced its intention of getting Media Circulation Services to audit the luxury magazine. I thought it a bit of a coincidence - the placement of these two short write-ups, and then the very next issue's mention of a luxury client getting money back for misrepresented circulation. But this is purely my own speculation and I claim no truth in it whatsoever. Heh.

The moral of my story is, I found this tale of false circulation claims rather familiar, and it reminded me of a magazine (which shall remain nameless...I love saying that) that I was very familiar with. An angry ex-employee, who had been told to leave because of conflicting ideas with management, had told me that she had a good mind to embarass them by telling advertisers that the actual print-run was less than a quarter of what they had been led to believe. And she could very well have done that, as she was on very good terms with most of the magazine's major advertisers.

Hah! She thought she would just be embarassing them! In view of what was printed in Marketing Magazine, they might have gotten into very big trouble indeed. Though, I noticed they've recently changed their claim for the size of their print-run, which is certainly a wise move. Still, looking at the advertising content of the two most recent issues, I do wonder a bit about whether they did get any flak...but that's me in pure speculation mode again.