The Week will roll out new advertising and marketing initiatives this year under its newly appointed marketing director, Danielle Yuen.
Yuen joined The Week from Condé Nast’s Self. She said that she will use her big-brand experience to bring The Week more and higher-end advertisers and to grow readership.
“My hiring at The Week is absolutely part of a larger marketing strategy,” Yuen said. “The Week is a bare bones sort of organization, and it is invested in elevating the brand, not only from a magazine standpoint but from a global standpoint.”
Two big initiatives aimed at advertisers will debut this year: the Total Transparency package and Buy The Week by the Week campaign. Total Transparency Plus will use Vista’s reporting techno-logy to provide ad performance reports for 16 issues of the publication.
Buy The Week allows print advertisers to “purchase” the magazine’s Web site, gaining a monopoly on the site’s display ads, for the entire week that the same ad appears in print. Similar efforts have been successful for the print edition of the magazine.
“The Week is about trying to deliver things very simply to our advertisers,” explained Steven Kotok, general manager of The Week. “Owning all ad space on the site for that week cuts through the clutter of managing campaigns.”
Kotok added that The Week does not tweak editorial or do customization for ads to draw eyeballs. “Splash screens get in the reader’s way, and advertisers are not going to need it because they have every darn position on the site anyhow,” he said.
With global expansion underway, The Week is offering ad packages that cover its Web site, its US and UKprint editions and an Australian edition planned for later this year.
Kotok said of worldwide readership, “We were surprised at how similar [readers in different countries] wound up being. We didn’t target any onedemographic, but it does wind up an educated audience, and frequently educated people are also affluent.”
Luxury advertisers are using the outlet. Jeweler adiamondisforever.com is the current “owner” of The Week‘s site. Other advertisers include American Express, Barclays, Hilton and Pfizer.
The Week will also explore ways to grow newsstand sales. As of July 2007, the magazine reported total paid verified circulation of 494,683, most of which is paid subscription.
