Not everything can be blamed on the boom-to-bust economic fears of the last 9 months. There have been factors that have been changing in direct marketing for longer than that time period.

The demise of the mega-magazine subscription agencies (American Family), or their weakening, has played a major role in subscription levels, base rates and advertising rates for space in many publications.

The new 50% rule change in the circulation marketing practices that has been approved by the ABC Board (Audit Bureau of Circulation), and the similar changes in the BPAI, will affect the size of subscriptions and types of individuals that will be subscribing to many magazines in the near future.

From a circulation point of view, this is probably good news for many consumer magazines, as well as magazines that bridge the business and consumer market places.

For sure, we are going to be seeing more premiums, discounting of pricing and more trial offers.

The main challenge for any responsible circulation director will be "how to convert the short-term subs into long-term renewals" at a more traditional pricing structure.

However, when they go out to rent lists, or exchange a list in the future, these changes in the rules are going to offer new challenges that have not been met before. Response rates are going to change and not necessarily for the good.

A person who subscribes to a magazine offer in Winter 2002 will probably be responding to a substantially cheaper subscription rate and may be given an offer for a shorter time period as a trial.

According to the new rules, this person is an active, paid subscriber. A year ago this wouldn't have been the case. Good for space sales - probably bad for the list renters.

How we in the list industry start to redefine different types of sub-sets of subscribers will ultimately affect the success of the campaigns that we will be working on with our client base.

It may be that a recent expire who paid "full-boat" for a subscription only one year ago may, indeed, be a more qualified target for a magazine offer than the most recent hotline sold at a much lesser rate and for a trial period.

Under normal circumstances, or better put, under our current system, expires are worth less than actives. In certain upscale magazines, financial magazines or B-to-B paid magazines, this may not remain true. We are going to have to report and show whom the various subscribers are and what offer they responded to.

At least 15 years ago, the following happened. A certain magazine list had, time and time again, been on the short list of list rentals for one of my own magazine clients. Their subscription prices were similar (average unit of sale), the profiles on the rental list and on my client's file were constant, and therefore, after at least 10 rentals, ranging in size from 10,000 names to 150,000 names at a clip, we had a fairly good read on what our expectation level could be on this rental file (all other variables including seasonality were taken into consideration). Finally, the day came when we placed an order for over 200,000 names. It bombed.

Needless to say, my client wasn't happy, I was shocked, and both of us needed to analyze how this could have happened. The answer was that the new circulation director for the rental file had slashed the subscription price by over 60%, thereby widening the population and loosening the demographics and the profile of the new subscribers. In other words, the name of the list was the same, but the people subscribing to the magazine were different. We immediately tested recent expires and our response rates returned to almost normal.

Over the years, I have often thought of this story,
and I think it has relevance to what will become the norm in the magazine list business in the next
several months.

Until the new rate-base initiatives become the norm and we all have a good look at how the demographics change or remain the same, circulation directors and attentive list brokers would do well to seize the opportunities of recent expires, full-term subs and renewals. Renewals as a separate select might be an interesting rental.

A usual line that I insert, and many others insert, in magazine list brokerage orders is "omit agency sold". We may now have to place more omissions into our standard select criteria. Of course, the one constant for all of us in direct marketing is measurability. Therefore, what's required to take advantage of all of these new criteria is to test, test, test.