International Data Group's CXO Media Inc. subsidiary in September will debut a monthly magazine targeting marketing officers from director level upward.
Called CMO, the controlled-circulation publication's name is a play on the chief marketing officer title. It will publish two years after CXO launched CSO, a title for chief security officers using the same publishing template.
“What we're seeing is there's a void for a magazine written about their function,” said Gary Beach, group publisher of CXO, Framingham, MA. “Other marketing publications are analytical. Our focus is on people. People like reading about other people.”
CMO will not cover marketing mainly from a news angle like Advertising Age, Adweek, Brandweek or DM News. Nor will it resemble academic publications like The Journal of Marketing Practice and Theory, a quarterly, or the Chicago-based American Marketing Association's Journal of Marketing, which drops quarterly to 9,000 paying subscribers.
Instead, CMO will bridge the gap between theory and practice, more like the AMA's Marketing Management, which goes six times a year to 10,000-plus mid- to senior-level marketing executives.
Content will focus on best practices and issues like marketing governance, promotion, technology, research, advertising relations and budget/salary trends. Expect a strong focus on return on investment articles.
“What we don't want it to be is a technology marketing publication,” Beach said. “The problem we've sensed, almost for a year, is that CMOs have not en masse adopted the use of technology to quantify the success of what they've been doing. We've found a very tight parallel between the challenges CIOs had coming their way to the ones CMOs are facing.”
CMO's initial circulation is estimated at 25,000 qualified subscribers. CXO will pull names from the Cahners Decision-makers Database. It also will source names from IDG titles like Computer World, InfoWorld, Network World, CSO and CIO, the CXO flagship for chief information officers founded in 1987.
A telemarketing campaign to prospects begins in June. Mail and e-mail will follow.
Saddle-stitched, a typical CMO issue will have 64 pages and glossy covers. Trim size is 8 3/4-by-10 7/8 inches. The ad-to-edit ratio is planned as 50:50. A black-and-white full-page ad costs $7,900, and a four-color full-page ad is $10,800.
A site at www.cmoresource.com will launch ahead of the print edition in June. Events for CMOs are planned as well, in keeping with the IDG formula of niche publications tied to events.
Beach aims to have 60 percent advertising from the technology sector and the rest from providers of marketing services to CMOs.
CXO has no plans to introduce CMO on the newsstands. But non-qualifying subscribers can pay $65 for an annual subscription.
Aside from circulation analysis, a rationale exists for the ceiling of 25,000 copies a month. For one, CXO looked at another AMA title, the bimonthly Marketing News, which has a paid subscriber base of 38,000 copies to not just members but also students. It then examined the Bureau of Labor Statistics' database for marketing chiefs at the number of firms with 500-plus employees — roughly 35,000.
Still, CXO can expect hard labor for CMO. The publisher will have to steer clear of the temptation to become a technology marketing publication. And it will have to position itself finely to attract advertisers not already served by existing marketing publications.
“The chief marketing officer market is still being developed,” said Jack Hollfelder, group publisher for the AMA's titles. “The CMO universe is not that large — yet. And, by the way, there aren't 25,000 CMOs in the country.”
