Linda Ruth's Page

The message seems to be this: Everyone stay calm. The sky is not falling. And there will be no massive anti-trust style litigation.

I’m talking, of course, about the acquisition of the Comag Marketing Group by the Jim Pattison Group; and judging by the trade coverage of this event (not so much) everyone seems to be staying very calm indeed. Which is interesting, since JPG owns The News Group, the largest magazine wholesaler in North America. Pattison’s name is so closely associated…

I spoke to my friend Andrea York today about a new eulogy we have to write—a eulogy for a form of marketing that was brand new not so long ago.

It seems so recently that we all began to collect names on our sites. We started e-newsletters and sent them off, jam-packed with value, to our burgeoning lists. This was the beginning of permission-based marketing, where our audience would give us the OK to sell to them, as long as we provided enormous value along with our…

Every now and then, when our own newsstand landscape begins to look too homogenous and our cover formulas too tired we look to overseas to shake us up a little.

Or a lot—the polybag premium craze that swept our consumer publications a decade or two ago (but who’s counting) was sparked by one UK company.

Polybag premiums have, after many years, to some degree run their course here in the US, but any publisher with a serious commitment to a UK distribution is aware that it is…

What do you use when you are not using QR codes?

I’ve gotten a lot of mail asking me that question since a recent blog post wherein I mentioned that one of the downsides to using QR codes is that there are easier ways to reach the mobile customer. It isn’t internet marketing. It isn’t SEO. It isn’t QR. And it isn’t Siri (the topic of another recent blog post).

It’s text messaging.

That sounds crusty and ancient, doesn’t it, in this day of smartphones? But text messaging…

Here is one piece of magazine news that has gone a bit viral: the U.S. military has decided to stop its magazine program in its overseas commissaries. If you are interested in distribution and sales on the overseas military bases, you probably noticed it over the past couple of weeks popping up in various newsletters and updates.

The U.S. military overseas is actually one of the big sources of distribution for magazines with foreign sales. That makes sense of course—the audience is…