By David Coker, CEO and Co-founder, Spacely Media
On a Monday in March 2015, I got an email I still remember. Grey Goose needed to pull its back cover from Fast Company’s Most Creative People issue. The brand didn’t have the creative at the time and wouldn't have it in time. We were five days from close.
I asked if they could run something they’d used before. The answer was no. I asked about an extension. The assets were still a couple of weeks away. So, I called my boss, whose response was a more colorful version of, "Are you kidding me?"
Then, the whole team went to work. Eight of us, in New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, called every client who had ever run a premium position. “Can you take the back cover?” “Do you have artwork?”
By Monday night, we were offering a discount, and it grew every day. By Wednesday, a page worth about $40,000 was half off. By Friday, we were offering it free to anyone with artwork ready. Free.
Nobody could turn it around. Budgets couldn’t move that fast, and neither could creative. In the end, we moved an advertiser up from page 30 into the back cover. That filled the space. It didn’t fill the revenue.
What I remember most about that Friday is a very practical thought. Am I really going to spend my time trying to give away a page for free? And honestly, no.
That’s when it clicked. The page wasn’t unwanted. Somewhere there was a brand that would have paid full rate for it—one that had bought the position before or was planning to buy it next quarter. I just had no way to tell them it existed.
Eight reps making 30 or 40 calls each were doing, by hand, what should have taken one push of a button. Digital had levers for this. Print had none. And it wasn’t rare. A page falls out several times a year for every rep. Budget shifts; creative runs late; a campaign slides a week.
For years, I blamed print’s struggles on readers. People moved to laptops and phones, and the money followed. That’s real, and I’m not going to wave it away.
But the more publishers and buyers I talked to, the less it looked like the whole story. I’d ask buyers how they built a print plan, research the titles, email five magazines, ask each to fill out a spreadsheet with positions and rates, then wait. I’d ask if there was a tool where you could just click, compare, and buy, the way you book a flight or a room. Every time, the answer was no.
Should be, though.
Imagine being the one airline that isn’t on Priceline. The one hotel that isn’t on Expedia, bookable only through a travel agent or an 800 number. That’s what buying premium print has been like.
Not long ago, a publisher told me he was going to cut his circulation, which is over a million, in half. I asked why. “The print revenue wasn’t there,” he said. But the readers were. He was still reaching more than a million people who wanted the magazine. The audience hadn’t left. The pages had just become harder to buy and even harder to sell.
Here's what I believe now. For 20 years, ease has been deciding where advertising money goes. Digital became easy to discover, compare, activate, and measure. Other valuable media stayed dependent on phone calls, spreadsheets, and whoever on the team still remembered how it was done.
It isn't only print. A brand team once told me they had three months to pull off a live event activation with a star athlete. A week out, they still hadn't secured the venue space. Not the production. Not the printing. Just the space. With media like that, you have to really, really want it to go through the trouble of buying it.
Most people, reasonably, don’t. They move their time and budget toward whatever has fewer steps. Nobody decided that great offline media deserved less money. Friction decided it for them.
The quality of a media opportunity should determine whether it makes the plan, not how hard it is to buy. Friction should not decide where billions of advertising dollars go.
That’s the part of 2015 that matters most now. As AI tools start to take part in media planning, they can work only with media they can read, compare, and act on. Most premium offline media still isn’t built that way.
In 2015, there was no way to tell a person the page was available. Today, there’s still no way to tell a machine. That’s about to matter a lot more.
And that is why I started Spacely. The page was never unwanted. It was simply invisible.
