And so it came to pass that the ad industry’s weekly masturbation manual – sorry, the “iconic media and marketing magazine brand Campaign” – has waved the white flag and is now going to be a boring old monthly rag, just like the rest of ’em.
According to someone close to the situation, its svelte editor in chief – the self-styled trade mag version of Dame Anna Wintour – is taking it hard. Allegedly, her only goal in life was to ensure that Campaign remained weekly until it reached its 50th anniversary in September 2018. Close, luv, but no cigar.
So now she will have to run the gauntlet at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity love-in knowing full well that her mission has failed. In fact, she is said to be so upset, that she hasn’t eaten for a week…
Of course, I have been stuffing my face for England ever since I found out as it meant old McKelvey has finally won his bet with former IPA boss Hamish Pringle. OK it was only a fiver but you can get a lot of doughnuts for that you know.
Not that you would necessarily deduce that there was anything amiss by the cringeworthy news story that they pumped out, under the decidedly upbeat headline: “Haymarket evolves flagship Campaign brand to meet needs of new breed of creative marketers.”
Apparently, readers “now look to the magazine for intelligent longer-form, more analytical content, extended case studies and trend reports, which are better supported by a monthly format…this is an incredibly exciting time”. It has even promised that the new monthly Campaign “will have intelligence, class, flair and fun”. Good luck trying to find any of that in there.
Mind you, it does make you wonder what took them so long, as apparently its bulletins “now reach almost 400,000 people a day, while Campaignlive.co.uk has 988,000 monthly unique users”. With such an impressive readership, how come it has so few ads? Then again, according to figures on its own website, it has half that number of monthly unique users, and just 15,000 subscribers, 65% of whom get it for nothing. You could say the figures have had a “Twickenham Tweak”.
As one PR to the stars muttered to me: “Does this mean the advertising wank mag has finally run out of spunk?”
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