NEW YORK — The world of virtual marketing has spawned a new pair of unlikely bedfellows: Cosmopolitan magazine and seven-month-old online fashion destination Glam.com have struck an advertising partnership.
With the Internet drawing just 3 percent of media spending in the U.S., or $7.9 billion in 2005, and the prospect of building an editorial, shopping, and networking Web site a daunting one for Cosmo, venture-capital-backed Glam.com in August will begin featuring as many as 18 of Cosmopolitan’s print magazine advertisers, most of which are anticipated to emanate from the fashion, luxury and beauty sectors.
“It would take Cosmopolitan a long time to build a property like Glam.com,” Donna Kalajian Lagani, the magazine’s senior vice president and publisher, said when asked why it would share ads with a site that is otherwise a competitor with the Hearst title.
The exclusive arrangement, to be announced today, will run in two six-month periods, from August through January, and February through July, and will feature up to 18 Cosmo advertisers in each time frame. The products will be highlighted at Glam for purchase and sampling and will be marketed interactively via videos, podcasts, and user polls, for example, on brand pages. Lagani estimated the value of each Cosmo advertiser’s exposure on Glam.com at a minimum of $50,000.
In addition to fashion editorial content, Glam’s online destination features shopping and social networking activity such as blogging, podcasts, interactive games and polling, and was attracting one million unique users as of March, according to Samir Arora, founder and chairman of Glam Media, who cited data from ratings agency Hitwise, as well as from Glam.com’s own ad-tracking Zedo software.
Cosmopolitan’s content-driven Web site, has also been getting about one million different visitors a month, Lagani said, while circulation of the print magazine is 2.9 million, with two million of it coming on the newsstands. Ad pages for Cosmo’s January through May print editions are down about 1 percent, to 674.3 pages from 680.4 pages in the corresponding period a year earlier, based on data from Media Industry Newsletter. Though slight, the decline is twice that of monthly magazines overall, where ad pages fell 0.5 percent for the January through May issues, said Steve Cohn, editor-in-chief of MIN.
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Fledgling Glam.com — funded with an initial investment of $11 million from a handful of venture capital firms, including Accel Partners — now has 10 advertisers, up from five when it launched last September. Among them are Bloomingdale’s, Target, Mango and ABC TV. To date, Glam has previewed products from Target’s Isaac Mizrahi and Luella Bartley collections, and marketed “The Bachelor,” ABC’s romantic reality series, via interactive quizzes and blogs.