Print and Online Advertising Break Records

by Peter Eddington

The fiscal year that ended June 30 was a record-breaking year with more than 27 million print advertising pieces distributed throughout the United States. This was more than a 400 percent increase over last year.

Ten million of these pieces were seen in a nationwide Reader's Digest advertisement, and more than 2 million each in American Baby and Parents magazines. The remaining 13 million pieces were distributed through card packs, supermarket brochure stands, UCG member distribution and co-op mailers—similar to previous years.

The total number of responses added through June 2007 from these efforts is 115,172, with residual responses still coming in each day. Our overall cost per response for the fiscal year stands at $5.70, and it is going down more each day.

Reader's Digest Ad Exceeds All Previous Efforts

As of June 30 we had 31,082 responses to our April Reader's Digest advertisement, and another 1,373 responses were received in July. We initially projected we would add 30,000 subscribers from this ad.

So far, this Reader's Digest ad has received a 0.32 percent response. Our previous Reader's Digest ad in 2000 brought in a 0.25 percent response. Our goal was to meet or exceed that percentage, which we have done. Since we are still receiving cards from the ad run in 2000, I would imagine that over the next few years we will exceed 0.4 percent for this year's ad, which would be very good.

Reader's Digest subscribers are the most likely group of any of our subscribers to read the magazine and renew their subscription every two years. It's among our best-spent advertising money.

Responses to the April American Baby advertisement were projected to be 7,600. As of the end of July we had received 11,016, which exceeds our initial projection nicely. However, the May Parents magazine ad is underperforming from what we had hoped. We had 5,047 responses as of the end of July, while we had projected 8,400.

Overall, these three additions to our print advertising were expected to bring in 46,000 responses, and we had 46,225 as of June 30. We're ahead very favorably—and thousands more will be added in subsequent months. It was a very good year for our print advertising proclamation efforts!

Online Advertising Best Year Yet

It was also a record-breaking year for our Internet advertising at Yahoo and Google, with more than 765 million impressions of our ads shown. From this we gleaned 118,611 responses, by far our best year yet. This online advertising allows subscribers to learn much more about our teachings, if they wish, before they request the literature than normal print advertising does. The cost per response for online ads is around $2.65.

Additional funds were approved mid-fiscal year for both print and Internet advertising. Thus, we began promoting World News and Prophecy, Vertical Thought and various booklets online as part of the plan to use the additional $531,500 added to the Media and Communications Services budget. This is beginning to show results, as the print run for World News and Prophecy exceeded 50,000 for the first time in August. UN