In Determining ROI on Advertising Spend, It’s the Eyeballs!

It’s that time of year again, budget planning season! Telemarketers and sales managers are asking every day for your advertising budget. But do you analyze the likely ROI (return on investment) before you buy?
Sometimes what might seem to be the cheapest advertising offer is actually the more expensive offer! It’s the eyeballs you’re paying for! How many pairs of readers’ eyes see your ad? And do those eyes belong to a reader who is a potential buyer of your product or service?
I hope you’ll take time to really study the market and consider Oil&Gas Eurasia. We have the highest circulation of any Russian oil and gas publication and we prove it with a BPA circulation audit – cross platform on print and on web.
Economic times are going from bad to worse as I write this November editor’s letter. In times of recession, companies in mature economies advertise more aggressively to insure that when the recession is ends, their customers still remember them. One client told me recently, “in recession there are fewer projects and so competition is greater. We need to keep our brand visible in the marketplace.”
So how do you stay visible, and conserve cash in hard times?
First, let’s make sure you know who your customers are. You want to enter the Russian market or maintain your presence there, right? So your customer is Russian, right? If your customer is not Russian, stop reading this magazine now. Oil&Gas Eurasia is for Russians inside Russia and for persons outside of Russia who want to reach Russians with information about their products and services.
So if we’re clear that it’s Russian readers you want, let’s talk about how you do it.
First: Read the fine print! Look at the magazine’s cover and the masthead (the page listing personnel, location of the printing plant, and contact details for the publisher.) Is a calendar month printed on the cover? Is the magazine issued monthly, six times a year, quarterly, semi-annually? Is there any statement of frequency or any evidence that the publication has an office, editorial team and production facility in Russia? If it doesn’t beware!
When you advertise in the West, where your brand is already known, you accept the fact that frequency builds awareness. Frequency is even more important when you enter a new market where your brand isn’t known and the benefit of your product is not well understood.
If you buy a cheap quarterly publication to heighten your presence at a big show, you’ve missed most decision makers. And if the publication has no cover date at all, it goes to print only when the publisher has sold enough advertising to make a profit. How often? Who can tell?
Second: Watch your language! Entering a market where English is not the common business language can be confusing. Oil&Gas Eurasia was Russia’s first bilingual oil and gas magazine. As a native English speaker I understood that our clients needed the comfort of being able to read what they were buying. But to get those advertising clients the right audience, it is even more important that the Russian language text be a pleasant read for a native speaker – and something Russians want to read.
If you speak a second language you know there is a difference between word for word translation and editing to suit cultural language norms. Have you ever laughed at translated English that in cultural context sounded like an off-color joke? Remember those Internet jokes during the Beijing Olympics about English signage translated from Chinese? This happens in Russian too! So it’s important that your advertising vehicle be in Russia, staffed by Russians and with a Russian website that is also drawing an audience. 
Third: Ask yourself, “Who reads this and who is your customer?” If you want to sell in Russia, you want to reach Russian clients. So, you want your ad read by Russians who live in Russia. Magazines distributed to marketing managers in Europe and the United States reach only your competitors – other marketing managers in Europe and the United States.
Recently, a potential advertiser in the United States told me that he thought that Oil&Gas Eurasia was the best publication in Russian oil and gas and that the second best was a publication that markets its brand heavily in the U.S. but is not seen in Russia – except at the very largest conferences. I thanked him for thinking well of Oil&Gas Eurasia but I told him that if he wanted to know what his potential clients read, he ought to ask Russian oil and gas professionals.
Clients of mine that have asked, say that the most often named publications are these: Oil&Gas Eurasia, Nefte Kapital (Oil&Capital), and Oil&Gas Vertical. Oil&Gas Eurasia, say our Russian readers, has a western approach that differentiates it from its two closest Russian competitors. Nefte Kapital was post Soviet Russia’s first advertising driven glossy oil and gas magazine and it is highly regarded across the Russian industry. Vertical is respected widely for the quality of its analytic material.
I’ll call these “The Big Three.” But names that also turn up in informal marketing studies are
Neftenoyhozaystvo (Oil Industry), Russia’s oldest oil scientific magazine. Started in the 1920s, the publication was rescued post-Peretroika by several Russian oil companies. It is close to the research institutes whose scientific papers are printed there. There are corporate publications such as Lukoil’s Nefte Rossiya and Gazprom’s Gazovaya Promishlynost; and there are general business magazines such as Expert and RBK that are widely read by oil professionals – Russia’s largest business segment.
As a Western publication produced in Russia, Oil&Gas Eurasia was the first Russian-based publication to audit its circulation. OGE is still BPA’s only Russian member. Only OGE gives you independent third party proof of circulation! As a publisher, I have been involved in attempting to educate my colleagues at other Russian media as to the benefits of doing circulation audits. With audited figures in hand, Russia’s other quality oil and gas publications would not be dismissed because they don’t employ an army of English speaking telemarketers in the west.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, think like a business person. If you book a page for $2,000 you can bet the other advertisers did as well. Count the ads, do the math, multiply by four if it’s a quarterly; or by six if its every other month and ask yourself if that would be enough money to fund distribution in a frontier market like Russia. If you’ve looked into doing business in Russia you know how expensive it is to do business. If it’s expensive and confusing in your industry, why would it not be expensive and confusing in the publishing business as well? So is it realistic at such revenue levels that promises made are being kept? If your common sense suggests this is not the case, then I’d suggest that you lay that cash on the ground and set fire to it.
Or contact Oil&Gas Eurasia. My email is p.szymczak@eurasiapress.com

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