CI innovates with performance based advertising

Construct Ireland editor Jeff Colley

A ground breaking performance-based advertising system developed by green building and upgrading magazine Construct Ireland has been nominated for an innovation gong at the Irish Magazine Awards.

The bold offer means companies advertising green products and services in Construct Ireland don’t have to pay for adverts until they receive a pre-agreed number of reader enquiries.

“Advertising industry pioneer John Wanamaker famously once said ‘half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half,’” said Construct Ireland editor Jeff Colley. “As anyone selling advertising space knows, Wanamaker’s sentiments are shared by many businesses. Companies in the sustainable building sector, from SMEs up to well-known brands, don’t tend to have systems in place to establish how prospective clients heard about them. There’s a widely held misconception that print advertising doesn’t work. It’s not surprising really – companies get badgered into advertising in mediocre or shoddy publications by pushy sales people all the time. And of course advertising in a poor quality publication isn’t going to work.

“We were novice publishers when we set up Construct Ireland in 2003,” said Colley. “We started from first principles, and we came up with a very simple idea: take an interesting, growing subject like sustainable building, focus on strong journalism, professional presentation, and circulate the magazine as widely as possible to the right type of readers.”

Since first publishing in January 2003, Construct Ireland has used a reader enquiry system to separate it from other magazines and prove the efficacy of advertising in its pages, based on similar systems used in some of the UK’s leading trade magazines. Construct Ireland’s approach involves inviting readers to fill in enquiry forms under the range of products/services advertised in a given issue, and allocates the relevant enquiries to the appropriate advertisers. “So for instance, each solar company advertising in a particular issue gets any solar enquiries, and the reader gets the benefit of receiving information from several solar companies at once,” said Colley, who won the Green Leader award at the 2010 Green Awards.

By 2011 the system had become so reliable that Colley took the decision to make an unprecedented offer to clients: performance based advertising. “Depending on our confidence about the response level we reckon a given product or service will yield, we offer advertisers a deal where their obligation to pay for the advert only applies if we surpass an agreed number of enquiries. It’s been an overwhelming success, and is playing a key role in securing repeat advertising and boosting revenues above 2010 levels."

The online version of the enquiry form is available here. Construct Ireland has the highest circulation of any construction trade magazine in Irish history, and is independently audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) at an average of 7,419 per issue (1 July 2010 – 30 June 2011).