Inside.com Launches Ad Campaign as its Magazine Hits Newstands

Online media and entertainment publication Inside.com on Wednesday kicked off a new integrated advertising effort, promoting its ability to provide timely news and insights, and introducing the new print magazine that debuted this week.

The campaign follows the theme of the company’s first effort, which portrays clueless executives — presumably people who don’t read Inside.com. In one print ad, an exec says, “If we don’t get this company on the Web in three minutes we’re toast.” In reaction, another exec — whose thoughts are pictured in a comic strip-style bubble — thinks, “At least toast has a business model.” The tagline: “There’s the conventional wisdom and there’s just plain wisdom. How can you tell the difference? Get the Inside story.”

Inside.com hopes to reach entertainment and media professionals, as well as “civilians” who have an interest in how movies, television, newspapers, magazines, and Internet sites are produced. The campaign seeks both to win subscribers for Inside.com’s Web site, and to raise awareness of its newly-launched print magazine, Inside, which the company is producing in partnership with the Industry Standard.

The ads — which will be executed in print, billboard, and banners — will run in the entertainment and media capitals of New York and Los Angeles. The media buy includes print publications like the New York Times, Billboard, Adweek, Hollywood Reporter, and Entertainment Weekly. Banners will appear on Salon.com, SiliconAlleyDaily.com, HollywoodReporter.com, imdb.com, Entertainment Weekly’s EW.com, and TheStandard.com.

“It delivers on the brand promise that Inside is intellectual capital, the currency to succeed in a world of rapidly converging media,” notes
Scott Kraft, president of interactive marketing at the Sterling Group, the marketing consultancy that handled the campaign.

This campaign is Inside.com’s second advertising effort, following a big splash following its launch in May 2000. Spending was not disclosed. The effort launches at a time when Internet content plays are not doing particularly well, and just a few weeks after two key executives — Andrew Gelman, director of business development, and Richard Skeen, VP of sales and marketing — departed the company. On a more positive note, Inside.com recently scored distribution deals with MSNBC and Yahoo!.