More interesting than those ad guarantees is Forbes getting into the reputation tracking business. This helps confirm my bias that publications should be getting into services and not just content:
Get past advertising. It’s a commodity — and who wants to buy a commodity? But a service — that’s a different story.
That’s how Bruce Rogers, chief brand officer for Forbes, says the magazine is thinking these days. Even though circulation has remained relatively stable, Forbes sees an opportunity in thinking beyond selling advertising and diving into broader service areas for clients. […]
In conversations with chief marketing officers at major financial institutions, like Bank of America, it became clear that many of these companies were dealing with a serious corporate image problem. Rogers said those conversations led to Forbes’ latest service: a reputation tracker, which gives a company an understanding of how its corporate image is perceived by both the general public and by Forbes readers. The idea is to help companies get a benchmark for their relative strength or weakness. And the tracker will specifically test how that reputation changes after an ad campaign run in Forbes — a way to bring some of the measurability of web advertising into the more staid (and more profitable) world of print advertising.
Nieman Journalism Lab: Forbes new tool tracks advertisers’ corporate reputation