The advantages and disadvantages of magazine advertising
(Originally published in Sept 2016, updated Aug 2026)
Considering magazine advertising to promote your business? Here's my guide to the pros and cons.
Advantages:
1. More targeted. Specific magazine titles appeal to specific audiences far more precisely than a newspaper advert would.
2. Long life. Magazines tend to stick around longer than newspapers, in waiting rooms, on magazine racks, and with collectors who keep issues for months or years.
3. Pass-on readership. People often pass magazines on to friends and family, which extends your advert's reach well beyond the original buyer.
4. Status. Some titles are genuinely well respected in their field, and an advert in one of these can lend your product or service some of that same prestige by association.
Disadvantages:
1. Deadlines months in advance. Magazines often need artwork submitted weeks or months ahead of publication, so your marketing planning has to be well organised in advance. It also makes testing different adverts a slow process.
2. Cost of testing. Colour artwork can be expensive to produce, which makes small-scale testing uneconomical for a lot of businesses.
3. Limited regional targeting. National magazines are just that, national, so testing an advert in one region alone often isn't possible.
4. The graveyard. Without paying for premium positioning, your ad runs the risk of ending up buried among dozens of others near the back of the magazine.
Did you know a right-hand page advert usually costs more than a left-hand one? The same goes for outside edges compared with the centre of the magazine. It comes down to how readers' eyes naturally scan a page.
Worth saying too: print circulation across most UK magazines has been falling for years, and that trend hasn't reversed. But the picture isn't simply “print is dying”. The readers who do buy and keep a physical magazine tend to be genuinely engaged with it, and trust in printed adverts has held up better than a lot of people expect compared with digital. Many titles now also offer digital editions alongside print, and QR codes have made it much easier to track whether a print advert actually leads to a visit, a call or a sale, something that used to be one of print's biggest weaknesses.
None of that changes the fundamentals above. It just means the decision now often isn't “print or digital” but where print fits alongside everything else you're already doing.
If you're wondering whether magazine advertising is right for your business, get in touch and I'll talk it through with you.
Jo Evans is founder of Emerald Frog Marketing, based in Ely. She provides outsourced marketing support, copywriting and consultancy to businesses across Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk.
