Stuart Elliott of the NY Times has an excellent article about a new campaign from Conde Nast, the owner of Vogue, The New Yorker, and Gourmet magazines, among others.

Link: The New York Times > Business > Media & Advertising > Advertising: Conde Nast Makes the Case for Old-School Advertising. (free registration required, and article is only free to read for a few days)

The goal is to promote the ability of magazines to forge strong emotional bonds with readers, and by extension, of magazine ads to form similarly potent connections with consumers. This all comes as marketers are becoming more tempted to shift money they spend in old-school media like magazines and radio into online media, e-mail marketing and other nontraditional methods to reach increasingly fragmented demographic groups, particularly younger and urban consumers. Indeed, advertisers are reassessing media choices with an intensity and skepticism perhaps not seen since the 1950’s, when television started supplanting radio as the mass medium of choice.

Richard D. Beckman, the president of the Condé Nast Media Group makes a particularly perceptive remark:

…never before have media companies had to confront the fact that "media used to be something consumers sought refuge in, now it’s something they seek refuge from."