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Whether it’s serving as EVP of Time Inc. (from June 2001 to January 2008) or as president of Sports Illustrated (1998-2002)—where under his leadership, the brand broadened its scope in print, TV and the Web—Michael Klingensmith’s achievements in magazine publishing have been nothing short of superlative. During his 31-year tenure at Time Inc., where he started as a financial MBA trainee in corporate finance straight out of the University of  Chicago, the Minneapolis native presided over some of the company’s most notable benchmark efforts.
An Entertaining Brainchild
Perhaps his most significant role at Time was as founding publisher and president of a once-obscure publication called Entertainment Weekly, which launched in February 1990. Klingensmith had no prior background in ad sales—his career up to that point had focused on finance and consumer marketing—although he did possess remarkable arithmetic skills that quickly brought him up to speed. “I could calculate complex ad discount percents in my head,” he jokes.
Thus would begin a critical phase in Klingensmith’s career, one in which the future of EW was uncertain. “The magazine almost folded after about six months, then 12 months and so forth for a few years,” he recalls. But thanks to hard work, creativity and “the bankroll of Time Inc.,” EW survived, becoming one of Klingensmith’s greatest success stories.
A Toast to Success
Of the many campaigns he’s overseen, the one he’s most proud of was for EW during its first year. The client was Absolut Vodka. “They were the bellwether account for EW, [which was then] an aspiring young pop culture magazine,” he recounts. “The unusual part, though, was that it was for their then-fledgling Absolut Peppar brand. We got the business exclusively by guaranteeing a minimum increase in case sales.”
Since 2008, Klingensmith has been serving as a managing director of AdMedia Partners, a boutique investment bank that provides M&A advice to digital and traditional media as well as marketing and information firms.
Don’t Just Sell Ads—Sell Editorial Content
Dipping his toes in unfamiliar waters: “The first ad we sold at EW was sold to Rubbermaid—not exactly one of the glamorous Hollywood advertisers we had in mind —and it was sold by Jim Hermann, who founded our Detroit sales office. He could sell almost anything to almost anyone.”
Lessons on surviving the recession: “Since I’m currently working in investment banking, which I guess is a different sort of sales, we've been hit pretty hard by the financial washout. But, interestingly, there is still strong interest in good companies, particularly ones that are benefited by, rather than eroded by, digital forces.”
What’s disturbing: “The trend by media companies to have their entire content creation enterprise supported by advertising alone. Excellent and valuable content does not want to be free to the consumer. Companies need to have the confidence in their products and their consumers to charge fair prices for it. It is dangerous for content, particularly journalistic content, to be exclusively supported by ad revenue. Plus, the numbers don't work.”
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