Now, I guess, we know the price

It's so brazen, so upfront that I'm not sure what to make of Creative Review, a magazine serving the design side of the British advertising industry, selling the guest editorship of its 10th anniversary February edition to an advertising agency.

According to a story in the UK Press Gazette, there is nothing stealthy about it; the ultra-trendy agency Mother put a big, yellow sticker on the front, saying it had paid £15,000 for the privilege. The theme of the issue was “I Sold My Soul and I Love It” and debates what it means to work in visual communications and the ethical choices professionals such as advertisers and graphic designers have to make on a daily basis.

CR editor Patrick Burgoyne insisted that the magazine retained final editorial control, after a series of meetings between the two companies over the content of the magazine.

Mother initially paid for the issue — which appears as a price sticker on the cover — but Burgoyne said the final cost was “a lot more, to fund the editorial content....This issue had three times the production spend but didn’t cost the readers anymore. All the money Mother spent is subsiding the reader so they get more for their money in that issue.”

As part of its experiment, Mother auctioned off a page of advertising in the magazine on E-bay. The CR editor said he could foresee a time when a magazine will put all its ads up for auction.

Burgoyne said: “All magazines are looking at alternative ways of funding their issues. We are a professional magazine and we have seen a lot of our advertisers putting their money into the internet and away from the printed page — they didn’t want to do display adverts. So magazines are looking at different ways around it, to fund the editorial in the magazine. It’s not something we can do regularly, but it’s an interesting way of looking at funding the editorial side of the magazine.”

Burgoyne did not think the one-off would affect future editorial on the agency.

But he added: “We will have to see if people think that we are completely compromising editorial.”