Striking a balance: Glow, Shoppers Drug Mart, and the branding benefits and ad/edit challenges of a custom magazine

This project report describes how Shoppers Drug Mart uses its custom publication, Glow magazine, as a marketing tool to create and maintain relationships with its customers, and to promote the company’s brand. It goes on to consider the constant process of balancing advertisers’ demands with editorial integrity – a question for all magazine publishers, with special challenges for custom magazines. A close study of several issues of Glow shows the particular application of the ad/edit question to this magazine. The report then explores the steps that Glow editors have taken to draw a clear line between advertising and editorial in the magazine, and what more might be done to keep advertising and editorial separate while meeting the needs of both advertisers and readers. The editorial content cited and analyzed comes primarily from the December 2006, March/April 2007 and May/June 2007 issues of Glow Magazine, which the author of this report contributed to as an editorial intern in the autumn and winter of 2006.