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Article: Marissa Latshaw, Marketing Manager at Time Magazine

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Marissa Latshaw, Marketing Manager at Time Magazine

Marissa: I work in a multi-title department - the payment department. My whole department handles all the billings for the magazines. I'm assigned specifically for Time Magazine.

I'm responsible for testing the market to find ways to improve payment. We test through trying different billing formats. I work with the creative department to come up with new creative ideas and different incentives to use to get people to pay. It's a critical function to the title.

People often think when you work on a magazine you would deal, with some extent, in the editorial content, but I've never even met the editorial team at Time magazine.  I'm not on staff at the magazine. I meet with them (editors only) on a weekly basis to go over the status of tests and roll out recommendations based on successful tests.

8:30 a.m.
I check my voice mail and e-mail, and respond to questions.  I get all kinds of questions about how payment is doing. I'm responsible for how the payment is doing across 55 different categories of business - renewals, direct mail, online paying, ect. I get a lot of e-mails from the renewal department, and I have to do things to support them in billing.

I get different questions about the creative process - people needing clarification, or having creative-related questions. I have to maintain a certain inventory of stock, and I'm responsible for projecting how much inventory of stock we're going to need in the next coming months.

Once a quarter I come up with a marketing plan for next three to six months. So, each week, I refer to the plan to see which campaigns are coming out and figure out what I need to do to get the correct billing in there.

~ 10 a.m.
I write a spec memo, which details exactly what's going to go in the mail packages. I have to inform our fulfillment center of exactly what will go in.

Every Monday, I look at my test results and see how the tests I've done over the last few months are doing. That involves looking at the data and comparing the test to the control and seeing if the test is doing better or worse. It will set me up for meetings that I'll have throughout the week with reports on how my tests are doing.

12:30 p.m.
I usually go out to lunch and bring it back to my desk.

1:30 p.m.
I have a meeting with the people at Time Magazine to go over the test results and plan new tests for the future. Not only do I present the information, but they inform me of how things are changing at their end and how that will affect billing.

After the meeting, I try to write an e-mail that summarizes what we did.

2:30 p.m.
Afterwards, I have a billing staff meeting (with 10 staff members) where I meet with the other billing managers who work on other publications. We share our findings and try to benefit from each other. We go over tests, get ideas, and work out fulfillment issues. For example: A big push for us is to try and get people to pay for subscriptions with credit cards, but our Operations System is not accustomed to taking credit cards. This affects all publications (and billing staff), so instead of fixing it for one magazine we fix it for the whole company.

~ 3:30 p.m.
I would say I have about ten projects that I'm working on at a time, all of them at different stages. From start to finish, they take two months. On a consistent basis, I get what we call our job folders, which contain the creative elements at different stages of the progress. I work with the promotions department and make sure the creative piece is legally correct and it reflects the creative concept that I had in mind. I mark-up changes and send it back. It goes through this whole process until I'm satisfied with the product.

6:30 p.m.
I go through my mail - we're a very paper intensive company. Sometimes, I prepare for any meetings I have the next day.