An earlier blog about Emap quoted David Hepworth on everybody reading pithy boxes, but the real importance of boxes, pull-outs, read-throughs or whatever you want to call them is that they get people into the articles and/or are remembered.
I ran InterCity magazines in the late 1980s at BBC/Redwood where it was by far the best-read title the publisher produced, despite having a comparatively low circulation. I lost count of the times people that I met at conferences pulled boxes from their wallets that they had culled from its pages, especially summaries from the ‘Captains of Industry’ series.
The prime example was related to me by the recently-retired chairman of ICI, Sir Denys Henderson. He had been awarded an honorary degree by Manchester University. At the ceremony, the chancellor had quoted the box that accompanied InterCity’s profile of him a few months before almost word for word.
Alas, ICI – like InterCity - are no longer the forces they once were.
