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Full collection, including a link to a site that sells them as posters, at Laughing Squid.
Boing Boing suggests the faux vintage ads must be the work of Mad Men’s Pete Campbell. “These are too cheesy to be the work or Don or Peggy. Let’s be honest here.”
When I saw yesterday that Conde Nast plans to increase the rates it charges readers of its magazines and websites because, according to CEO Charles Townsend,
“We have been so overtly dependent on advertising as the turbine that runs this place, and that is a very, very risky model as we emerge from the recession,”
my first thought was: Oh come on. There have been plenty of recessions and one Great Depression since Conde Nast began a publishing empire built around ad-supported magazines, starting with Vogue and Vanity Fair (which in 1915 ran more ad pages than any other US magazine). I thought here’s another traditional publisher that’s preparing its audience for a post-Internet iPad paradise where readers will pay for their digital content.
My second thought was: Maybe, but so what. Conde Nast should have raised subscription and newsstand rates ages ago. When Henry Luce launched Fortune Magazine in 1930, he charged $1 per issue at a time when the Sunday New York Times cost $0.05. The whole point (according to Alan Brinkley’s telling in his Luce biography The Publisher) was to weed out the riff-raff who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay such an insanely high price for a copy of magazine, and then to make a mint selling advertising against such an upscale audience.
Whether or not the content-is-free culture of the Internet gives way to an I’ll-pay-for-the-premium-stuff future, Conde Nast should raise rates for their magazines. Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour and GQ readers aren’t highly price sensitive. And besides, the advertising pitch gets better when your readership is limited only to those with lots of disposable income.
Here’s a print ad for Boot Dermocare created by McCann Bankok, ostensibly designed for audiences in Asia, and presumably too racy for American magazine readers. (Censorship courtesy of the ChasNote design team; full version below.)
Predictably, a wide range of US and UK advertising sites republished the ad. Is that the intent? Give North American and European brands and agencies plausible deniability (”Oh dear! That wasn’t us! That smut was created by a distant subsidiary when we weren’t looking!”), while at the same time providing them, through the magic of social media, a global audience for their more eye-catching if controversial creative? (BK is king of this practice.) Sneaky but smart.
Meanwhile, here’s the full version. You thought what?! Those are her toes!
(Hat tip to Nicole Williams, who as far as I can gather is the world’s leading authority on NSFW advertising creative.)
From the book review of The Publisher, Alan Brinkley’s new biography of Henry Luce, the media entrepreneur who founded Time (in 1923), Fortune, Life and Sports Illustrated.
“Luce and Hadden shared a contempt for what is now called the mainstream media, both the sensational tabloids and the serious dailies, which they regarded as dull and bloated. Brimming with precocious self-confidence, they conceived a weekly digest of news and analysis culled from other publications. The journal that was initially to be called Facts (but morphed into Time before its debut in 1923) promised to scour close to 90 periodicals and amalgamate news from every sphere of life. Its declared mission was to serve ‘the illiterate upper classes, the busy businessman, the tired debutante, to prepare them at least once a week for a table conversation….’ The new magazine had the qualities we associate now with blogs. It was concise and informal, with plenty of political topspin, rendered in a prose that inspired much satire.”
Introducing his third “issue” of Pop-Up Magazine to a sold-out audience at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco on Friday night, Doug McGray described the event as “an unrehearsed work-in-progress” — a table-of-contents-full of personal stories, magazine essays, radio features and mini photography exhibits, all performed live. The evening’s event isn’t captured on video or assembled and printed on paper like a regular magazine. It’s a rough-draft magazine that never intends to become its own finished product.
My favorite part, of course, was the advertising. Instead of hanging their logos on wall-mounted banners or handing out free samples in gift bags, sponsors had to climb on stage and perform their pitches live, or give permission to let the Pop-Up crew insert their messages between the editorial performances. The co-founder of a boutique wine label took to the mike to tell the audience how she and her partner quit their jobs in finance to launch a vineyard and “live the dream,” and then she invited us to try out her product in the greenroom after the show. Chef and food author Bryant Terry (pictured below, without a flash) told the story of an Oakland urban garden that spread backyard to backyard down a whole block — and then made a cocktail, sponsored by Skyy Vodka, with Meyer lemons and other ingredients from backyard(s) garden he described.
When it was announced that the W Hotel had taped a few gift certificates behind seats in the theater, the woman behind me said “Wow!” When’s the last time you heard someone react that way to a print ad in magazine made of paper?
Interesting stats from the latest Kaiser Family Foundation study of media consumption among young people (via Business Insider):
Young people spend more time consuming media on their cellphones than talking into them.
They’re watching 38 more minutes per day of TV content in 2009 versus 2004, but 25 minutes less (per day) of it is live on an actual TV.
Reading books is up almost 20% (21 minutes to 25 minutes per day) since 1999. But magazine and newspaper reading are down 40% and 57%, respectively, to 9 minutes and 3 minutes per day. Time spent reading anything on paper (38 minutes) is dwarfed by time spent watching TV content (4 hours 29 minutes) or time in front of a computer (1 hour 29 minutes).
I hear that question a lot. As the mean-spirited bloggers steal audience from traditional publications, and as audiences migrate from reading publications printed on paper to reading them online (where the ad rates are lower), what’s going to happen to the Fourth Estate? Who’s going to pay for investigative reporting??
Seth Godin reminds us that the journalists and photographers aren’t the expensive part of running a newspaper or magazine:
“A magazine with a million subscribers might spend more than a million dollars to deliver a single issue to its subscribers. A million dollars spent on postage, printing, subscription sales, fulfillment, ad sales, sub rights and more. I wouldn’t be surprised if the freelance budget for the writers and photographers (the real reason people read the magazine) is less than 15% of the cost, perhaps a lot less.
“The economics of this business are interesting. Millions spent, millions earned, and almost all of it goes to pay for the paper and the friction it brings.”
So let’s ask different questions. Who’s going to pay for the paper? Who’s going to pay for our collections department? Who’s going to pay our enormous gasoline bill to fill up those delivery trucks? Or even, who’s going to sell the ads?
Two good things happen. One, the discussion is immediately less hostile: Reading news on the internet doesn’t mean you hate democracy. Two, solving the business problem gets easier. Is your ad sales team inefficient? OK, outsource to Google or Federated Media. Is your accounting group costing too much? Maybe software and offshore partners can streamline your approach. Paper, ink and delivery costs decimating your profits? Check out the Internet and the iPad.
ChasNote’s Asia bureau chief passed through India over the holidays and was impressed with the indomitable persistence of the advertising sales community there.
Ads were everywhere, from the front page of the Times of India — Yahoo’s ad was the front page; news started on Page Two that day — to private cement fences in rural towns, like this one for Vodafone in Alleppey in the southern state of Kerala. Made me feel that Times Square isn’t taking full advantage of all its opportunities.
Among SAI’s list of 22 magazines kicking butt amid the recession, two of the titles are men’s body building mags: Muscle & Fitness and Flex. That surprised me….
