Playboy Says Goodbye

Newspapers eventually shrank themselves down to profitability. In essence they have become coupon delivery mechanisms. It is one of the areas where there is an advantage to the consumers, the manufacturers and the advertisers. Coupled with display advertising from strictly local businesses, it seems enough for most newspapers to limp on as shadows of their former selves.

The same cannot be said of the magazine. What we are seeing is nothing short of an implosion. The retailers are dumping magazines with wild abandon. All that remains at most checkout counters are the strongest of the woman’s magazines and slick gossip titles. Specifically marching off to death are the lifestyle magazines, the cooking and bride’s titles and most of the male segment. We’ve gone from three national news magazines to one irrelevant one in the course of just a few years. Those retailers who are still giving pride of place to magazine offerings are increasingly finding those spaces filled in by what we have dubbed Neo-Pulps, coffee table books in magazine form covering sensational or celebrity oriented topics. The trend in memorial editions continues without abate, with even the long dead making new newsstand appearances. And there are some even more troubling trends…

Magazines you may now safely avoid: Maxim and GQ

Maxim never was any good. It occasionally featured pictorials of B-Movie actresses flouncing around in their underwear. When it wasn’t giving actual word space to what these actresses had to say (which wasn’t much) it rattled on Hooters Magazine style about beer and motorcycles and sports equipment. Today it no longer has the pull to bring in the fluffy actress types, so its pictorials are now about aspiring models. The editorial has shifted to long form biographies (daily routines of 20 year olds) oddly imposed with wistful musings about what it would be like to be in this woman’s life.—And on occasion, they cram in a bit of actual journalism, albeit in ten point type with wide borders. Little Miss I Do Yoga and Eat Nothing But Kale merits at least eleven point type, but war coverage or anything of substance requires a microscope to read. Editorial choices aside, this magazine may have the worst layout of anything commercially available. All in all, it is truly bird cage liner and would be disinteresting even as junk mail.

GQ is something that I never picked up before. I already get Esquire and Playboy, which are the other two titles in this men’s lifestyle segment. Esquire has long form reporting. Playboy had naked women in it. GQ has nothing. Since the 1980s it’s essentially been a fashion and “wellness” rag. So I had no interest in it whatsoever. Having been on the receiving end of GQ for the past few months—it was sent to me as a replacement for the equally vapid Details—I have had my initial evaluation ratified in spades. It is the least literate piece of literature ever. GQ is a continual symposium on deploying permutations of the word ‘wow’. Maybe I’m not 20 anymore. Maybe I just don’t give a rat’s ass about ‘hotness’, whatever that might be. It’s a magazine driven by what it can sell ad space for, long form advertorial. And it’s not a particularly subtle sales pitch, uncritical and bombastic to the point of being a house organ for a pantheon of utterly useless, overpriced crap. As junk mail it would be interesting, only if I were interested in one iota of what it is selling. And I’m not.

Magazines Made to Order: Conde Nast Advertorial

Just when I gave up on this publisher entirely, this drifted in. co-packed inside my Vanity Fair and GQ mailers. The title is a little dopey and most of its features are strictly grazing materials, but… It’s much better magazine that either GQ or most editions of Vanity Fair.

It’s a no doubt about it General Interest magazine, with a fine (but staid) layout and a compelling assortment of topics. Add a humor or fiction section and maybe a long form chunk of journalism and you would have a package most people would be happy to subscribe to. Or pick up on the newsstand if you did a bit more with the shop window (cover title and cover presentation).

What’s Next is actually an advertorial for the “All-New 2016 Chevrolet Malibu.” As opposed to gushing about the Malibu relentlessly, as GQ does with its ad page buyers, What’s Next is a straight forward magazine in all respects. The Malibu is simply the only advertiser, the sole sponsor.

Conde Nast (Advance Magazines) publishes two of the best magazines out there, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. There’s obviously a lot of talent sitting on its benches, so abortions like GQ and Details are inexcusable. The current staff at Vanity Fair has gone past its use by date, and the entire concept behind it has become hairy. What’s Next wouldn’t be a bad model for Vanity Fair’s much needed rehab. Unlike Vanity Fair, What’s Next can actually be read without the need to consult blue prints or astrologers.

If the folks at Conde Nast need a clue as to how to lay out a magazine—and they do—they should check out Bloomberg’s Businessweek.  Hire that person. Do what that person is doing.

What’s Next may also be setting a direction in advertising supported direct mail titles. I certainly don’t think any less of the Chevrolet Malibu for having appended What’s Next to my Vanity Fair. But I’m not entirely sure  I am a representative sample. I actually might have opened it up had it appeared on its own. So maybe the future of the magazine medium is as serial themed junk mail? It would be a future, so let’s not dismiss the idea out of hand. 

Tabloids Enter Presidential Election Frey

The Tabloid presentation is nothing new. Much of what they do is a theft from the 1950s magazine Confidential. Whereas Confidential spent actual money digging up celeb dirt, the tabs largely make things up or are fed pieces by publicity agents. When it comes to covering presidential candidates, however, the tabs have occasionally trotted out some journalistic moxie. It was the Enquirer (publisher of all of the remaining tabloids plus Star Magazine) that busted John Edwards. For those of you who don’t remember, Edwards was a rising light in the Democratic Party who the tabs revealed as being a leave your wife while she has cancer and impregnate your publicist class scum-bag. And for that the tabs do deserve a modicum of credit. But mostly they just serve as outlets for opposition research material of an off taste variety. When they aren’t just making things up.

Two prominent tabloids, the Enquirer and the New York Daily News, have come out in favor of Donald Trump. Actually endorsing a candidate is something new for the Enquirer. Both tabs seem to have made the choice for business reasons.  Trump has been very good to the Daily News. One imagines that the prospect of a Trump Presidency makes the Enquirer’s mouth water. The Enquirer is also seemingly carrying the Trump campaign’s water by running a spurious piece about Ted Cruz’s mistresses.

This is a new trend. Smearing on one candidate’s behalf is without precedent. Tabs have always been equal opportunity smear distributors.  When it comes to people in the presidential realm, tabs have spotty credibility. For each Nancy Reagan astrologer, Bill Clinton mistress or John Edwards misdeed accurately disclosed, there are legions of flat out fabrications run nearly every issue of the election season. Few of them reach the height of salaciousness trotted out by American Spectator with its Hillary Clinton Murder Mystery. Mostly we have over the top whoppers, told in serial form.

President Obama is gay. You would know this if you read the tabloids. W and his wife were continually on the verge of divorce. Obvious fabrications such as these have been more the norm than the exception for the tabloids for as long as they have been around. But the tabloids, at least in the form that we know them now, have only really been around since the 1970s. As a field, tabloids began to gain traction with the Manson murders. There was a lot more variety in their offerings back when each tabloid was produced by a different publisher.  In the 1990s the Globe and the Enquirer merged and there has been only one publisher in the field since. Prior to the Reagans, the tabs didn’t consider Presidents to be enough of a draw.

I don’t think anyone believes Ted Cruz has a mistress. Or several. No one likes Ted Cruz that much. And as the tabs are likely to find out, no one cares.

Playboy The Long Goodbye

Overall indifference seems to be what has been driving the changes at Playboy magazine over the past few months. Behind the scenes, Playboy has undergone a series of transformations. Playboy used to be a fairly sizable content provider, with a cable television station and a music label.  It dabbled as a movie producer and a slinger of video tapes and CDs. And if you’re near death, you probably remember the Playboy nightclubs and the Playboy After Dark television programs. Perhaps not so well remembered is that none of these things did all that well in the long term. No one is employed as a “bunny” anymore. Not for decades.

Back when there was a Playboy empire, the old saying about the magazine went “a million people a month can’t be wrong.” That figure is now 800 thousand, ten times a year and is probably sliding towards the 500 thousand mark. I can’t imagine that there’s ever been much of a cry from the people who still read Playboy about any need for changes. The magazine’s problems have not been content related, at least on the surface. Unattainable naked women are still a pretty good draw. And classing up the package with lit pieces and journalism and comics and humor is the proven way to go. The problem is that it has some fairly high fixed expenses and only one revenue source. Vice advertisers are only going to pay so much to reach a diminishing and steadily aging demographic.

There aren’t any good choices here. And Playboy has already gone ahead with the obvious ones. Playboy is no longer a major content provider. It is largely a licensor. It pimps the Playboy brand name to whatever you want to stick it on. It no longer produces the magazine. Rather it packages the contents. The magazine is actually published and distributed by the National Enquirer. This hedges Playboy’s risk, but it also caps its pass through on cover price profits. These economy measures, however, do not seem to have been enough.

So they jettisoned the naked, unattainable women. Playboy had been the only title in its full frontal softcore space for the last few years. Hustler went hardcore. Penthouse evaporated and then was revived as a hardcore brand. Behind the scenes, Playboy is the financial backer of a number of hardcore enterprises. (Not exactly a magic money machine, either.) The transitioned Playboy flagship now fits in with a groove carved out by the likes of Maxim and Hooter’s Magazine. How much better this space is, I can’t say. None of the lad mags seem all that chock full of advertising. Details just folded shop and GQ and Esquire are hardly humming. But we were led to believe this was to increase the magazine’s appeal to advertisers.

Then the other shoe dropped. Actually Playboy would like to be gone. The owner would like to be paid for the privilege of someone else producing his magazine. Or he’ll sell you the Playboy trademark and call it a day. He’s also selling the mansion.

This is where we cue the analysis about magazine trends and the rise of internet pornography and changes in lifestyle focus. Nonsense. Flashy vulgarians have been with us since the start of mass mediums and they will be with us until the Andy Warhol apportioned five minutes of fame mandate comes into effect.  Playboy’s owner is just one of a string of people of similar ilk. If there continues to be a magazine business, there will always be someone like him in it.

This is about the owner doing the right thing by his heirs. It is better to leave behind a giant pile of money than it is a business. Or real estate.  Neither the owner nor his daughter need Playboy anymore. They don’t have the money to turn around the business nor exploit the trademark to its furthest extent. This is a perfect situation to sell in.

As for the new Playboy, it sucks. It’s supposed to suck. The new owner will stick the naked girls back in as his/her first move. It’s the classic Classic Coke move. Playboy will be back, if for no other reason than it’s the only brand name in its space. Or at least that’s my prediction.

Next: No one put a gun to my head, but I did see the latest Superman movie. Great Caesar’s ghost! We must save Superman!