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Playboy&;s Absurd AdvertisingOutsourcing
By encinoman
If a magazine can&;t sell advertising, it should probably just throw in the towel.
But after losing $13 million in 2008 to be followed by losing an estimated $8 million this year, Playboy went in a &;different direction&; contracting with David Pecker&;s AMI publishing to sell ads&;and essentially outsource all business functions but editorial.
Most magazines have two key revenue streams: advertising and circulation. Playboy has both and adds a third&;licensing of the venerable Playboy name. But apparently only the licensing part is working (and is not part of the AMI deal). NY Post media reporter Keith Kelly says Playboy newsstand sales, which once topped 7 million copies per month, have deteriorated to a pathetic 150,000 today. I&;ve written before about Playboy&;s incoherent content (and cookie-cutter plastic girls) which hardly makes it a compelling impulse purchase.
Contracting with Pecker&;s AMI is no panacea for advertising either. According to Keith Kelly, Pecker boasts that when Playboy&;s total circulation of 1.1 million is combined with that of AMI titles such as Flex, Men&;s Fitness and Muscle & Fitness, there will be a combined ad buy of 11 million men in the prized 18-to-35 demographic. &;That&;s bigger than the men&;s networks of Time Warner, Jann Wenner&;s company or Hearst.&;
I don&;t believe a word of it for three reasons:
1. Flex, Men&;s Fitness and Muscle & Fitness have ten million readers?!
2. A more apt display of the work AMI does selling ads can be found in Star and my old rag, The National Enquirer. If you actually pick up a copy, they&;re very low on the quality national ads like the Sonys that Playboy has traditionally had, and high on commemorative plates and catalog crap.
3. The dirty little secret of men&;s magazines is that they&;re read by old guys like me and Kevin Bacon; the &;prized 18-to-35 demographic&; is more interested in Call of Duty than &;call of p***y&; on glossy paper stock.
Soon enough, Pecker will want to take over editorial and do it cheaper with the reporters he has already. Maybe they&;ll sell him the rest of the magazine.
More likely it will go out of business. The only thing keeping this money-losing relic of the 60&;s alive is the fear that killing it will kill Hugh Hefner.
Tags: AMI, David-Pecker, death-of-magazines, Hugh-Hefner, Kevin-Bacon, Playboy, The-National-Enquirer
This entry was posted on November 25, 2009 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Men's Magazines, Playboy, Sex and Society.
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One Response to &;Playboy&;s Absurd AdvertisingOutsourcing&;
George Wimple Says:
November 26, 2009 at 6:40 pm |
Someone said, this looks like two crippled companies sharing a cane. The problem is the service company (AMI) has its own problems and it is debatable whether Playboy will get its best efforts. Since, AMI has more titles and lower ad rates, a combined Ad network will more likely benefit AMI. Playboy is going to be subsidizing AMI&;s titles and pay for the privilege . AMI has little to no overhead to add by picking up another title. These kinds of arrangements make sense only for small titles with no distribution.
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