Archive for the &;Men&;s Magazines&; Category

Playboy: Bring on the RealGirls!

December 18, 2009

So the Playboy sale has fallen through, largely because of Hugh Hefner&;s insistence on living at the Mansion until his death. Sad, but even incoherent and out-of-date as it is, this great American brand can still be saved.  I&;d love to consult on it or edit the new version, but I&;ll provide the first of my modest proposals for free: Bring on the real girls! Yes, I understand that Playboy is supposed to be full of fantasy females as part of its quaint &;Playboy philosophy,&; which philosopher-king Hefner says &;is very, very connected to the American dream&;that we indeed did and do own our own minds and bodies.&;

But right now, the girls have been completely Barbi-cized, between the plastics surgeon&;s knife and sacks o&; saleen, the airbrush and the aerobics and the soft-focus photography.  Fake boobs, fake girls.

Instead, why not make it, at least partly, an instruction manual for the impressionable male?  Maybe some girls are a bit chubby, others a little nosy, hairy or otherwise quirky.  For when the one-hand reader of today&;s magazine (and website) encounters a real girl, they won&;t look like this&;especially down there.

Tags:fake-girls, Hugh-Hefner, Playboy, Playboy-sale-fails Posted in death-of-magazines, Men's Magazines, Playboy, Uncategorized | 1 Comment &;

UrbanDaddy.com&;GetLost

December 15, 2009

What&;s an UrbanDaddy?  Although I am, in fact, an urban daddy (of two) after two years of emails from UrbanDaddy.com, I&;ve decided they are not me.  Here&;s their self-description: We start from the premise that there&;s a lot of noise out there when it comes to your city [they 'cover' New York, Los Angeles,  Las Vegas, Boston, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco]—poor recommendations, shills, plants, promoters, liars, enemies, and exes. Our goal is to be your friend. The kind of friend who knows everyone—the maitre d&;s at all the right restaurants, the bouncers at all the right clubs, the addresses of all the great parties. And the kind of guy who lives to share the wealth. And that&;s what UD does—once a day we&;ll send you a short and quick email with the latest piece of need-to-know information on underground opium dens turned cocktail lounges, brilliant advice from supermodels and how to spend a night at the Guggenheim. If this kind of pretentiousness turns you on, well, knock yourself out.  Here&;s my email to their site: Dear Urban Daddy: 1. Many hundreds of thousands of us live in the San Fernando Valley or Pasadena and will never go drinking in Beverly Hills, Culver City and the like; it&;s not just the distance but the DUI. If you think that makes me geographically undesirable, then take me off your email list. 2. Many more of us regardless of where we live will not be purchasing the silver-enlaid martinis with encrusted gold olives and the overpriced like.  That&;s so&;2006.  A serious financial crisis is upon us, if you haven&;t noticed.  Yes, Thorstein Veblen is long dead, but when millions are losing their jobs and houses, so should be the conspicuous consumption you advocate in every post.  If you think that makes me financially undesirable, then take me off your email list. That is all.

Tags:conspicuous-consumption, online-lad-media, recession-economics, urban-daddy Posted in Men's Magazines | Leave a Comment &;

Playboy&;s Absurd AdvertisingOutsourcing

November 25, 2009

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 Posted in Men's Magazines, Playboy, Sex and Society | 1 Comment &;

Will Esquire DropDead?

April 23, 2009

So 24/7 Wall Street is claiming. The collapse in print advertising has pushed revenue at most of Hearst’s large magazines down by double digits after a bad year in 2008. &;Hearst is going to have to cut some of its anemic magazine titles. Esquire is among the weakest of the major men’s magazines on the basis of advertising page performance. Through April, ad pages at the magazine dropped 27% to 206. Men’s magazines are one of the most crowded categories in the industry. Esquire is up against GQ, Details, Men’s Journal, Maxim, and a number of men’s fitness and health publications. The men’s magazines which are performing the most poorly will not last long. Understandably terrified of being teabagged by a tag-team Maxim/GQ combo, Esquire denies that they are an endangered species. To that list I would add Playboy.  The current issue, with Lisa Rinna (who?) on the cover and nekkid inside, is an anemic 118 pages. Combined with the size shrinkage of the magazine and thin cheap paper stock, it&;s an unprepossessing half the size of my Dad&;s Playboys from the early 1970&;s, when I developed an interest in the genre. While Playboy the magazine doesn&;t know who it is either,  at least their Bettie Page fixation is harmless, if gay.  But I have an active dislike of Esquire, partly based on their ever-snobby attitude.  (And just who are their real readers, anyway?) But I mostly dislike them because of the  &;investigative obituary&; (investigating her sex life, I recall) of Judith Resnik, the Challenger space shuttle astronaut, right after she was tragically killed.  Way to go, Esquire.  We won&;t miss you when you&;re gone.

Tags:Bettie-Page, death-of-magazines, Esquire, Judith-Resnik, Lisa-Rinna, Playboy Posted in Men's Magazines, Playboy, Publishing | Leave a Comment &;