Buffing-Up The Brand

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 2002 by Cable Neuhaus

Byline: CABLE NEUHAUS Editor-in-Chief cneuhaus@mediacentral.com

Sometimes bad things happen to good magazines. Examples abound, many too horrid to contemplate: A suddenly sour ad market deals a death blow to ambitious editorial projects several months in the making. Your Mr. Big inexplicably takes his publisher's magic to a competitor's book. A veteran editor who is like that with his readers decides this is the year he'll finally retire to a fishing village in Maine. A printing plant burns. Terrible, ulcer-inducing things, all.

But nothing that happens to - or at - a magazine can do as much harm as complacency. To avoid arthritis of the spine, books need to keep moving. The best of the breed are ever in near-manic states of self-criticism, reflection, exploration, and recalibration. (We at FOLIO: are doing all of these things at this very moment.) A magazine that fails to constantly examine its place in the world is a magazine that, sooner or later, will have no place to go but out of business. Irrelevancy, in the mag world, is death without dignity.

This month FOLIO: focuses on two great - but aging - American magazines that are self-confident enough to have looked in the mirror and then looked around the corner. Both, as it turns out, came away startled by what they saw. Our subjects, Playboy and Martha Stewart Living, are more alike than one might immediately assume. Each, after all, is obsessively devoted to a life well- (and somewhat hedonistically) lived. That's not a bad thing. (OK, maybe it is. Your call.)

Given their attention to perfection in every detail, it's no great surprise that these icons have lately taken a time-out to reconsider their core virtues. Playboy, which has hired its first new editorial director in 30 years, is about to embark on a difficult wholesale rethink. (Even the continued use of nudity is in question.) Living, which, like Playboy, has seen its territory carved up and attacked by a profusion of new titles, has just completed a redesign two years in the making. The staffs of both books, as you will see, cooperated with FOLIO: in our reporting this month, and we thank them for that.

Finally, a thought about time - specifically, about letting it pass your magazine by. Whisper what you will about Hugh Hefner's Playboy, there's no gainsaying that, for many years, it set the standard in its category. (An aside: It would be dishonest not to acknowledge that I admire Hef's giant achievement, not to mention his hospitality. As a journalist, I've been a guest any number of times at his home in Holmby Hills. Above, see an incredibly unflattering picture of us eating, most unsexily, at the Mansion.) But the reality of today's men's magazine market is harsh: Playboy committed the unforgivable sin of sauntering, rather than galloping, through the decades. The dilemma Hef & Company now face is, Can the brand's equity be reclaimed in full? Depends on who gets involved in the fixing. Allowed room to roam, it seems to me that an inventive editorial mind has a better-than-even shot at pulling a rabbit out of the hat. Playboy could get hot yet again.