The Megalaunch That Wasn't

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2004 by Jeff Bercovici

Byline: Jeff Bercovici

For millions of TV viewers, the Lifetime network is known as the place to go for endless Golden Girls repeats. The first season of Lifetime the magazine may suggest a different 1980s sitcom: Growing Pains.

Launched in March 2003 as a partnership between Hearst and Lifetime Entertainment Services, itself a joint venture of Hearst and Disney, Lifetime has won readers (it recently raised its rate base 20 percent, to 600,000) and advertisers (it carried 362 pages last year). And for most new magazines, those would be encouraging numbers. But clearly Hearst was hoping for more. How much more became dramatically clear in January when the company fired launch editor Sally Koslow, and replaced her with Susan Wyland, founding editor of Time Inc.'s Real Simple.

Insiders say Koslow's ouster came after months of second-guessing by top Hearst management, who questioned her cover choices and submitted every element of the magazine to exhaustive focus-group testing. In the run-up to Lifetime's debut, Hearst president Cathie Black had been careful to stress in public that the company was not expecting Lifetime to match the trajectory of O, The Oprah Magazine, Hearst's phenomenally successful TV-to-print crossover. Inside, however, it was clear that management was hoping for another blockbuster.

"You kept hearing, 'They're not happy, they're not happy,'" recalls former art director Christin Gangi, who left the magazine in January. "A lot of the reaction I got at the beginning was 'Make it look like Oprah, make it look like Oprah.'" Says another departed staffer: "People didn't hesitate to weigh in" with criticisms.

But why, exactly, were they so unhappy? After all, even successful launches typically take five years to start making money, and first-year potholes are the rule, not the exception. The issue may be less about flawed execution than unrealistic expectations. Following in the footsteps of O, Lifetime has been a little like the normal child whose older sibling is a world-famous prodigy. (O is the child that grew up to be the homecoming queen, starred on the basketball team, got into Harvard and got a scholarship.) "It's hard to be the magazine that launches next after something like Oprah," adds another ex-staffer. "You sort of knew it in the back of your mind."

In theory, at least, Lifetime shared the critical attributes that helped put O on top. Both magazines came from successful TV brands with millions of devoted women viewers who seemed eager to follow the franchises into print. Like O, Lifetime started with a rate base of 500,000. But within two years it was up to 2 million and, with 1,446 ad pages in 2003, is one of the most successful launches in the past decade. Lifetime actually launched with a bigger newsstand push than O - 30,000 checkout positions, compared with 20,000 for O. Hearst declined to share circulation data for Lifetime, but sources say that sales fell off steeply after the first issue.

OVERPROMISED, UNDERPROMOTED

One reason for Hearst's impatience may be the higher stakes facing all launches these days. Given the enormous costs of supporting circ and newsstand efforts, it's not worthwhile for giants like Hearst and Time Inc. to maintain less-than-mass products. Last year, Hearst shut Victoria, saying that the 950,000-circ shelter title wasn't generating enough ad revenue. Moreover, at the American Magazine Conference this past October, Hearst's Black said flat out during a panel discussion that her company is no longer interested in launches that can't reach at least 1 million in circ. Black declined to comment for this story.

Whatever the expectations, it is clear that the execution at Lifetime has not been Oprah-like. Several people involved in the launch attribute the magazine's slow takeoff to insufficient promotion. Initially, Lifetime TV supported its spin-off with a blitz of spots, some running as long as 90 seconds. But in subsequent months, the volume of promos dwindled, with many of the spots migrating from primetime to daytime and late night, when commercial time is less valuable. (A Hearst spokeswoman says Lifetime still airs about 75 15-second spots during the first two weeks after each issue's on-sale date; the spots air at all times of day.)

Meanwhile, Oprah continues to rule daytime TV and remains an A-list celebrity, while the Lifetime network has lost its status as the most-watched basic cable network. Its average primetime audience shrank by 14 percent from the fourth quarter of 2001 to the fourth quarter of 2003. Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research at Horizon Media, attributes the falloff in part to the growth of two other women's cable networks, WE and Oxygen. "Lifetime's probably a victim of their own success in that they've proven that a cable network that delivers only 51 percent of the country can deliver huge ratings," he says.

Finally, however, there is the product. Where O quickly established itself as a new kind of women's magazine - with a heavy emphasis on the TV star's philosophy of uplift - Lifetime has not created a unique identity. "It felt a little more choppy, more service-y and less lifestyle than I had envisioned it being," says Karen Jacobs, executive vice president and director of print investment at Starcom. "I think there's room to grow there."