What's The Scottish Phrase For 'Skirting The Guidelines'?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 1, 2003 by Michael Learmonth

Byline: MICHAEL LEARMONTH

It's a gripping tale of two men against the elements - just the kind of white-knuckle travel piece one might expect to find in Men's Journal. It features eco-adventure studs Ian Adamson and Isaac Wilson - identified as the "Men's Journal Adventure Team" - who brave Scotland's steepest climb and roughest whitewater, then repair to the local Dewar's distillery for some relief on the rocks.

"It's a great read," boasts MJ associate publisher Beth Press. "It's like what we would do editorially."

Exactly. And some readers, no doubt, will mistake it for standard feature-well fodder. But the April piece, "Conquer the Highlands," wasn't edit. It was a barely disguised ad for Dewar's Scotch whiskey, written by a team of copywriters in the Wenner Media marketing department and paid for by Dewar's and the Outdoor Life Network.

Once the province of cheesy brochure-like layouts and sophomoric marketing copy, the special advertising section, or "advertorial," is a genre undergoing a renaissance.

Media buyers love advertorials, and their reasons are obvious. But now these pseudo-stories are increasingly assuming the look, feel, and actual quality of the pub in which they reside, causing some hand wringing among editors and ethicists.

To steady the wall between the church-and-state issue, ASME issued voluntary guidelines on special ad sections in 1996. In addition to the "Advertising Section" slug, ASME insisted that the special sections should differ from editorial standard edit in "layout, design, typeface, and literary style."

Men's Journal seems to have missed the spirit of that last guideline, and by a wide margin.

Like most of what one finds in Jann Wenner's magazines, the Dewar's package is beautifully designed. The trouble is, type faces, sidebars, and captions all bear the distinctive DNA of Men's Journal. It even has the mag's signature Oxford rule roped around the text.

So, who's in trouble? Technically, no one. And that's a shame.

Agencies, of course, want special ad sections to resemble edit as much as possible. "We like to push the boundaries with publishers so their palms sweat and they're thinking strongly of the ASME rules," says FCB's Tyler Schaeffer, who manages Samsung's U.S. advertising strategy. And in times of economic hardship, publishers are less likely to push back. "There are greater demands being made by advertisers in terms of look and feel," says Marlene Kahan, ASME's executive director.

So, did MJ cross the line? ASME refuses to go on record, but MJ's Press insists the magazine followed ASME guidelines. A Wenner spokesman calls the package a marketing coup that gets Dewar's in the magazine and the MJ brand on an Outdoor Life Network TV show. Most important, he says, it adds value for the reader. And what could be wrong with that?