How To Tell If You're a Details Reader

by Carrie McLaren

13% of Rolling Stone readers ride goats. ha ha, just kidding. The rest of these stats, however, came from magazine's media kits.		33.8% of Wired readers plan to buy a suit over $400 in the next 12 months
78% of Interview readers would recycle even if there wasn't a law		74% of AP readers regularly go to malls
Spin subscribers average 3.7 trips a month to record stores		26.5% of Swing readers graduated high school
40% of Bikini readers smoke		99.4% of Details adults do NOT read Swing

One of my jobs is buying ads in magazines. To "help" me with this task, magazine salespeople can do any number of things. Bigger mags offer free lunches and dinners, which isn't too terrible (though I'd rather just have them give me the money). Or they can offer to drop by for an office visit (not a realistic option).

Or we could do away with the face-to-face altogether and let the media kit make the pitch. Magazines of all sizes use some variation of a media kit. Small ones usually keep it to a page of ad rates while bigger magazines tend to have bigger--and more complicated--kits. Kits so complicated that, in fact, I've no idea what most of the stuff means.

All kits, however, share a single purpose: to sell ad space, i.e. to provide a solid argument for getting my money. The surprising part is that this generally has nothing to do with the content of the magazine. I'm not supposed to advertise in Details because it's well-written, informative, or interesting, but because it reaches and influences the right audience. Magazine content is sorta beside the point, a means to an end; the audience is what matters, the audience is what's for sale.

CATEGORIZATION X

Just being a reader, you probably don't know it but most magazines are hip, influential, cutting-edge, and really important to our generation. Well, that's what the media kits say:

Ray Gun - "the choice of a generation"

Spin -- "the voice of a generation"

Swing -- "the first lifestyle magazine written for, by, and about people in their twenties, today's most exciting generation."

Film Threat -- "the ONLY movie magazine read by generation X"

Vibe -- "speaks to a whole generation of young men and women whose lives defy categorizing"

Vibe's readers aren't the only ones who defy categorization. Just about every mag has their own way of saying "stereotypes are bad," their readers are all different, unique, etc. The only thing that unites readers--other than them all being influentials (see below)--is their devotion to the mag in question.

But then maybe the magazines are joking. This would explain why the parts about defying categorization are followed by pages and pages of charts, percentages, and decimal points categorizing their readers. (No two psychographics alike!)

65% of Wig readers call themselves artists

63% of Interview readers say "I have more self-confidence and style than most people my age"; 92% love to experience new and different things (the other 8% are unconscious)

98% of Film Threat readers wear hip clothes

Too bad publishers don't make their magazines as interesting as their math. (If I start reading Film Threat, are my clothes more likely to be hip?) Granted, I'm no numbers whiz, but publishers' stats seem impossibly off. The median age of Film Threat readers is given as twenty-five and the median income as $39,000 (and these are, according to the media kit, "the people they invented the word slacker for"?). Meanwhile, Spin readers are buying 7.5 CDs a month . . . whatever . . .

According to its media kit, Rolling Stone has "a single mission: to get our readers the news about who's made it, who's hot, and who's on the leading edge."

ALL THINGS INFLUENTIAL

Apparently, if you just read the magazine, you're not doing it right. Magazines are for consumers, not readers. Magazines don't make money selling magazines--subscriptions and vendor sales don't even come close to covering costs--they make money from selling their audiences, their targeted markets.

Marketers constantly survey, poll, and interview readers to see how much they're consuming. Some of this audience research has a secondary purpose--such as helping the editors "give readers what they want"--which diverts attention from the issue. Others offer incentives: answer a few questions, win some prize. Lifestyle magazines such as Details, Paper, and Wired recruit readers to serve as marketing consultants, answering questions for the magazine's advertisers in exchange for free goods and other perks.

Once they've collected the data, magazines compile and transform it into something that proves how influential they are.

Two main types of influences:

a) influential -- as in, the mag influences its readers to buy things, much in the same way that a catalog or a promotional newsletter does

b) influentials -- as in the magazine's readers are influentials, i.e., tastemakers, fashion-forward, popular people. They set trends and cut edges. They're the first to try new products and encourage their friends to do the same. And old MTV trade ad says, "buy this 28-year old and get all his friends for free." Or as the media kits put it:

Interview - Whether it's the latest unheard-of sound, the next big fashion statement, or the newest anything, our readers are quick to enter uncharted territory. Perhaps more importantly, Interview readers help draw the map for those that follow.

Paper-[Paper has] the ideal "tastemaker" readership based in America's largest and most cutting edge single city market, New York, as well as strategic trendsetting markets across the country.

Pulp -"targets hip, fashion conscious, consumption-oriented demographic. Our readers are diverse, yet share a common bond in exploring our offered areas of interest."

What I want to know is this: If magazine readers are so influential, what are they doing filling out marketing surveys? Don't they have anything better to do? Shouldn't they be out influencing?

NEED A BIBLE?

Spin - "the bible of cool"

Ray Gun - "the bible of music and style"

Wired - "the bible of the new cyberworld"

P.O.V. - "the bible for the young guy trying to get ahead"

Paper - "a style bible"

"GENERAL, YET SPECIFIC"

You'd think the most likely people to be able to cut through the b.s. would be my fellow ad buyers. And you'd be wrong. Or maybe whoever's putting these things together believes we can't read. Media kits contradict themselves all over the place. Pronouncements like these are eerily common in media kits:

Ray Gun - "high profile and extremely visible, but decidedly rebellious and underground."

Maxim - We're "general, yet specific . . . (Our reader) is not interested in fashion, he's interested in clothes. He's a man who has arrived, but is still going places."

Spin - "We are cutting-edge, but avoid the hypnotic trap of being trendy."

*surface - "a spotlight for today's 'avant-guardians' " and yet "*surface's cover stories are the superheroes of our media age, icons like Grace Jones, Nina Hagen and Debbie Harry . . . official slogan: the subculture is surfacing."

"Packed with street-wise need-to-know information and delivered from a smart, substantive, and styling guy's point of view." -- P.O.V. media kit

ADVERTORIALS

Advertising is content. - Plazma media kit

The down side of passing up lunches and office visits is I don't get to have the salesrep rep offer editorial coverage. These sorts of deals aren't in media kits--they're, you know, unethical--but magazine editorial is for sale along with ad space. I can't even begin to count to phone chats with reps that rely on the assumption that I should advertise band X because the mag covered them. Again, it's a consequence of magazine content being secondary to advertisers.

Not sure I want to go on about this; the blurring of advertising with editorial could be a book in itself and the genre of promo pubs like Escandalo! (Slant, Sony Living, etc.) certainly fits in there. There's no question we're trying to make money, too. But magazines of the more traditional variety aren't all that different; they operate like commercial radio when it comes to "creative barter." In exchange for financial favors, the mag will put an agreed-upon artist on the cover or whatever. Even semi-legit mags do it. You'd be surprised.

Or then maybe you wouldn't, especially once you consider that more and more magazines are run by Madison Avenue types. This is something the media kits ARE up front about: Plazma was founded by former creatives at Wieden and Kennedy, supposedly one of the hippest ad agencies (they do Nike); the new men's mag P.O.V. was started by a couple guys from Forbes "looking for a younger, cooler mag"; and the soft-porn men's "zine" Hollywood Highball is the brainchild of Steven Grasse, CEO of a marketing agency that helps companies like R.J. Reynolds, Coca-Cola, and MTV target generation X. Hollywood Highball's media kit may be the savviest of all: it's nothing more than one sheet with the ad rates. Perhaps cos the mag itself is a sort of media kit.

In a few years we'll all think back to the golden days of the early 90s when the issue of advertiser influence was a matter of censorship: Rolling Stone canceling something that pisses off Subaru or whatever. Advertiser money doesn't merely censor content, it dictates and defines acceptable content in the first place. This is one of the reasons that music magazines--like other specialty publications--are transforming into so-called lifestyle mags. It's hard to name a mass music mag now that DOESN'T regularly feature fashion spreads, trend reports, tech columns, and consumer tips (Rolling Stone's guide to cameras, Spin's guide to makeup for men). Alternative Press (their media kit says to think of AP as a "guide to better living"), Ray Gun, and Spin do all the above. It's not as if some Spin editor is actually thinking: "Hey guys, let's get some scantily clad models, an expensive car and take pictures of them frolicking with powerbooks in the desert . . . readers love that!" Features often aren't made for readers to love; they're often not made to inform or even entertain but to sell gear.

Fortunately, magazines have other ways of making money besides selling editorial content: "ancillary revenues." These include things like brand extensions: Spin Radio, The Source clothing line, Plazma fonts, Rolling Stone Rock and Roll Bowl and New Music Tour, Paper Promotions (a marketing consultant service), Playboy cigars, etc. Media kits promote what they call "value-added" deals where, in buying an advertise-ment in their mag, you get a bonus of some sort. See corporate sponsorship section for details.

CONCLUSION

Magazines, particularly lifestyle magazines, are bullshit. That's not to say they can't be appreciated for what they do offer--an occasional great article (Paul Keegan's "Cyber Agent Man" in the December Details andGlasgow Phillips' article on t-shirt logos in the Jan/Feb Might are recent faves), photos of attractive people, fragrance strips, etc. In fact, understanding and questioning the way magazines work makes it possible to appreciate worthwhile content even more.

It is, however, unfortunate that I need to spend a bunch of money advertising in magazines that sell, whether people actually read those magazines or not. If I had my way, we'd bypass expensive magazines altogether. You know, cut out the middleman: Take the several thousands of dollars it costs for a Pavement ad in Details or whatever and just pay people to buy the record. I bet we'd receive more return on our investment that way. But then, what do I know. I'm just the ad person.

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