My friend and former colleague Ian Birch posted this on his Instagram page the other day.
In fact, if you’re interested in getting into the nuts and bolts of what makes magazines great - or otherwise - check out Ian’s Instagram, it’s always interesting. He’s something of a magazine legend.
This, the ‘first global cover from Rolling Stone’ featuring Harry Styles, caught my attention. Publishing companies have been attempting for some time to sell us this march towards globalising their magazine brands as something impressive - a bold, revolutionary new use of their collective power.
It’s anything but, and frankly most of the creatives on these mags - the editors, the art directors, the stylists, the writers - probably agree.
No matter how they talk about it publicly (see above), the decision to homogenise magazine covers and other content is not being made in the halls of Conde Nast, Hearst et al because they think it will excite readers. It’s an attempt at streamlining and cost-cutting on a grand scale.
First, as brief a summary as I can manage about how we’ve arrived at this point:
The whole practice has been ushered in by the consultancy firms that most of the big publishing houses have paid to give them ideas on how to cut costs. It’s no secret that traditional print media has fallen on tough times. The digital age and its infinite universe of free content has KO’d the profit model. These companies have spent the last 15 years scrabbling to pivot to multimedia revenue streams. But unlike digital-first brands, the power for print media companies has still centred around their flagship print titles.
So they set about two tasks: 1. Figuring out what their business looks like in a post-print world, so investing heavily in new digital platforms, other revenue streams like e-commerce sites. But…
2. Still realising that all the stuff they were working on in point 1 needed the brand might of the magazine titles behind them. So at the same time they set to work on figuring out how to keep making print mags, but with much - much - leaner costs.
These teams of bean-counting consultancies never feature anyone who has actually the remotest understanding of media, let alone glossy magazines. As such, something most of these companies advised was that it made no sense to have multiple magazines around the world called Vogue, or GQ, and then have them all having different covers and content.
‘This consulting firm doesn’t understand why all the Glamours can’t just run the same content?’ was something my boss said to me, frequently, in the few months leading to my unceremonious departure.
I would have to swallow down, hard, on a deep, heavy sigh. Because when I joined the company in 2000, it was a point of pride with the management that each editor of a Vogue, or a Glamour or a GQ was free to shape it into what they thought their local audience would most love. They were proud that their magazine titles would share some international core values - in Glamour’s case a spirit of positivity and female ambition - but then would each display the cultural loves, hates and idiosyncrasies of their own country. When there was a sudden change to, ‘But you’re all the same mag, why can’t you all run the same stuff?’, I knew we were in some panicky, depressing death throes.
Still, sensing that I no longer had the job security that had been my privilege for around 16 years, I was keen to show willing. At a global conference of Glamour editors, we decided to try to produce a global cover. This was before there was a hard directive about it from our bosses, but we’d all read the room and wanted to see if we actually could do it. This is how we came up with the idea of every edition of Glamour making a magazine that was created by only female contributors. (Typing this is making me really miss those conversations with that group of smart, driven women who were also just really nice people.)
And look here - we did pull it off. Every edition of Glamour ran this cover.
But it was complicated. Here’s a few of the snags we came up against in the process.
Getting a celebrity to agree to be on one cover internationally.
It’s happened too many times for me to count - a celeb publicist would agree a shoot for UK Glamour’s cover and then give me a list of Glamour territories where this shoot MUST NOT APPEAR, usually because they’d promised a rival mag in that country a cover. American Glamour would secure a cover star I’d been desperate for and then I’d find out I was blocked because she/her publicist preferred UK Elle. To find a celebrity who wants to be on one title globally is not always easy.
In fairness, maybe this sort of stuff goes away if all the magazines look the same to begin with, so maybe these globalised mags are winning on this one now. A lot of celebs will no doubt love that one shoot = several covers at once. That’s great if you’re international, hectic phenomenon Harry Styles. The flipside of this is an interesting issue for celebrities. If one celebrity is getting, at any one time, some 25 covers, that’s a lot of lost promotional opportunities for other celebrities and any record or film companies who wanted that prestigious PR. Smaller, more local celebrities could potentially lose out big time if global magazines need a Harry Styles-level celebrity for every issue.
Getting a world of editors to agree on one cover star
Oh dear god. I remember being thrilled when Cindi Leive, editor of US Glamour, emailed us all to say Zendaya, soon to be starring in the Spiderman films, would do this global cover. Granted, she was not ‘the name’ she is now. Not yet. But I knew she was going to be. I’d seen her on various kids’ shows my daughter watched and knew she was crazy talented. Also, insanely beautiful. It was only a matter of minutes before several editors started saying they just couldn’t see her being able to sell their cover. Many of them didn’t yet know who she was. This was a common problem in conversations about celebrities with international editions. I found the French, in particular, exceedingly picky about celebs. Their audiences always seemed to prefer a lesser known model as long as she looked like she spent her days smoking and reading poetry in cafes. The French editors always tended to be slightly aghast at the idea of a hugely famous person on their cover.
So, Cindi and I successfully steamrollered our way to having Zendaya. But that in itself is pretty sucky for the ‘smaller’ Glamours, no? Is this happening all the time with the more dominant titles of each brand just calling the shots?
This kind of centralised decision making could ultimately be disastrous for individual territories if you’re constantly being forced to have content that you just know your local audience won’t like.
I don’t see this problem going away in this bold new global cover world. American GQ will continue to want to put baseball and basketball players on their covers, British GQ will still want the likes of Harry Kane. Realistically, how many even really famous people are going to ‘land’ in every single global territory?
Getting every magazine onto the newsstand at the same time.
Glamour UK released a new issue in the last few days of the month - that’s how you ended up seeing the September issue in late July. (I don’t know why that is and we’re not supposed to ask.) Several other editions released their new one in the middle of the month. Others, the very first day of any given month. If you’re going to all have the same cover, this is a problem. Global news websites will pick up and report on the interview and photos of that celebrity from the second it's revealed. That is a potential sales disaster for any of the other editions that come out later. If you’re living in Britain and you’ve already read the story about Zendaya on Mail Online, why bother picking up British Glamour when it comes out a fortnight later? It’s not a simple thing, aligning on-sale dates. It’s a whole eco-system of pre-ordained orders and schedules: printing presses, paper supplies, warehouse storage, transportation trucks, retailer space - all of these things would have to go back to square one, in every country, in order to all suddenly be appearing on newsstands on the same day. Never gonna happen.
And because American Glamour sorted this cover, they got to demand to be on newsstands first and the rest of us had to just live with it.
Deciding who controls the art direction on the one shoot.
Ego-a-go. This is where everyone starts pleading that their country’s audience won’t like the same thing that your country’s will. Frankly, a lot of this gets sorted by the fact that the publicist will have a huge say in who’s taking the pictures. Then you have to just get your head around that whatever that photographer’s aesthetic is, that’s what you’re getting. But the nightmares keep on coming. ‘In our country, they hate cover girls wearing trousers’. ‘Britain calling, PLEASE don’t plaster her in too much make-up, and can we please not have a hot pink background’. ‘My boss won’t let me run a cover unless she’s covered in accessories, so here are the brands I need her to wear (and this is usually a list of brands that are just not a thing in other countries. Something these expensive consultants refused to hear when asking why we didn’t all just print the same fashion shoots).’
I’ve written before about the amount of creative tensions that somehow rub together to make an image. This takes it to a whole new level.
Again, I’m sure this sort of stuff has been ironed out to a huge degree in a world where global covers are becoming more commonplace. But I know of one big magazine brand where two editors-in-chief battle it out behind the scenes, each individually phoning stylists and photographers to tell them to ignore the direction of the other editor. Fun.
Criticisms if you all use the same picture.
If I were an editor now, I’d want to assert my country’s individuality - and yes, OK, my individual creative stamp - by at least having the freedom to choose my own cover image. I’d have done what the American and British Rolling Stone editors did and made damn sure my cover was different to the rest. What the hell is the point of even being an editor if you can’t do that much? Because I’m totally on the side of the readers who would be disappointed to see their favourite magazine looking so dull and one note. I don’t see ‘brand power’ when I look at that grid of Harry sitting on his garden chair and many other commentators, Ian above included, are confused by why so many editions used that one picture. Furthermore, isn’t Harry one of the very few stars whose fans would be inspired to collect a world of different magazine covers? What a missed sales-boosting opportunity.
Criticisms if you don’t all use the same picture.
Years ago, British and American Glamour scored their own individual shoots with Emma Watson.
We’d argued successfully that our audiences demanded different things from covers. Internally, a senior executive complained to us that this was bad for the brand. Maybe this person was right, but I disagree. I think readers are interested in the different ways different creative teams make pictures and words. Isn’t that one of the whole damn points of magazines?
If you’re a manager of a magazine company reading this, I know you will be rolling your eyes at my economic naivety. I know - I know - it’s expensive to produce magazines. And when the income is being outstripped by expenditure, rationalities that were once unthinkable must now be considered. But my point is, this strategy is not going to convince readers to return to magazines.
My friend Joseph is an avid consumer of fashion magazines. He tells me he wants to buy Italian, French, British, American, Japanese Vogue, and more, precisely because he wants to sample fashion and culture from all these wildly different countries. He doesn’t want to see the same cover images and shared fashion photography inside. ‘I subscribe to all of these magazines, but what’s the point if they’re all basically the same?’
To me, the drive to cut costs - and hire corporate consulting firms who don’t understand a thing about magazine publishing - has exposed that those in charge of magazines are now demonstrating a fundamental failure to understand the magazine readers who still really love to support them. Like Joseph. It also exposes the fact that actually, the reader is the very last person being considered in this strategy.
It always fascinated me that there was money for expensive consultancy firms, who asked questions like ‘What is a magazine feature?’ and glamorous new offices full of ever-expanding teams of digital experts with fancy titles like ‘head of story-telling’. But the thing that, without question, had to have its legs cut off was apparently the actual product - the magazine.
So in case I’ve been too subtle, here’s my opinion on print magazines globally sharing content: It sucks.
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So interesting!!