Tuesday, May 13, 2008
As the lad mags in the U.K. wither, their American counterparts try to give the formula one more squeeze.
Oct 1, 1999 | About five years ago, before it was so easy to make big bucks writing for the World Wide Web, I had a near-miss experience with advertorial. A large tobacco company hired me to "consult" with them about a magazine for men they were planning. A magazine for real men, the kind who like to smoke. They had already shopped a prototype to focus groups of men who smoked one of their manly brands of cigarettes. All I had to do was create something along the lines of the dummy magazine they had created.
The dummy had no stories, mind you. Maybe a headline or two -- "On the Road," or "When Blues Get Hot" -- and all the photos were from stock. Guys in pickups, hoisting tallboys. Guys in pool halls, sizing up the kind of sultry, tight-jeaned babes you only see in beer commercials. Guys rafting, surfing, biking and, oh yeah, smoking. The text was dummy text -- "loeahkh fenasnmn xzoehrnl" and words to that effect -- and there were no ads. They didn't need them. The whole magazine was an ad.
I left before that magazine became a reality (and before Satan took my soul) but about two years later I saw something very similar. It was called Maxim and it had been transplanted from the U.K. where it and its brethren -- known as "lad mags" there -- were doing quite nicely. The United States followed suit and by May of this year the American Maxim had over 100 ad pages per issue.
The product of Dennis Publishing (whose owner, Felix Dennis, once appointed a hamster as interim editor, figuring it could choose photos of chicks as well as the next fellow), Maxim followed a simple formula. Lots of pictures of scantily clad women busting out of underwear and lingerie, accompanied by slim articles about the women (often models, B-movie or cable TV actresses). Consumer stories about tools and toys. And guy tales of sex -- getting some, getting none, bad dates, a-
This did not win it respect among the other men's magazines. "That whole magazine is aimed at losers," Art Cooper, editor of GQ, snarled. "Their advertising is beer, underwear and condoms. I always wonder why there is so much condom advertising because their readers are all masturbators."
You may recall that Onan's sin was spilling his seed on the ground, so perhaps the readers are sanctimonious masturbators, but no matter. No one argues with success, and soon all of the men's mags were paying respect to Maxim with the sincerest form of flattery. Suddenly, big-breasted babes were jumping out of every men's magazine you could find. The competing editors expressed surprise when the trend was noted, of course; they spat when the name Maxim was uttered and denied dumbing down to fit the Maxim model. But the pressure was on. As Maxim's readership grew -- the thing boasted a circulation of over a million -- the others seemed to stagnate. GQ was hovering in the 800,000 range, Esquire was about 600,000 -- only Men's Health, which has done more to fetishize the male body than anything since "Scorpio Rising," bested it, with an estimated 1.6 million copies sold in May.
Condi Nast decided that it would steal away Maxim's canny editor, Mark Golin. After months of denying that changes were afoot, the company tapped Golin for the job of editor at the languishing Details (though the announcement was made in March, he was bound by his Maxim contract until this summer), sending editor Michael Caruso packing. Maxim brought in the aforementioned Mike Soutar, onetime editor of FHM (formerly For Him Magazine). The great sucking sound continues across the Atlantic, leaving us to wonder: Who will edit Britain's trashy glossies? Suddenly Art Cooper had to face bumping into the man he once called a one-trick pony in the new Condi Nast building and Mike Soutar had to learn to call a lift an elevator.
But a funny thing happened since those hirings and firings: The lad mags began tanking. As reported in the New York Times earlier this month, FHM's circulation declined almost 10 percent from June 1998 to June 1999. It's now about 700,000. (Circulation had grown over 50 percent in the previous year.) And Loaded, another laddie, was in even worse straits, dropping almost 15 percent in circulation. Even Maxim U.K. felt the sting, dropping 3 percent of its circulation where it had risen by over 60 percent the year before.
Now come the October issues of Details and Maxim by new editors Golin and Soutar, respectively. These are the first that they fully had their hands on, and the question is raised: Are they too late? Has the moment for a suds-and-buds revolution already passed? Is the fall-off in interest in lad mags in the U.K. a portent of things to come here? Or will it fail to translate, sort of like Mr. Bean?
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