John Owen
Editors are biting fingernails and journalists are whispering in the corridors as the neck-on-neck magazine market prepares itself for the arrival of a kick- ass competitor in the form of Y, a new magazine written by young black people for young black people.
The fire behind all the smoke has come into view with news of a conference scheduled to take place in the Magaliesberg next week. Jointly hosted by Studentwise, the publishers of SL magazine, and YFM, South Africa’s largest regional radio station, the conference is intended as a birthing ground for the new youth title.
Y is due to make a noisy appearance on the already crowded media stage in October this year.
The conference will be geared towards overcoming the structural limitations that force youth market magazines like SL, Epic Culture, Vibe, Blush and Top 40 to service different readership ghettos in order to appeal to specialised advertising sectors.
Drawing on the successes of the two partners, the new magazine will be aimed at combining the expertise of SL’s editorial staff with the kwaito and hip hop energies of YFM, which boasts more than half a million listeners in Lifestyle Standards Measure’s Supergroup A – the big spenders.
SL was recent awarded an Advantage Admag Grand Prix for Editorial Excellence and a Mondi Premier Award for Features.
YFM’s latest Radio Audience Measurement Survey (Rams) figure is 944 000 weekly, and between 389 000 and 573 000 daily.
The new title is intended to fill a gap in South Africa’s cultural consciousness that SL – despite its brave attempts to reach a cross-over youth audience – can never hope to fill because of limitations imposed by the necessities of the marketplace.
In a South Africa still suffering from an apartheid hangover, the concept ”youth market” is about as amorphous and contested as the term ”youth” itself.
No one is really sure what the youth market is, or where it’s located. The kwaito- loving trendoid is not the same as the Prodigy fan.
Often, these differences are racially demarcated. If the rainbow nation is a myth, the rainbow youth is a total illusion.
The relationship between SL and Y is intended to be a symbiotic one. SL editor Kate Wilson says the relationship between the two titles is a move towards establishing the first multiracial youth-market product to succeed in this country.
While they remain separate titles, the link is made obvious in the pay-off lines of the two magazines: SL’s line is currently ”SL – everything you know is wrong”, and it is proposed that Y will read ”Y – because I want to know”.
Analysis of these pay-off lines is revealing. The one for SL magazine expresses the existential uncertainty of young white people whose security has been compromised by history.
The Y pay-off line encapsulates the positive confidence of a free black youth.
The aspiration is to have an intelligent and interactive relationship between two effectively competing titles that feed off each other. Y will certainly have the capability to make a large impact on the local youth market. And it’s not going to be a package that mirrors the market either – or at least not overtly.
The biggest mistake any youth market advertiser or medium could make is to assume that its target audience wants to be targeted. Says Robert Senior of United States advertising magazine Shots: ”There’s nothing more irritating for a teenager than being force-fed some kind of pan-European version in this case pseudo- American of what an agency’s research is telling them is hip.
”Kids look at ads where all the baseball caps are turned.”
12