Fifty years ago, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy sanitised sex for the masses and men in their millions bought into it. At its peek in 1972 it sold more than 7.2-million copies a month. It now sells a mere 3 million odd. Of course, as every subscriber would tell you, there was more to it than bare-breasted women with indistinct genitals. It was about style. Today’s men’s magazines are more specific; they’re about “lifestyle”.
To paraphrase Julie Irwin, writing in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Playboy was about Armani suited gents advising how to fix the perfect martini spread among photos of scantily clad, pouting, women. Spot the difference? Yeah, right.
Talk of men’s magazines in South Africa, and most people reckon it’s a two-horse race between the über-lad mags, Men’s Health (85,000 copies/month) and FHM (91,000 copies/month). Theoretically, media analysts and decision makers should include the gun-toter’s magazine, Man/Magnum (28,000 copies/month) and traditional lifestyle mag, GQ (41,000 copies/month). And possibly the full-frontal beaver book, Hustler (47,000 copies/month).
But as the market has expanded so too has the definition of what constitutes a “men’s mag”. What were labelled as “niche” or “special interest” categories now form part of the target for male magazine editors and marketers. (And we’re not even looking at the male sports mags such as SA Sports Illustrated, or Kick Off, etc.) Publications such as the recently launched Popular Mechanics (23,000 copies/month), the established Getaway (95,000 copies/month) and, of course, Car (109,000 copies/month) can all be considered men’s magazines. [All figures above from ABC July-Sept 2003].
Be that as it may, the growth in the market has certainly been driven by Men’s Health and FHM. Touchline Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media24, launched Men’s Health in 1997 in partnership with United States publisher, Rodale Press. The worldwide success of the title – published in more than 27 countries, it remains the largest male magazine brand in the world – did not escape South Africa, where it was one of the most successful magazine launches in history.
Still, as in the rest of the world, Men’s Health was under siege from a crop of magazines that weren’t overly concerned with the “49 Health Checks That’ll Save Your Life”. More interesting to the contenders was: “17 Ways to Score the Boss’s Wife”. Mags like FHM and the locally short-lived Maxim – all of which were spawned in the United Kingdom, the home of the tabloid press – represented what one writer called the “hooligan movement”.
FHM launched in South Africa in 1999 and it too can claim to be one of the publishing success stories of the decade. FHM publisher Kim Browne is on record saying that it has a “strict no nudity policy”, but this may have more to do with the sensitivity of the Naspers board than with the sensibility of the editorial department. (UpperCase Media, which publishes FHM in SA, is a 50 percent-owned business unit of Media24, the print operation of Naspers, and Emap PLC). It also acknowledges the squeamishness of the advertisers and retail outlets.
Despite claims that it delivers “quality content” for which advertisers are willing to pay a premium, magazines like FHM, Maxim, Loaded and Stuff rampage on the gross side of life with tales of mutilation (the year’s best sport’s injuries), fighting dwarves and sex. As one lad-mag editor put it, they strive to release “the inner swine”. Maxim last year ran a fitness story about beating up people to keep in shape. The local FHM ran a piece on a New York dominatrix punting a “fitness” regime called “Slavercise”. Of course, a lot of this is tongue-in-cheek stuff and the more serious you take it the more the editors hoot and pull your chain.
The competition in the UK (and USA) for these markets is a lot more intense, and understandably the local offspring of FHM is a lot tamer than it’s UK parent. This year, IPC Media (who publish Loaded) plan to launch a weekly in the UK, called Nuts, to take on ZOO, Emap’s latest salvo in the beer and tits market. Both camps reportedly told the Wall Street Journal that they intend spending more than UK£14 million (about R175 million) marketing the titles and hope to reach a circulation of between 150,000 and 200,000 per week within a year. Emap says it will look at both the USA and South Africa as possible markets for its weekly.
Yet Men’s Health has consistently managed to sell more advertising pages than FHM. A page count in a recent issue matched 110 pages of advertising in Men’s Health against 33 in FHM. At roughly R25,000 per page, even your average FHM reader can work out the math and figure who’s pulling the cash here.
The reason? Part demographics and part advertiser cringe. Men’s Health sells to an older market: more than 60 percent of its readers are in the 25 to 39 age bracket as opposed to some 50 percent in the 16 to 24 bracket for FHM. And media decision-makers do ask whether their client really wants its product alongside a picture of a naked fat backside that’s undergone radical surgery to remove a malevolent cyst. However, as any media buyer will tell you, “the money will go where the readers are”, and Men’s Health is beginning to look a bit last millennium.
Today’s youngsters sucking on FHM‘s porcelain servings of excess and splay-legged models are the ones who will be working in the ad agencies tomorrow. They’ll go for what they know. Both magazines are going after the retail fashion, travel, transportation and health and beauty categories, and while Men’s Health may corner the banking and business-to-business sector it can’t be long before FHM starts to eat from those pies as well.
Then there is the possibility of a conservative backlash. In the UK, conservative groups have successfully lobbied some stores of the supermarket chain ASDA to pull copies of Loaded from its shelves because customers felt it was too explicit. In the USA, supermarket giant Wal-Mart pulled Maxim for being “too explicit”. Will Pick ‘n Pay follow suit?
Of course the walking wounded of the sector is GQ, which has dropped from 12 to eight issues per year. Launch editor Daniel Ford recently moved on to start his own company and was replaced by Craig Tyson. GQ should have dominated the fashion scene (when Men’s Health launched, they thought GQ was there biggest threat) but didn’t. Perhaps that’s because it failed to appeal to the new urban black (fashion-conscious) audience and because it is based in Cape Town. Tyson has injected a more light-hearted tone to the mag, but it remains a fairly serious read.
The Dec/Jan issue cover lines promised Arno Carstens giving the low down on groupies; the actual story devoted a paragraph to the subject with Carstens saying you shouldn’t shag them. Right. The rest of the piece examined his (interesting) ideas about rock ‘n roll and Afrikaans music rather than what it’s like to come off the stage after a three hour gig and get your socks rocked off by three strange women.
But magazines like Getaway and Car, both published by Ramsay, Son & Parker, tap into a consistent market without the “inner swine” content, and both increased circulation by more than seven and eight percent respectively over the last year. Perhaps the most exciting of this stable’s entries is Popular Mechanics, which launched in August 2002. Editor Alan Duggan says the December circulation figures were up to 26,000 – a growth of 18 percent over the first half of 2003 – and more than 10,000 of these are subscribers. A recent reader survey showed that the readership is 98 percent male and that most of them keep all the magazines for future reference.
“We hope we will be the first magazine to buck the trend in South Africa,” says Duggan, “and become predominantly subscriber driven.”
The magazine does a lot to woo and keep its readers. As Duggan says: “When you’re competing on the bookstore and supermarket shelves with titles that promise ’10 Positions For Outdoor Sex’ you can’t really rely on ‘Goodbye Traffic Jams’ to get someone to put their hand in their wallet.”
Irwin points out that with men’s magazines the formula for success is simple, but the reasons for success are a little more complex. A combination of up-yours political incorrectness (not for nothing is FHM interpreted by some as “Female Hate Magazine”), an increasingly competitive marketplace and, of course, sex. With pornography becoming more mainstream – porn stars now make Celebrity A-Lists – and women’s magazines becoming more explicit (even Redbook runs stories on how to have a better orgasm), publishers keep pushing the boundaries of taste to keep their share of the market.
Is it the editorial decision to run a story about an interrupted blow job that prompts an advertiser to use a blow-up doll to sell deodorant or vice versa? As the lads would say: “Does it matter?”