Magazine publishers fighting for survival in face of falling sales and declining advertising are wasting their most powerful weapon.
That weapon is the cover and entries have been flooding in from across the industry for The Maggies – the first-ever Magazine Covers of the Year awards. You can see the winning titles on www.themaggies.co.uk and they share a high standard of imaginative design and sales impact.
But what concerned me, as one of the judging panel that selected the short-lists, was the poor standard of the great bulk of the entries. And these were no run-of-the-mill selection – they had been submitted by publishers, editors and art directors in a conscious choice as their very best covers of the year.
So what was wrong? In a word – words. Far, far too many of them.
A cover is essentially a recruitment poster. Not a familiar sight for regular readers who will know where it is on a crowded news-stand. Its job is to jump out of the throng and grab the attention of the passing traffic; to win new readers and win back lapsed readers with the promise that this issue is really special.
Research shows that shoppers visiting a sales point with the general idea of buying a magazine (not picking up a regular purchase) spend between 5 to 7 seconds looking at any one magazine.
Their eye is first caught by the main image on the cover, then a strong coverline linked to that image. Hopefully, the next step is to lift the magazine from the shelf and study supporting coverlines that sell the most exciting features to be found inside. Not everything.
So many magazines have turned their covers into veritable contents pages with the main image struggling to break through heavy curtains of type.
One of Condé Nast’s entries was Glamour magazine (and remember this employs one of the smallest formats on the news-stand). There we had Keira Knightley poking her head out of an assemblage of no less than 78 words of coverlines. The publishers assured us that a celebrity face and a glimpse of one shoulder was enough to give a sales uplift of 5% but since the main coverline proclaimed “YOUR BODY’S SEXIEST CLOTHES” it might have been even more effective to show a little more of what she was wearing.
As it was, the largest piece of her dress on view was submerged between 10 words of a coverline reading: “Stalker nightmare – He hid in my room while I slept.” No wonder Keira looked so serious.
Even so, Glamour was relatively taciturn compared with IPCMedia’s Rugby World (110 words of coverlines); Nat Mags’ She (109); Esquire (100 and 89 for two separate entries); and Good Housekeeping (95); and OK (83). Tilllate clubbing magazine (108) and Small World travel and leisure magazine (98) did their best to compete with the big boys. To be fair, Time magazine carried only four words and Creative Review none.
The idea behind The Maggies was that shortlists in six different categories would be selected by a professional panel but that the winners would be choice of the public (just as they make their pick from what is presented to them on the news-stand).
Significantly all six receiving the most votes carried less coverlines than the average for their sector. That principle was almost breached by Bauer’s Q magazine which the judging panel awarded the title of overall Magazine Cover of the Year. This carried all of 59 words of coverlines but the difference was that the typography was dramatic and the words were positioned so as not to intrude on the striking image of pop star Lily Allen in the company of two black panthers.
There’s a very big difference between coverlines carefully placed to support the image and those merely scattered over the image; between a busy cover and one that is just messy.
In these days of reduced consumer spending it is understandable that publishers want their covers to offer value for money by promising there’s so much more inside.
But this is counter-productive if all those words crowd out the message and weaken the overall impact.
A proud chef may be tempted to list every single dish of his a la carte menu on a board outside his door in the hope of attracting passing trade. But if the restaurant doesn’t look attractive you don’t bother to cross the street and read the words.
Another worrying aspect of current cover design is an apparent inability to recognise that the requirement is to produce something which demands attention by being immediately visible among those congested shelves; which is extrovert rather than recessive.
This is where the colour palette is crucial. Research in this area shows that people are most easily drawn to covers using red and blue against a pale background. Yet no less than 40% of the entries were predominantly black and brown. What more certain way of fading into the background?
Media analyst Jim Bilton (www.wessenden.com) points out that while magazines sales are continuing to decline overall (down 10 per cent year on year) subscriptions are showing a slow but steady increase.
If more and more readers are preferring to commit for a whole 12 months to a magazine that arrives sight unseen through the letterbox, it would suggest to me that publishers are not working hard enough to win back readers in those precious 5 to 7 seconds at the news-stands.
Peter Jackson