Stuart Elliott
Before the recession, magazines had little in common with marsupials. Now, though, magazine covers are starting to sport pouches.
For instance, the cover of the September issue of a Hearst magazine, House Beautiful, will include a pouch containing a chart that readers can pull out and save. The chart, offering tips on choosing colours for home decorating, carries an advertisement on the back for Glidden paints, part of a new campaign with the theme ?Glidden gets you going.?
What gets magazines? and other traditional media?going these days is the need for new sources of revenue. Although back covers of magazines have carried ads for decades, the front covers had long been sacrosanct as pitch-free zones. But just as newspapers have begun to sell ads on the front pages of sections, magazines are selling space on or inside front covers.
For example, Entertainment Weekly magazine, part of the Time Inc division of Time Warner, included a pocket on the cover of its April 3 issue that contained a pullout ad for a new series on ABC, ?The Unusuals.?
Esquire magazine, also published by Hearst, printed special covers for its February and May issues with special ads that appeared on the back side of editorial content. The proliferation of ads associated with front covers concerns an organisation representing the editorial side of the magazine business because of the potential for blurring the line between paid and unpaid content. ?There?s no problem with advertising appearing next to editorial,? said Sid Holt, chief executive at the American Society of Magazine Editors in New York. ?Our concern is the use of a cover for advertising purposes alone.?
The organisation gave a thumbs down to the Entertainment Weekly cover because, Holt said, ?the cover had been altered to support advertising.?