Internet Marketing: April 2007

What makes a good magazine Cover?
First off, I would like to explain that a good cover look for one magazine is not going to necessarily work for another magazine. It all depends on the audience for the magazine. I imagine some magazines thrive off of subscriptions and others especially new ones need to sell based on impulse buys at the magazine stand or through Internet promotions.
For guys, I suspect that a good cover has a scantily clad woman with cover lines that promise more pictures inside. How about Paris Hilton Exposed as a cover line for a men's magazine. Then add a picture of Paris in underwear and another cover line stating Paris exclusive pictorial inside.
For women, I suspect that a good cover has a beautiful woman about the same age and the target audience wearing some really “in-style” clothes and wearing some “newly in-style” jewelry. The cover lines usually have the word sex and often times talk about sexual performance enhancement or “normalcy” of just about anything.
How much time do working woman spend doing ...cooking, shopping, driving the kids around, how much sex is normal, do clothes make a difference in the job interview? Shoot I even remember picking up my wife's magazine and reading about “how men measure up in the sack” or something like that to see what the magazines are saying about us men. Good covers entice people to pick up the magazine and to feel they will learn something by buying it that has more value than the $5 they spend to buy it.

A good magazine cover:
1) Has a title that appeals to a group of people.
2) Has a picture or art or words that stimulate the senses of targeted audiences for the advertising inside.
3) Jumps out of the magazine stand due to contrast or color or graphics.
4) Has used the top left corner to help entice someone to pick it up when it is on a rack with only the top left 4 inches showing.
5) Has the title in the top 4 inches so it shows on a rack when it is not in the front position.
6) Appeals to as wide an audience as possible without alienating any of the targeted audience.
7) Can portray the visual image that the magazine wants to portray. Good reading on this subject can be found in the book “Seeing is Believing” by Arthur Asa Berger.

Example of a bad cover:
A Vogue magazine with a scantily clad bimbo on the front cover.
A Playboy magazine with the picture of a family camping on the cover.
A popular person’s picture on the cover but distorted or defaced.

Here is a brief look at how magazine covers have changed over time.
Starting in the 1700's with simple magazine name like an old book cover to the frenzy of words adorning today's magazine covers.
Early magazine covers. 1700's-1800's
The earliest magazines had covers that looked like books with not much visually enticing art or words. Slowly magazines added the table-of-contents cover. Most early magazines had either a book looking cover or a table of contents looking cover.
“The book-like cover co-existed through the 1700s and 1800s” along with some symbolic covers like the pillars used on the Mothers magazine from 1844. Interesting that the table of contents cover was used by Readers Digest to 1990. Cover lines did make an appearance. “2 haunting questions Should we use cover lines? If so, how many, and where should we put them?”

The Poster Cover: “Pictures That Need No Words” 1920's - 1960's
“The covers of many of these over sized magazines looked as if they were printed to be framed and hung on the wall.”
Poster covers were used prominently from the 1920s until the 1960s. Also note that magazines have not increased that much in price over the last 100 years. For example, Fortune in the depths of the Depression in 1930 was $1 a copy or $10 a year. Now Fortune is $1.15 each issue at Amazon when purchased for a year. It seems to me like the advertisers pay for the cost of publishing the magazine and the actual price of each magazine is set to provide perceived worth to the customer. How valuable is a magazine that is free???

Pictures Married to Type 1900's to 1970's
The Quest for the Perfect Relationship
Note that Maxim magazine today and McClure's of 1916 use the same look.- a large title with the model's face overlapping it - a model in a (nearly) full body pose- a model in an unusual and expressive posture - cover lines on all sides of her, carefully positioned in relation to the model and the background
Here we find words on the cover to help sell the magazine. It could be a story line or a name of a famous person. Often times the poster style was offset to the side to make room for more words. It was later in the forest of words that the words took over the whole cover. Interesting way to describe a cover “is in this cover a combination of activity and repose, a restful confidence combined with outdoor recreation” Wow! I hope I can have more that pictures and words and create a feeling or emotion that causes the consumer to buy my magazine because of the great cover.

In the Forest of Words 1990's - today
“For most magazines at the turn of the 21st century, cover lines were as important as cover art.” So the words have taken over as the prominent part of magazine covers and hence the period is described as “in the forest of words”. Now the words are all over the cover and partially covering the background picture or poster art. People now are buying magazines on impulse based on the cover and it had better tell a story that entices the consumer to buy it. Popular pictures are of scantily clad women or women in underwear. Popular words for the cover include SEX, Money, Learn, Look Sexy, Makeup, Designer,new and improved, healthy, green (planet stuff), natural, retirement. Words play into the advertising and the articles play into the advertising too.

Actually we do not get much true editorial content in magazines anymore, since if a magazine says anything bad about its advertisers products it will probably loose that advertiser. So in my opinion, magazines exist for advertisers and the consumer pays the price.

Here are the results of going to Barnes and Noble and seeing what magazines jumped out of the stand.
6. Magazine Display Rack Cover Evaluation
a) Name 6 magazines that stand out.
RIDE
– Caught my eye with it’s Giant Letters in simple type
Cowboys and Indians
– Sepia cover and full cover exposed and at the best display location of eye level. I tended to not look at the ones on the floor level.
O
– I saw this one first because it had a big yellow square in the top left corner of the cover.
Jewelry
White background black type and simple typeface like Ariel.
Guitarist
- White letters on dark background – title fills total width of cover in a font with a serif.

b) How visible are the magazine names on the magazines you can see.
- All the magazines that popped out of the crowd had a Name that was clear and easy to see and read with lots of contrast except the sepia magazine.
c) Describe three possible strategies that Get Your Attention!
1) High Contrast
2) Black on White
3) Big bright color square in top left corner with single letter in the square. Like O and Q magazines.

Now I am off to design a great magazine cover.