Commentary

Playboy Puts Its Clothes On For Apple's iPhone

Playboy-App-B2The Playboy brand has been playing peekaboo with the Apple iPhone now for several years. The prudish Apple App Store has rejected outright any attempts by the brand to bring its signature nudity to smartphones, as the mobile app gateway has also turned away so many others.

Playboy has taken a few abortive attempts at bringing preview versions of its magazine content to the iPhone and the iPad, but we can’t recall either getting much traction. It has done a successful end run around Apple censorship by creating a subscriber-only Web app that is optimized for the tablet. The iPlayboy.com site is a remarkable archive of every issue of the magazine in a digitally browsable form.

But the magazine has struggled to find an identity on smartphones. This week Playboy comes onto the iPhone featuring content that both previews the current issue and also tries to highlight the content that is most valuable to a mobile user. So this app features content about travel, food, drink, cars, gear and style -- all in nice chewable content chunks.

To its credit, the app is refreshed daily with five or six new elements including the necessary pictorial. As one would expect, the Apple filtered version of Playboy is clothed -- often just barely. In another smart move, the magazine piles on the cheesecake. We get clothed versions of our playmates and models, but we get a couple of dozen images of each. Ratchet through them quickly enough and you may actually imagine yourself seeing them naked. And -- also good for Playboy -- we get a video version of our cover girl, and the entire app is extremely well polished and smoothly designed. They finally got an app that communicates some of the plush qualities of the brand.

And yes -- there are articles here, including the latest interviews, forums, features, and the 20 questions. Subscribers, at $19.99 a year or $1.99 a month, get access to substantially more content. But the app has a fair sampling for the free use audience.

Do people really want some sort of Playboy presence on their iPhone that is aimed mainly at content consumption rather than specific utility? We will see. The company says it is really getting behind this one by leveraging its considerable social media fan base across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and even Pinterest and Viddy. I must admit, that I have given up trying to understand Playboy’s digital strategy a while ago.

Back in the 1990s, then CEO Christie Hefner was a genuine pioneer and cheerleader for digital platforms -- among the only magazine executives you would ever find at the first digital media shows. In fact, in those early days, Playboy -- along with The Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports -- were the only print brands that seemed to demonstrate that people would pay for some content online. 

But the Playboy.com site, even though it was among the first magazines on the Internet, went through so many different content and revenue models I lost track. Under new leadership, the company now describes itself as more of a branding and licensing enterprise than a real content creation machine. Nevertheless, in this app, as in the magazine and Web site, there is still that persistent Playboy brand product -- velour elegance and some aspirational notion of success grounded in the accumulation of stuff, both animate and inanimate.

 

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