• by June 20, 2005

WHO'S THE KING OF MAGAZINE PRODUCT PLACEMENT? APPARENTLY, IT'S 'THE KING' - Assemble a group of the world's greatest magazine editors to draft something important and you'd think they'd at least come up with something readable. As it turns out, the publishing arts may be a lot like the culinary ones. And you know what they say about too many cooks. Apparently there were a few too many fingers in the American Association of Magazine Editors' official guidelines, according to Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, a publication that has never been known to be either verbose or confusing. Whitaker, one of the heads of the ASME committee that's redrafting the guidelines acknowledged they have grown, "Very long-winded, very convoluted." So much so, Whitaker conceded, "Even we cannot tell what they mean sometimes."

Whitaker made this disclosure during last week's Association of National Advertisers' Print Advertising Forum in New York, where he also said the new guidelines would specifically address "new trends" in the church and state relationships of American magazines, especially product placement. Given the verbosity of the current ASME guidelines, it's hard to know whether they were written more by the church than the state, but Whitaker implied the new testament would be more theological in nature, suggesting they would be whittled down to "11 or 12 commandments."

If Paul Woolmington - a renowned chef by anyone's account, and head of The Media Kitchen - had his way, these new commandments might be written in changeable type or electronic bits, not etched in stone. He predicted the magazine industry would embrace the kind of product placement deals that the TV industry has within the next "three to five years."

Newsweek's Whitaker was far less sanguine, suggesting that TV's rapture with branded entertainment comes out of a weakness - the fact that people hate TV commercials and are looking to evade them - unlike magazine advertising, which is "liked" by consumers. "This is a problem that does not exist in magazines," he asserted.

For his part, Woolmington thought the whole product placement debate was a bit of a side show to the more fundamental issues confronting the magazine business, noting, "I think we are under a much broader pressure than just branded entertainment and magazines: Proving ROI and acknowledging that the consumer doesn't like advertising."

Woolmington later qualified that statement, noting, "Consumers by and large don't like advertising unless it is entertaining, relevant, and in the right context."

To that point, Martha Nelson, managing editor of People magazine pointed out a form of magazine product placement that was entertaining, relevant, and in the right context, and one that apparently passed muster with the editors of the Time Inc. pub.

To promote its recent "Elvis" special, CBS placed an audio microchip in People magazine that, when opened, played a performance by The King himself.

"You opened the magazine and got Elvis," marveled Nelson, adding that it was an element that generated some of the greatest positive editorial feedback, including calls from friends.

"They weren't calling me to say, 'Hey, great cover story,'" she recalled.