• by Ken Liebeskind , March 1, 2002

Recently, many magazines have lost significant ad revenue and many have gone out of business, but the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, hailed by some as the Super Bowl of magazines, is a continued success story.

SI’s average weekly issue has 50 ad pages, but this year's swimsuit edition, which hit the stands last week, boasted 110 ad pages, a 25% jump from last year, according to associate publisher Grayle Howlett.

"We did a better job of retaining advertisers from last year and added new ones," he says. "It was good timing and selling on our part."

Warner Brothers ran a three-page spread to promote three new movies and MCI came back after a long absence. Among the new advertisers were Alka Seltzer, Under Amour, and XM Satellite Radio. Not all of the ads were simple page prints – Giorgio Armani’s Acqua di Gio and the Sci Fi channel’s upcoming miniseries “Firestarter Rekindled” ran scent strips.

Advertisers got a 4.5 million circulation guarantee, compared with 3.15 million for a weekly issue. Newsstand sales jumped to 1.5 million from the average 75,000 for a weekly issue.

"SI has benefited from the fact that sports has been a good comfort area for people,” Howlett says. “We took a hit in Q4 for travel and other ads, but if you look at how people have rallied around sports, we've been a benefactor. It's an escape for people and a nice way to get away from the trauma."

"And advertising goes along with that," he says. "It's an environment that is safe and comfortable as opposed to news weeklies where you might be opposite controversial edit."

But it’s not all about print ads. Accompanying the release of the magazine on Feb. 19 was a special Swimsuit section on CNNsi.com, which included photos not available in the magazine. "We go with the magazine and get integrated deals," says John Trimble, director of advertising at CNNsi. Among the advertisers were Levi's, the Air Force, Toyota and Boston Beer, all of whom also appeared in the magazine. Online they used a wide variety of rich media formats.

"It's similar to the magazine, it's huge for us," Trimble says. "We do 50 million page views in a week and a half - it's the biggest online opportunity in a concentrated period."