• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, October 13, 2015

Ah, what a place in time. The magazine cover of the year no doubt is Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair, but the magazine story of the year might indeed be the announcement that this is the last full year Playboy will be displaying full frontal nudity on its pages. Nudity is passe, or will be as of the March, 2016 issue.

Quirky side note: The Playboy.com Website gave up on nude women pictorials and videos last year, and so this is one rare example of the anything-goes Internet acting more conservatively than mainstream media. But that circumstance is due, in large part, to the handy availability of porn all over the Web. So go figure.

Robin Zucker, senior vice president of marketing and digital for Playboy, was the extraordinarily timely guest at MediaPost’s Publishing Insider Summit on Tuesday in Asheville, N.C. and began her session asking attendees, “Who knew Playboy and ‘safe-for-work’ could be used in the same sentence?”

Well, for one, Playboy.com knew. Since giving up nudes, she said, Playboy.com has seen its popularity soar on the site and on social media. The no-nudes news for the magazine, Zucker enthused, was being lauded all over the Internet today, getting respect on Reddit and trending on Twitter.

All because, oddly, so very oddly, of giving up the revolution it started. "In 1953 and through the 80s, nudity was exciting,” Zucker said. “Not that it’s not now. But it’s distracting.”

Back when Playboy, the magazine, was still very cool, it ran a monthly house ad that asked, “What kind of man reads Playboy.” One from 1970 read, “He’s a mover who’s always in sync with the latest sounds. Fact: Playboy is read by half of all men under 35 who purchased record albums in the last six months. And Playboy reaches more men 18 to 34 who own stereo tape component systems and in-car tape equipment than any other magazine. Want to tune into a sound market? Turn to Playboy.”

Alas, those were the days when nudity was still not so. . . distracting. 

But except for the equal revolution in sound equipment, that’s the audience Playboy.com is now getting. And that Playboy the magazine is not. 

Zucker said 77% of Playboy.com’s followers are millennials. The median age of Playboy.com fan is now 30.5. In 2014, before the Website was transformed into a more lifestyle-centric, nude-averse place, the average age was 47.

She said, in fact said that its own research said that on Playboy.com, humor now surpasses “girls” in popularity as Playboy still calls the women who appear, somewhat, if not always fully, dressed on the site.

(That “girls” thing, Zucker said, is just tradition that she insinuated was something that needs to be studied. Go for it.)

It seems interesting to note, Playboy.com made a giant social media splash last year when it published, “Should you catcall her?” a brutally on-point “flowchart” explaining when that loutish street behavior is okay. It “flows” down to two approvable catcall instances:  1) When she is, literally, a cat, and 2) when you have “both consensually [explicitly] agreed to shout sexually suggestive comments to each other in public.” That’s the new kind of Playboy.com material that's making social media blow up, which ought to have be a clear enough sign that times had changed.

The buttoned up Playboy, like Playboy.com, can now go after the same advertisers, and even the same audience, as other men’s publications can and do, without the distraction of. . bare breasts, and so on.

While Maxim might have learned that lesson a long time ago, Hugh Hefner and the rest of Playboy are just coming around, but to be fair, it’s almost as if Playboy invented nudity. Abandoning it, as The New York Times showed, is front page news.

Dressing up is liberating. Zucker said today in Asheville, with advertisers the non-nude Playboy “can go fishing where the fish are. But now we can swim in different lakes and ponds because we’re wearing bathing suits.”

pj@mediapost.com