• by Frank Saxe , October 1, 2002

Browse the women’s magazine section at your favorite newsstand and you will be amazed at how many titles fill the shelf. The old favorites like Cosmo and Good Housekeeping, are still there. But there’s a whole new crop of titles fighting for readers’, and advertisers’, attention. Next March Lifetime cable network will launch its monthly magazine with Hearst. This month Oxygen is upping the ante by playing its trump card – Oprah Winfrey – with a prime time show. At the same time, there are an increasing number of channels vying for women’s attention on television — no surprise, really, since women watch more TV than men. The surprise is that even during an advertising downturn, the sector has held steady, and has even grown to some extent. It’s clear that to programmers, publishers, and marketers, women are still the demographic of choice. But in terms of readership and viewership, the category shows some disturbing trends.

It has been a mixed year for many women’s magazine titles. On the one hand, circulation figures posted their worst showing in five years. One industry analyst blames the continued decline of Publishers Clearing House and American Family Publishers, which had fueled sales for years. Among the women’s titles with the biggest circulation decreases are Self; O, The Oprah Magazine; and Rosie. On the other hand, Vogue had its best September book since 1989. Elle’s ad pages were down 11.5% in the same month. Yet all three of those magazines posted higher advertising revenues. Rosie, for instance, saw its billings surge 135% in the first six months of the year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. In the first half, the number of ad pages for all magazines dropped 9%, while revenues were essentially flat. Few titles appear on the brink of extinction, yet with so many magazines on the newsstand today, many believe a shakeout is coming in the next year.

“We’re in a shakeout,” says Greenwich, CT-based branding consultant Jack Trout. “We’re in a segmenting market where you have new players, and you don’t have a lot of growth in the ad business, so you have more players chasing fewer dollars, and that makes for a shakeout.”

Horizon Media VP/director of planning Eric Blankfein also wonders if there are more women’s magazines than the marketplace can support. He points to the low number of women’s titles that have actually become extinct. “They’ve held their own and there’s a vitality there whether we see a differentiation in product or not.”

Yet standing out is vital to long-term survival, says Meredith Magazine group president Jerry Kaplan. “The ones that are differentiated are the ones that are very successful, and I think if you aren’t you run the risk of being marginalized.”

Some believe there will be fewer outright failures — and more magazines making less money — as the ad pie is cut into smaller and smaller pieces. “There are so many magazines out there, I can’t believe they’re all healthy,” says Deutsch chief media officer Peter Gardiner. Faced with a growing number, he limits Revlon buys to the top 25 women’s titles with beauty content.

But is beauty content what women want? “What a woman wants is one of the great questions which I have not been able to answer, and most people can’t answer it because most women are so complex.” That was Sigmund Freud’s take decades ago. It is something that editors, publishers, and programmers continue to struggle with today. On the one hand, surveys show women want less sex and gossip, yet flashy covers continue to outsell everything else on the shelf.

Kirsten Botts Ward, associate media director at Deutsch, and head of the Revlon account says it’s important to remember that not every woman is reading every magazine, so if it appears they are all giving the same beauty and fashion advice, so be it. “Think of it like having a lipstick in 12 different shades. Different colors and shades appeal to different people.”

Lee Heffernan, SVP of consumer marketing for cable channel WE, is optimistic that the explosion of women’s media indicates that a larger shift is under way. “I think programming for women is still in transition,” she says, explaining that the more dimensions the media outlets convey, the better it is for women. It is, however, a slow process. “It’s hard to change what, on paper, is doing well because very few outlets are going to take that risk.”

Foote, Cone and Belding VP/group media director Maggie Connors agrees that women’s media is in flux. “It has to do with demographics of the baby boomer generation, and it has to do with a shift in priorities. You’re seeing a shakeout in editorial content now. Whoever nails it will do the best.”

On television, in one of the most competitive summers in recent history, Lifetime Television was the top-ranked cable channel. It is the number-one-rated network year-to-date, and August was its eighth consecutive month at the top spot. “Everyone talks about the demise of TV, but women are watching; they’re just very selective about what they watch,” says Barb Reilly, SVP/director of women’s worldwide at Arnold Worldwide. Lifetime, which already has a sister channel dedicated to movies, will soon launch Lifetime Real Women, featuring all reality-based programming. It is also aiming at the periodical rack with the spring 2003 launch of a Lifetime magazine.

Lifetime’s nearly two-decade head start has given it a very healthy lead on upstarts like Oxygen and WE: Women’s Entertainment, but unlike in the print field, the cable channels have been able to more sharply define a personality.

“Lifetime is the friend you want to have because she’s always in a worse situation than you are and makes you feel better about your life. WE is the girlfriend you go clothes shopping with, and Oxygen is the urban sophisticate that you have to be on your best behavior around,” says Heffernan.

The women’s network most in doubt is Oxygen. Despite its high-profile connection to Oprah Winfrey, who owns a 25% stake, it has been unable to gain distribution on most cable systems across the country. It had promised advertisers it would be in 40 million homes by the end of 2002, a target it will surely miss. Connors says the trouble is that with distribution comes advertising. “It has hit that stagnant stage, where they need to invest more money into it in order to make that final push.”

“Oxygen is an interesting idea that has not been executed well,” says Gardiner. “They don’t have near the distribution of cable systems that they need or the cable audience that they need. It’s a brilliant idea, but they’ve got a long way to go.” Still, Deutsch has bought time on Oxygen for Revlon, just not as much as on Lifetime.

Horizon Media VP/director of media planning Eric Blankfein, too, has ignored Oxygen’s critics, and has bought time for clients including Ace Hardware. He remains cautious, however. “Clearance is everything in cable. You can bring the best programming in the world to TV, but if you’re not going to get onto any of the big systems that get into homes, you’ve labeled yourself as a niche network, and when it comes to ad dollars you’re not going to be a first consideration.”

WE: Women’s Entertainment has become a strong runner-up. “Our ratings and distribution are in a better place than Oxygen, and that immediately put us at a strong number two position as a women’s network option,” says Heffernan. Since converting the former Romance Channel into WE, Rainbow has counted on a single advertiser. In an unusual arrangement, Johnson & Johnson became the one and only advertiser on WE in March 2001. Now that the 18-month deal is set to expire, WE will convert to a traditional ad-supported channel. The network completed its first upfront this year, to some success. “We’re at a point now where we’re almost oversold,” says Heffernan. WE inked ad deals with Revlon, Sears, Procter & Gamble, and Pfizer, among others.

To stay in front of women, Lifetime is launching Lifetime Magazine next March. Publisher Hearst is offering a 500,000 rate base for the bimonthly, which should go monthly by September 2003 if all goes well. Carrying the tag line “Real Life. Real Women,” it will focus on fashion, beauty, food, decorating, plus inspirational stories and advocacy.

Their newsstand competitors are taking a wait-and-see attitude, but one sees Lifetime’s move as affirmation. “It underscores to me the relevancy of magazines,” says Allure magazine executive editor Susan Kittenplan. “As much as everyone likes to say they’re dead, people still want to hold something in their hand.

Kaplan sees it from a more dollars and sense angle. “Any time there’s more media, the amount of media dollars in the advertising dollar pot usually doesn’t grow to accommodate all the new choices that exist, so at some point somebody takes a hit.” The reality is that the cable networks reach small audiences, says Kaplan, and with further fragmentation on TV, it will be increasingly difficult to reach a large number of women at once. That’s where he thinks magazines like Meredith’s Better Homes and Gardens, which reaches 39 million readers a month, have an edge. “I’m actually pretty bullish,” he says.

The cult of celebrity made its way to the publishing world several years ago with the launch of Martha Stewart Living. Its big boost came in 2000, with the launch of O, Oprah’s magazine. Fueled by Winfrey’s five-day-a-week television show, O took off. Based on that success, Gruner & Jahr last year relaunched the aging McCall’s as Rosie.

But celebrities are fickle, it seems. Martha Stewart’s legal troubles worry advertisers of her magazine, while Rosie readers and advertisers simultaneously struggle with the end of her syndicated talk show, the announcement of her sexual orientation, and the changing direction of the product.

Trout lays it out like this: “Living brands don’t go forever because they’re people, and people are subject to doing something stupid or getting sick and dying.” What’s worse, particularly for the publishers of Rosie, according to Trout, is that he sees another critical ingredient. “The thing that drives the brand is the personality, and the thing that drives the personality is television. Subtract TV from it and you have nothing driving it.”

While O is still a healthy magazine, its record today is mixed. It was one of the hottest magazines in 2001. But in the first six months of 2002, its monthly circulation was 2.3 million, a decline of 17% compared to 2001. Much of the decline came from a 29% drop in newsstand sales. Ad pages remain flat over last year.

Men’s magazines for years have been about sex — usually of the scantily clad model/actress variety —sports, and rock and roll. Women’s magazines, on the other hand, have been labeled for some titles’ proclivity to put tabloid-like headlines on the cover along the lines of “12 tips to please your man.”

Whether in publishing or advertising, most agree that just a few titles really do carry such content. But that is not to say that just about everyone also thinks there is a place for it in women’s media.

“Middle America is reading that, and Middle America is buying our product,” says Botts Ward, who places ads for Revlon in books like Cosmopolitan. “Revlon has a broad audience, and sex appeals to the broad audience that is buying our product.”

On the television side, WE has sexed up its lineup with shows like Single in the Hamptons. Conscious that their sole advertiser, Johnson & Johnson, might object, the network allowed J&J to preview the show. Says Heffernan, “There was no hesitation because it was something that did well with our audience, and in the end, advertisers are trying to reach women.”

But that is not always the case. Connors, who buys women’s magazines for Merck, says the content cost some titles her ad dollars. Specifically, she stopped advertising in Glamour and Cosmopolitan after it was determined the editorial content was “too much for Merck.” She won’t rule out using them for other campaigns, though. “If you’re trying to reach younger women, it’s hard to avoid it.”

Based on Arnold’s research of women, Reilly believes celebrity gossip will always be an important information food group for female consumers since it ties back into women’s need to connect, whether it be with a talk show host or paparazzi photos of Madonna at the supermarket in sweatpants. This is just one situation where having a lot of magazines to choose from helps the buyer, says Blankfein, in that they can pick the title whose content and audience most closely matches the advertiser. “There’s enough to accommodate a lot of brands, which is why I think there will be a lot of survivability in the magazine business.”