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Why I don’t buy magazines anymore

Why I don’t buy magazines anymore

Is it time magazines looked at the collective effect coverline hyperbole is having on potential customers, asks Dominic Mills.

Looking at the remorseless downward trend highlighted by last month’s magazine ABCs, I realised I was part of the problem.

I used to love magazines. I earned my living from them for years. But, other than for specific work purposes, I haven’t bought one for over 12 months. I wasn’t sure why, so I went and stood in front of the racks at WH Smith.

Then it came to me. It’s the cover lines.

It’s like meeting a know-it-all who wags his finger in your face, shows not a scintilla of self-awareness, and starts every sentence with the words ‘You should do this, you should do that’. I’d much rather be told I ‘could’ do something. ‘Should’ carries a hectoring, almost bullying tone.

A special issue of Wired boasts on the cover: ‘104 Pages of Ideas to Future-proof Yourself and Your Business’.

Train magazine (it’s about fitness, not Thomas the Tank Engine): ‘Forge 5kg of Box-Fresh Muscle’.

Men’s Health: ‘133 Shortcuts to Athletic Strength!’.

Runner’s World: ‘Run Happy – Smash Your Stress; Wipe out Self-Doubt; Enter the Bliss Zone’.

It’s just too overwhelming. You think: how will I ever find the time to absorb 104 ideas to future-proof myself? I didn’t even know there were that many.

These magazines are chipping away at my self-esteem.

Meanwhile, the women’s magazines have entered a hyper-inflationary spiral of ‘idea’ and ‘tip’ generation.

InStyle magazine has ‘247 New Spring Looks’. Marie Claire has ‘389 Ways to Wear Denim (can there be more than 12?).

But that’s nothing compared to Glamour, which has ‘516 Spring Looks’.

How can any reader deal with so much?

Of course, I know how and why this happens. There’s downward pressure everywhere, and yet each sector remains over-crowded. The temptation to ‘shout’ is irresistible. How else do you get noticed on the newsstand?

I’ve been there myself, and I can say with absolute confidence that I have been guilty of hyping up coverlines.

The problem is that the editors or chief subs responsible for the coverlines only think of their own cover. Individually, they can rationalise their efforts.

But they need to look at the collective effect of all this hyperbole on the newsstand, and how it makes people feel.

I don’t like being lectured, I don’t like being made to feel paranoid, and I don’t like being made to feel inadequate. So, in the interests of preserving my sanity, I don’t buy magazines anymore.

But if there was a little less instruction and a little more wit, I could change my mind.

Appliance of a science degree

It was one of those casual conversations with a media agency chief executive about their recruitment of first-jobbers.

“Do you have a preference for recruiting people with specific degrees?,” I asked.

“Not really, as long as they haven’t got a media degree,” he replied. “We’re more interested in aptitude and people showing a natural curiosity. But we’re finding more people coming to us with science degrees. I like that because they have something different to offer.”

Of course, one of the problems of recruiting STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) graduates is that they are much in demand in big pharma, investment banks or anywhere that handles data. In short, they can get a lot more money elsewhere.

The other problem is that they take one look at advertising and can’t see how their knowledge and skills can be applied or, often, how they can fit in culturally.

That is not so much the case anymore. One of the things that strikes me is how once-arcane (to me, at any rate) disciplines like neuroscience, behavioural science and biology are now relevant to advertising and media.

Advertisers have always tried to unpick, and then exploit, the workings of the brain. But their approaches were somewhat crude – pop-science or psychology, one might say.

Now they’re getting much more sophisticated. You can see it in the way books like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow have become the new orthodoxy among researchers and planners.

Here’s part of the introduction to a book called Unconscious Branding: how Neuroscience can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing. It explains the change well.

“Unfortunately, businesses have long based their marketplace knowledge on culture and economics, not on the truths of biology and brain evolution. They have borrowed heavily from the social sciences, while virtually ignoring the natural sciences…This new shift from a cultural to a biological view of behaviour is one of the most exciting…”

The author is one Douglas van Praet, who has degrees in advertising (eeugh) and psychology (better), and has also real-life, hands-on, experience at agencies like Rapp and Deutsch. As he hints, the shift to a biological view of behaviour demands people with different skills.

So how are agencies doing on this score? Without some kind of census it’s hard to tell beyond the anecdotal. Millward Brown has a neuroscience practice headed up by one Sarah Walker, who has an undergraduate degree in natural sciences (first-class, of course) and a PhD in experimental psychology.

Last year I saw a fascinating presentation from Thomas Laranjo, managing director of Total Media, about how concepts like cognitive functions and circadian rhythms can have a bearing on media planning and targeting. He, it goes without saying, is an anthropologist by education.

I suspect that there are not too many neuroscientists, psychologists and anthropologists in advertising and the media. But it would be nice to think that might change.

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