|
|
Well, yes, OK!:
Porn to be king
Richard Desmond helped reinvent UK celeb field
By Heidi Dawley
OK!, though yet to
launch in the U.S., has already been in one major public spat, this over
who would edit the title. Americans can expect others to follow.
This was not necessarily the start former British porn king
Richard Desmond and his Northern and Shell Group had intended for the new
publication. But then in the world of celeb titles, it may not have been
such a bad start after all.
Desmond and controversy are old friends in the UK's celeb
market, which is every bit as competitive as that of the U.S., if not more
so. It's certainly been that way longer, and credit goes in large part to Desmond, who introduced much of it.
The American row erupted when Desmond attempted to grab editor
Nicola McCarthy out from her contract with Jann Wenner’s Us Weekly. As
Americans saw with the Star and the recruiting of Bonnie Fuller from Us
several years ago, who edits a celeb title can all but seal its destiny.
Desmond most desperately wants McCarthy, an experienced Brit celeb
editor now with invaluable U.S. experience.
The settlement, worked out between Desmond and Wenner over a cup of
coffee in New York, states that McCarthy will not be able to work for the
upcoming U.S. edition of OK! until April 2006, when her contract with
Wenner is up. She will however, be able to work for Northern & Shell’s
British publications from the U.S. until that time.
And of course, this will not change Desmond's plans to launch
OK! in the U.S. sometime before the end of this year. The U.S. launch
follows launches in Australia and China last year and the Middle East
earlier this year. Further markets are also being explored.
The rough and tumble of the U.S. celebrity market is unlikely
to come as a surprise to Desmond, as the scene in OK!’s British home
market is equally competitive, and has been for the past decade.
The shakeup for the traditional weekly women’s magazine market in
Britain started in 1988 when Hello! magazine, a British version of Spain’s
leading women’s weekly magazine Hola!, burst onto the scene.
Critics scoffed at the magazine’s fawning interviews with
celebrities and European royals, but readers embraced this magazine, a
much more upmarket product and very different from the traditional
downmarket real-life focused weekly titles that had made up the market.
Hello!’s launch was just what Desmond had been waiting for.
Known for his soft porn titles, which included the British version of
Penthouse, Asian Babes and Big Ones, he was looking for a way into the
more respectable side of the magazine business.
Northern and Shell quickly jumped in with OK!, a magazine
eerily similar to Hello! in some ways, even down to the exclamation mark
in the title. A monthly at first, it went weekly in 1996.
The magazine quickly managed to make gain ground on Hello! by focusing itself on a bit more downmarket readership than
Hello!. This meant less focus on the lives of minor European aristocracy
and more focus on a wider range of celebrity scoops.
The magazine now outsells Hello! with a circulation of
529,492 vs. Hello!’s 382,391, for last six months of 2004.
Good going, yes, but that’s not the end of the story. The
celebrity market has become a far more complicated market in the last
five years, with OK! and Hello! now making up only a small part of it.
Not long after OK! went weekly, Now, the first of a new raft
of celebrity magazines aimed at more mass-market readership than both
Hello! and OK!, hit the newsstands. It was joined by Heat in 1999 and then
Closer in 2002.
The weekly women’s market is now proliferating at a great pace,
with new weekly fashion magazines, real-life magazines and celebrity
magazines. This year is expected to be a particularly active one for new
weekly launches.
In fact, Northern & Shell has two others itself – New!,
priced at just $1.10, and Star.
How has OK! fared in the cut and thrust of all this activity?
Two of the newer titles, Now and Heat, have overtaken it in the circulation
war with circulations of 619,186 and 552,215, respectively, compared with OK!’s
529,492. And Closer (504,350), with its mix of celebrity stories and real
life, is catching up.
In fact for the last six months of 2004 OK!’s circulation
did dip by 7 percent compared with the same period in 2003. This compares to
circulation growth at competitors such as Now, which grew 5 percent after
a price cut, and Hello!, which grew 9 percent.
However, media buyers caution that OK!’s circulation is
very volatile, dependent on who's on the cover, the cover price and how
many free coupons for the magazine are given away.
Says
Natalie Rutherford, press manager at Vizeum, a buying shop owned by Aegis:
“They are faring well against this increased competition.” She says
that OK! is quite a different proposition from the other titles, being
more upmarket than many and more downmarket than Hello!.
She says that because Northern & Shell also owns New!
and Star, they have to make sure they don’t compete with these more
downmarket magazines with a younger audience.
What also looks to be the case is that there will be no let
up in the competition this year, with readers still hot on the sector
generally and publishers keen to get in.
|
March 16, 2005
©
2005
Media Life
-
Heidi Dawley, an American living in
London, covers European media for Media Life.
|
|
|
|
