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| Magazines | |
for the young Brit It's a kind of men's magazine, upscale and free Sep 20, 2007
ShortList is a mass-circulation, upscale weekly magazine, and at 500,000 copies a week it dwarfs all other men's titles in the UK. But what really sets Shortlist apart is that it’s free. One does not subscribe or pay for Shortlist at a newsstand. One simply holds out a hand. If successful, as expected, the new title could forever change the model for men's magazines, and for magazines generally, both in Britain and other countries. In launching free, ShortList adopts a model that's increasingly popular in Britain and elsewhere. There are at least a half-dozen free daily newspapers in Britain, and a free magazine as well, launched a year ago. Media buyers, already impressed by the launch of ShortList, see more free weeklies popping up in other categories. “I think there is room for more. I expect a few more launches of this nature,” says Steve Goodman, managing director of print buying at MediaCom. “It’s bright, it’s bold and it’s fresh,” Dayna Slate, media manager at Carat, says of the launch issue. ShortList is aimed at 18-to-35-year-old upscale men and will cover the raft of subjects that traditionally have appealed to men, such as sports, business, cars and style, but without the downmarket titillation that has come to characterize the lads mags. The magazine will distribute about 360,000 copies in London, largely near major public transportation stations. Another 140,000 will be distributed in five other British cities. The magazine was conceived by Mike Soutar, a former editor-in-chief of FHM in Britain and Maxim in the U.S. He was also at IPC when weekly lads mag Nuts was launched. To create ShortList, Soutar brought in an experienced team of men’s magazine experts, including former Nuts editor Phil Hilton, as editorial director. The idea for ShortList came out of watching the men’s category struggle in Britain. Circulations have plummeted for all but a few titles in the last few years as many magazines rushed downmarket to compete against the paid-for weeklies, Nuts and Emap’s Zoo. “The lads mags have all followed the lowest common denominator,” says Mark Gallagher, head of print at Manning Gottlieb OMD. “There is a certain stigma now. The average 23- or 25-year-old doesn’t feel comfortable putting one on the counter.” Soutar and his associates saw a gap in the market. “The original idea came to us as we realized that the existing mass-market men’s magazines had all become a little one-paced, repetitive...and wholly obsessed with the unclothed upper parts of the female anatomy,” writes Hilton in his editorial in today’s issue. This magazine aims to engage men who have outgrown the lad titles. “There are no naked women,” says Tim Ewington, strategy director for ShortList. “It’s for men with more than one thing on their minds. It’s guaranteed that you will be able to read it in the office because it is an intelligent, thoughtful magazine that combines fast, fun journalism about what’s going on in the world with longer pieces, business, sport, travel, cars, all the things that, when you are a young man, you are proud of." One might have thought that media folks would be skeptical of the magazine, coming as it does after a year of freesheet frenzy. They've been anything but. They've been impressed by the team behind it, the editorial proposition, the timing, the quality of its prototype and now the first issue. There was also the success of Sport, the free sports weekly that launched a year ago. "Had ShortList been the first to market, there would have been skeptics. But since Sport has proved a good proposition, week in and out, that has made the job of ShortList easier,” observes OMD's Gallagher. In any case, dummy copies were widely circulated prior to the launch, and that made the best case for ShortList. Says Dan Pimm, head of print at Universal McCann: “There has been very positive feedback on the magazine."
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