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(Just don't be confused by spate of new titles)
By Jeff Bercovici
It's very simple, see: first there was Real Simple, and then there was Simplicity, and then The Art of Simple Living. Get it?
Except that's not quite right. Long before Time Inc. announced their plans for Real Simple (let's leave Hearst's Simple Living out of this for the time being, for simplicity's sake) the folks at Simplicity Media were starting work on their idea for a cross-media platform that would help women balance and, well, simplify their lives.
They started work on it over a year ago, in fact, after running the idea by some people they knew at Time Inc.
Understandably, they were a bit miffed to hear in August that Time Inc. was planning its own simplification-themed women's title for a spring 2000 launch.
Though careful to avoid accusing Time Inc. of stealing their idea, it's clear that Christine Carville, marketing and ad director for Simplicity, believes the timing was more than just coincidence.
But intellectual property is seldom sacred in the magazine world. The real question is, why is this idea so hot right now?
We offer you opinion from both camps.
"Women are realizing that they can't do it all any more than they can have it all," says Real Simple editor Susan Wyland. "They're doing too much and enjoying it less, living as if they've been shot out of a cannon. We're multitasking our lives away."
Unlike men, who are apparently interested in forever acquiring more Stuff and additional Gear, women, Wyland says, are realizing that "having it all isn't all it's cracked up to be. He who dies with the most toys doesn't
win."
Simplicity's Carville agrees. "Women are facing an absolute inundation and hectification in their lives. They aren't willing to sacrifice any one thing, and historically, they've always been told that they can do it all. But they're finding that they have to make choices."
This "hectification" is driving trends other than magazines, says Carville, noting a tripling in the number of spas in the U.S. within the last year and a half.
It's also having a deleterious impact on public health, she says, citing findings that depression will soon be the second leading cause of death.
Simplicity, she says, will be an antidote, a sort of non-pharmacological antidepressant.
Published independently, Simplicity will hit newsstands Feb.25--a month ahead of Real Simple--with a Susan Sarandon cover and an initial press run of 125,000.
Simplicity will launch with a bi-monthly frequency, going to 10 times a year in 2001. Distribution will be national, but marketing will be focused in the tri-state area as well as northern California.
Though Time Inc. may have had help in coming up with the idea, the two magazines are more similar in name than in anything else, says Carville.
While Time is taking its usual mass-market approach, Simplicity has a narrower target readership: career-oriented, urban women age 25-40.
The goal of the magazine, says Carville, is "to help them embrace technology as a means of simplifying their lives." Accordingly, in addition to the usual fashion and beauty advertisers you'd expect, Simplicity is seeing a lot of interest from tech advertisers, especially in telecommunications.
Sony and Apple are two big names already on board.
The editorial will be organized around five aspects of a woman's life: Space, Style, Celebration (which includes entertaining and cooking), Mind, and Body.
Simplicity will provide in one magazine what women now find in diverse titles such as Gourmet, Metropolitan Home, and Fast Company, says Carville.
Another big difference between Real Simple and Simplicity is that the latter is only one tool in a cross-platform venture. The magazine, though editorially independent, is ultimately intended to drive people to the simplicityonline.com website.
The website is what Carville calls an "infomediary--a branded portal that will offer commerce, content, and community."
The site will go up in January in preliminary form, but not until the end of the second quarter, until two issues of the magazine have come out, will it take its final form.
By then Simplicity Media, under editor-in-chief and CEO Danielle Chang, will have increased its staff from its current 11 to a projected 50.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, The Art of Simple Living is a custom publishing venture put out by Hearst and funded by the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation.
With strict, self-imposed limits on tobacco ad pages more and more consumer titles--not to mention the banning of cigarette ads from TV, billboards and storefront displays--companies have had to create their own venues to hawk their products.
Simple Living is a standard women's interest mag with a twist: crammed between the gardening stories and celebrity profiles are pages and pages of ads for Kool, Capri, Carlton and Misty.
And the subscription policy is simplicity itself: it gets sent free to smokers.
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
