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regains its vigor
Editor: Era of lad titles is going into a fast fade
By Jeff Bercovici
A year ago, Men's Health looked like a magazine on the verge of irrelevance.
Ad pages were down more than 17 percent as of this time last year--and this, you'll recall, was in the gravy days before the ad market began sliding into recession.
On the circulation side, things weren't terrible, but neither were they good, with growth stalled amid an onslaught of new competitors.
Maxim had stolen Men's Health's traditional distinction of being the biggest men’s magazine without nipples (female ones, at least) and, in doing so, seemed to prove that guys were more interested in swigging lager and telling off-color jokes than in honing their obliques.
That was the situation when Dave Zinczenko, then editorial director of Men's Health International, was brought in to head up the American flagship as editor in chief.
The situation today is somewhat different.
With most consumer magazines slumping, Men's Health enjoyed relatively strong ad sales through August, although weaker sales in September and October made for a modest year-to-date drop in pages.
It's also one of only two major men's titles--and one of very few mass-circulation titles in any category--to report significant growth in single-copy sales in the first half of the year. (The other is FHM, which launched last February.)
All this reflects well on Zinczenko's performance as editor and the numerous unobtrusive changes he has made to the magazine.
Moreover, Zinczenko offers the first-half newsstand numbers as evidence that the brief reign of the "lad" magazines--meaning Maxim and its British-derived brethren--is coming to an end, and sooner than expected.
"When I came back last summer, you could see that there was this lad invasion that was occurring," says Zinczenko, who replaced Greg Gutfeld, now editor of Stuff.
"The Stuffs, the Maxims, the FHMs, the Gears were continuing to crowd the newsstand with almost identical products."
It was a state of affairs that couldn't last forever, and Zinczenko is among those who believe that a shakeout may already be underway.
If so, it's a mirror of what happened in the U.K. where, beginning with Loaded, a series of raunchy titles aimed at young men appeared, built up huge circulations in a flash, and then faded one by one. The difference, says Zinczenko, is that in the U.S. everything is happening in a more compressed time frame.
"The lad mags are going to have to be careful. They’re witty and well-done, but they're not the hardest magazines to put out," he says. "They don't really add value to your life, just a cheap laugh. While I'm in favor of a cheap laugh, I don't need four of them."
Ultimately, he predicts, the market here will support one, possibly two, large-circulation magazines of a lad-esque format.
This month's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. will, if anything, accelerate the decline, says Zinczenko.
"In terms of circulation and newsstand performance, magazines that perform a serious function and help people take control of their lives are going to thrive," he says.
"What we're also going to see, thank God, is an end to the celebrity-driven madness that has dominated the market for the last 10 years. People are going to be repulsed when confronted with another piece on the inner demons of some underperforming millionaire."
For Men's Health, the disaster and its aftermath will call for more stories with "emotional depth," such as an upcoming article in the December issue on ways to make one's family feel safe, says Zinczenko.
As for whether the magazine will have to lose Cosmo-inspired cover lines like "Sex So Hot She'll Speak in Tongues," Zinczenko says not necessarily.
"I don't know that we're going to have to change our cover strategy," he says. "Some of that stuff we'll want to tone down. You can't be tone deaf to something like this. But guys still want to have great sex and great relationships."
September 26, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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