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the anti-Maxim
Keep your beer and boobs! Adam, for nice guys.
By Lisa Schneider
After analyzing the contemporary man of 1997, the editors of Dennis Publishing's Maxim created a superstar magazine that reached an entirely new readership and redefined the male market.
The target audience?
Inattentive, beer-drinking sports-a-holics who were obsessed with sex enough to be vaguely interested in fashion.
Now, in 2002, enter the anti-Maxim, a new magazine called Adam that is founded upon the firm belief that there is quite a different untapped market among American males: nice young men.
Adam's premiere issue debuted last week with two ad pages and a circulation of 250,000, joining the genre that is now crowded with Maxim competitors such as FHM, Details, Gear and Stuff. It is published by Monarch Services.
But Adam's founders are clearly not intending to hook Maxim's frat boys. The first issue offers articles addressing topics such as airplane food-storage and platonic male-female relationships.
In his editor's letter, the executive publisher and founding editor Thomas A. Dworetzky writes, "This is a newly serious age and calls for a newly serious man."
The newly serious man, it appears, is one who wants to learn how to pick wine out in a restaurant, who needs yet another set of 2001's most-wanted mug shots, and who collects WWF action figures, PEZ dispensers and Condit-Levy artifacts in his free time, when not seeking advice on his quarter-life crisis.
The Adam-man is fascinated by gadgets, used cars, video games, and how to dress appropriately, cloned women and, of course, young lovelies, but mind you the right sort of young-lovelies, not the slutty sort.
This is the sort of magazine that a young woman would buy for her boyfriend to ease his Maxim addiction, with the hope that he will read it.
"We think there's a market for a clean men's magazine," says Adam's senior editor Jayne Blanchard.
"The whole thing is a big test. No nine oral sex techniques, no bikinis, boobs or babes, and you're never going to see how to host an orgy."
The magazine includes all types of columns: advice, law, health and financial. And, to lighten things up, there are several pages of reprinted political cartoons all lumped together in the middle of the book and printed on a tri-color, pastel background.
When asked about Adam's target audience, Blanchard asserts that it consists mainly of men between the ages of 21 and 34.
However, there are others that may want to read the magazine. Say, for example, women.
"What we've found so far is that women really enjoy reading it," says Blanchard. "And women are the subscribers. They subscribe for men."
Blanchard adds, "That's the way Sports Illustrated got so big."
Then is Adam going to be geared towards women?
"Maybe we're getting gender-free," says Blanchard.
Adam is Monarch Services Inc.'s second magazine. The first was Girl's Life in 1994, a book that aspired to be a "non-condescending" magazine for girls ages 10-15.
The next issue of Adam will include two short fiction pieces and tips on how to enjoy oneself at the beach without sex or drugs.
But the question remains: Is Adam really a men's magazine?
Since man's first dinner-table belch, there have been magazines with the singular, if largely impossible, aim of improving the male creature.
Their audiences have never been well-defined.
David M. Granger, editor in chief of Esquire, raises one of the questions that Adam's founding editors seem to still be grappling with: "Is it a men's magazine or a magazine for women about men?"
Granger, for one, is not convinced that Adam's time has come. "Sounds like an odd concept to me."
January 24, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
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