It’s come to my attention that the Look cover, which Ali Hall nominated and explained as her Best Cover at the recent IPC Editors’ Conference, goes some way to contradicting the confusion I expressed in the COVER VERSIONS blog.
Kenny Pryde, editor of SuperBike, wrote:
“…we recently listened to an experienced editor explaining that her best cover in 2008 owed a lot to luck. She took a chance on an untried masthead colour, they ‘got lucky’ when the cover star went mental after the cover had gone to the printers and they rather fortuitously had story ‘n’ pics. The mag scored a monster sale, but it’s hard to learn any lessons from that experience.”
Here’s the cover:
Great isn’t it? But, as I recall it, the cover had nothing at all to do with luck. Ali went for the yellow - which it’s true was untried before - because the sun had just started shining and, at that point, in early June, it looked as if we might be going to have what we old ‘uns used to call ‘a summer’.
Yellow also happened to compliment Lily Allen’s new blonde hair colour and the cover could have stood on its own as a ‘transformative’ story – The New Lily. But, as it happened, Lily had been out in Cannes getting caned and Ali had come upon some cracking ‘Lily goes loony’ shots plus one of Lily’s so-called ‘friends’ was willing to spill the beans on the reasons behind Lily’s meltdown for a few bob under the table.
What Ali did next was, in hindsight, utterly obvious but at the time I’d call it genius. She mixed the ‘magazine’ approach that Look usually uses with the ‘newsy’ approach of Now. Hence we get Lily looking great – very positive and aspirational – plus Lily looking wrecked – very voyeuristic.
Add to that the Hot New Heels in the bar above the logo, Britney confessing to her eating disorder, and the 349 Summer Going Out Looks - and the cover was one magnificent winner.
Taking all that into account, I think it’s actually very easy to learn LOADS of lessons from the experience, and I’m wondering whether a classic old Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones shot of the band, say, live and in their pomp with a drop-in of how they look now – all grizzled and old – may be the solution to the Uncut problem I referred to in the COVER VERSIONS blog.
Btw, in Kenny’s comment to the COVER VERSIONS blog, he goes on to say: “… more generally when it comes to hit and miss covers, how do you screen out the ‘noise in the (sales) data’ when analysing the magic ingredients? How can you be so sure of the ‘reasons’ for a high-selling winner/a total disaster without looking at the rest of the covers and market that month? Maybe you design a ‘great’ cover but still get shafted because your competitors have cover-mounted a gold-leaf coated crack pipe?”
I have every sympathy with Kenny’s point but you can only look at the rest of the market with either a fabulous spying network that enables you to match your rivals blow-for-promotional-blow (which is spending money to maintain equilibrium rather than boosting sales) or you’re dealing with the power of hindsight. Unfortunately, we don’t publish in hindsight.
The goal, therefore, whether our rivals are cover-mounting crack pipes or not, must be to produce magazines that are so good that they become regular must-have purchases, not because of who or what we have on our covers, but because what we do with that material is consistently surprising, enlightening, engaging, entertaining and unique.
I think the cover Ali used to illustrate her worst cover faux pas illustrates the point:
See? It kinda sucks.
Ali freely admits that what she was doing with this cover was trying to second-guess and copy her rivals. Look had never published an issue in January before, and Ali lost faith in her readers’ desire to shop just after Xmas. But without shopping, Look loses most of its usp, dna and all the rest of it.
So anyway, Ali published a diet-focused Look because that’s what all the other mags do after Xmas and, not surprisingly, it didn’t do very well because it wasn’t what Look readers wanted from Look.
Ali says she’ll do a cheer-you-up, fashions-to-look-forward-to new year Look next January. Which I think just goes to show that, although we can’t do anything about what our rivals are up to, we can become such a hard habit to kick that, even if they’re cover-mounting the crack pipe AND the crack, we are at very least an essential dual purchase.