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BoSacks Speaks Out:
The following article brings back some very fond and challenging magazine production memories. Some of these memories are from real-time personal experience and some are old time production folklore that may or may not have actually have happened. Knowing the trade as I do, I believe that they probably actually happened.
I am talking about here the magazine insert business. Magazines have inserted damn near everything and anything you can think of. There was a time when I was considered a bindery expert by many in the field. I used to boast that if called upon by a crazy advertiser, I could bind a hammer into my issues of PC magazine. I accumulated this specialty knowledge early in my career and it developed into a science by being at the right place at the right time.
When I was at Ziff-Davis we had a flock of thick successful computer magazines when computers were new to the public and before what we call the dot-com boom/bust. Computer Shopper Magazine was not unlike a telephone directory, a ridiculous thick and over-sized monthly magazine. PC Magazine was so successful that there were inserts between every signature possible. Do the math - if the magazine was usually over 300 pages, that meant a lot of inserts. I put together what I called the "gimmick" book, which was a loose-leaf binder with hundreds of inserts, and which I would bring to prospective advertisers to show them what was possible. It had every gatefold imaginable, inserts with sound chips, floppy diskettes, pop-ups, unique envelope configurations, mini-magazines, stickers, lenticular applications, and dozens of other fun and difficult to successfully bind items.
One of my favorite stories was when I was a Director at McCall's. One of the other seven sisters got a request to insert bind-in shampoo samples. They tested and ran the samples through the binder multiple times till they were assured that it could be bound without slowing the manufacturing process. It passed every test and they went into full production. It was then they realized that they didn't actually test everything. When these magazines were put on skids for shipping, the shampoo samples were popping open everywhere due to the combined weight of magazines on the pallet. They had never done a full pallet test. I am told that untold thousands of magazines were totally ruined and shampoo was everywhere in the plant.
Another story that rings true to me was when another magazine was contracted by Pacific Gas and Electric. The company wanted to alert their customers to what a gas leak would smell like. Again the product was tested and after considerable review at the plant was approved for the shipping process. There was no problem until the copies got to the local post office and the building was evacuated because of a suspected gas leak on the premises.
There are probably thousands of stories like these out there, and if you know any, I encourage you to send them to me. They would make a great read for the rookies on this list and perhaps prevent some similar occurrences from happening again.
I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.
Will Self
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Elle, Cosmo to Include Actual Vials Of Perfume With November Issues
A (Costly) Step Up from Scent Strips
By: Michael Sebastian
http://adage.com
http://bit.ly/15wQiWh
Some subscribers of four Hearst magazines will soon get perfume samples in an apparently new fashion for the industry: via sample vials of Marc Jacobs Daisy and Daisy Eau So Fresh.
The two-and-a-half milliliter tubes will come poly-bagged to 100,000 copies of the November issues ofElle, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Seventeen, for a total of 400,000 subscribers, according to Hearst Magazines. Affixing sample-size bottles of perfume to magazines is believed to be a first. "The technology just didn't exist," said Michael Clinton, president-marketing and publishing director of Hearst Magazines.
For magazine publishers, it could serve as yet another way to attract dollars from beauty advertisers, which has been among a handful of persistent bright spots for the industry. In the first half of 2013, the number of ad pages for toiletries and cosmetics climbed 3.3% industry wide while ad pages as a whole declined, the Publishers Information Bureau said.
"Until you get a scratch and sniff on your smartphone, magazine media has a unique selling proposition to allow samples," Mr. Clinton said. "This gives our medium an even bigger play into beauty advertising -- a big growth category and probably one of the biggest categories in the magazine marketplace."
The issues will not appear on the newsstand, he added, because of the possibility that the issues containing the samples will not sell out. "It's expensive," said Mr. Clinton, declining to name the specific costs. "On the newsstand you have the potential for a lot of waste."
"We've been working on this for almost 10 months to ensure we could get all the quality controls in place and fit postal guidelines," he added.
A spokeswoman for Marc Jacobs Fragrances said in an email that scent sampling is key to driving purchases. "We felt this new form of sampling is an innovative way of getting fragrance into consumers' hands," the spokeswoman said.
This isn't the first time Hearst has looked beyond the classic fragrance strip. In 1998, it introduced a sealed gel capsule for perfume that appeared in issues of Marie Claire and the now defunct decorating title Victoria magazine.
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Conde Nast Traveler Said to Cut Half of Editorial Staff
'Restructuring' Toward a Broader, Lifestyle Focus
http://bit.ly/19DtvdT
Conde Nast Traveler, the glossy travel magazine from Conde Nast, has eliminated about 14 editorial positions, more than half its staff, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
The job cuts include five editors, the entire photo desk and the the graphics department, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.
The eliminations come as editor-in-chief Pilar Guzman, appointed last month by Vogue editor and Conde Nast artistic director Anna Wintour, works to change the magazine's editorial focus. Sarina Sanandaji, a spokeswoman for the magazine, confirmed there were job cuts and declined to discuss details.
"This is part of a broader restructuring effort that will shift the focus on more of a lifestyle lens and the growing digital business," Ms. Sanandaji said. The magazine is likely to replace some of the positions, she said.
Conde Nast, led by billionaire Si Newhouse, produces 18 consumer magazines that draw high-end, brand marketers, mostly from the fashion and beauty industries. The publisher, closely held by the Newhouse family through Advance Publications, reported a 5% gain in advertising pages for its September issues, typically the biggest of the year.
Conde Nast Traveler had $58.1 million in advertising for the first half of this year, up 4.1% from a year earlier, according to data from the Publisher's Information Bureau based on openly-stated ad rates, which can differ from the rates actually paid. The growth came despite a 1.1% drop in the number of ad pages the magazine sold in that same period.
Ms. Guzman was previously editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart Living magazine and earlier worked for Conde Nast as the founding chief editor of parenting magazine Cookie, which was eventually closed down.
~ Bloomberg News~
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 "The Industry that Vents Together Stays Together" Responses to all Articles and Bo-Rants are greatly encouraged and may be included in " BoSacks Readers Speak Out" =======================================
All news items and the various opinions expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily the opinion of, nor in agreement with the opinions of BoSacks. They are just interesting thoughts and other opinions that BoSacks thinks you should know about.
After all, as the Japanese proverb goes:
"If you believe everything you read, perhaps you better not read."
"Heard on the Web" Media Intelligence:
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