"Head of new projects", far from being the money-no-object passport to publishing fame it suggests, has long been code for "been there too long" or "didn't see eye to eye with the boss". In short, it was rarely what you'd call "a career move".
The good news for new projects teams everywhere is that in the last few years, one of the world's biggest publishers has created two of the most boldly successful magazine launches in recent memory. For at least a decade, all and sundry have been telling us magazines are "doomed". First, it was Silicon Valley types arguing "content is king" and suggesting we should all hasten to "media neutral platforms". Even now, at any mention of a new magazine launch, at least one commentator is guaranteed to pronounce the market too congested. Recent events suggest that might not actually be the case. As we gear up in Australia for the unveiling of the first issues of Alpha,Real Living and Notebook to name but a few, it's perhaps worth taking a minute to mull over events overseas. In the UK, the current top-selling women's glossy has yet to celebrate its fourth birthday. Meanwhile, in the US, a "magazine about shopping" that launched to something less than critical acclaim is quickly becoming the most imitated new magazine in the business. Launched in the UK in 2001, Conde Nast's Glamour had taken over 70 years to finally arrive from the US, but boy, what an entrance! Already completely dominating the women's glossy market, it matched the sales of long-time leader Cosmopolitan before the first audit appeared. Most people know Glamour is handbag-size in the UK and priced at a discount to its competitors. Fewer people know the smaller format was trialled in Italy with immediate positive results, but nevertheless was still dismissed by UK competitors. Having plumped for the smaller size, and confident it had the potential to outsell top titles Cosmo and Marie Claire, the publisher of Glamour made two brave decisions. First, in committing more, much more, money to trade promotion than any publisher had previously spent, Conde Nast virtually guaranteed it was easy to find in supermarket checkouts and at the front of every newsagent. Then, in a competitive market renowned for high-profile launch failures, it made the audacious decision to print enough copies to achieve market leadership overnight. Even compared with Glamour, it's hard to underestimate the enormity of the impact made in the USA by the launch of Lucky, also in 2001. Proudly proclaiming itself to be "all about shopping" and originally launched as a tentative biannual, Lucky now turns over north of US$100 million a year in a category nobody really knew existed five years ago. Editor Kim France's vision was for a practical and useful magazine for a generation spending their entire weekends at the local shopping mall. "Practical and useful" meaning no features, no celebrity gossip, no real life stories, just "shopping". Plus, everything in the magazine had to be affordable and available. To help finance the enormous extra costs of producing regionalised editions, Conde Nast chose to dump expensive fashion shoots in favour of inhouse photography, and editorial staff modelled some of the clothes themselves. Anyone who has ever worked on a women's glossy may just have to read that last bit again. When launched, the US trade press didn't exactly pipe Lucky aboard. One reviewer invented a new word to describe "this hybrid between a magazine and a catalog" - the "magalog". By the time Ad Age named Lucky Magazine of the Year in 2003, nobody cared whether it was a magazine or not. So what tips can we pass on to our head of new projects? First, both launches were incredibly brave; Glamour took on two huge, entrenched magazine brands and Lucky created a whole new category. Perhaps more telling is the extent to which industry experts condemned both magazines before, during and immediately after launch with three damning words - "It won't work". Glamour and Lucky, just like Loaded, Wallpaper* and Men's Health before them, have that in common. Glamour would supposedly struggle as readers prefer A4 magazines and, anyway, cover price isn't an issue. Fashion advertisers apparently wouldn't touch Lucky, meaning it would necessarily fail. For the record, "nobody" would buy advertising in Loaded, a magazine famously about "lager and shouting". Similarly, people would only buy Men's Health once a year. As for Wallpaper's lavishly laminated and perforated maps of the streets of Fukokoa? Nurse! The screens . . . Speaking in London recently, TV guru Peter Bazalgette recounted a similar experience with a couple of ideas he'd devised with some mates in the late 1990s. Presenting each to the major American TV networks, they were also told "it won't work", but pressed on regardless. One idea was initially called The Golden Cage but we know it now as Big Brother. The others, Survivor and Who wants to be a Millionaire, don't seem to have fared too badly, either. Memo to all heads of new projects everywhere: If the industry experts say "it won't work", press on, you might just be on to something.
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