James Brady On Media

James Brady On Media
Bimbos Or Sweet 16?
BY James Brady
http://www.forbes.com/home/opinions/2007/04/25/james-brady-teens-oped-cx_jb_0426brady.html

What kind of teen magazine do we want our daughters reading? An innocent and rather refreshing True Girl with its devoted but minuscule circulation, curtly dismissed to me by Hearst Magazines' Cathie Black "because Madison Avenue has no interest in 'tweens"? The smart and sexy Cosmo Girl? The longtime No. 1 book, Seventeen? Or, heaven forfend, Teen Vogue, once snidely derided as "for rich white girls"?

For 61 years, the teen category leader in advertising page sales was Seventeen magazine (now a Hearst book), followed in 2005 by an oddly sized little (because it slips conveniently into backpacks) Conde Nast trifle called Teen Vogue. At that point only two years old, it came along to stun Seventeen by a razor-thin advantage of 26 ad pages. Within a year, Teen Vogue had a solid grip on the category, leading by 287 ad pages.

In a dismal season business-wise for many magazines--Life, Child, Premiere and Elle Girl all went under, and even the red-hot celebrity books were scrambling--Teen Vogue is again running miles ahead of its previous year's circulation and is modestly ahead in ad performance, up 4% in ad pages through May. What's the formula? I asked founding Teen Vogue publisher Gina Sanders over lunch at La Grenouille, the day before she and her family took off for a Jamaica holiday.

Sanders begins with the magazine's slogan, "Fashion starts here," and fleshes it out with names and stats. "Neiman Marcus uses our magazine because they want to cultivate a younger audience. Other stores want to gain cachet." Although girls begin reading Teen Vogue at about 16, "there are grown women who subscribe." Which is understandable when you check out the roster of what Sanders calls "our exclusive advertisers within the teen set"--such prestigious labels as Armani Exchange, Burberry, Chloe, D&G, Dior, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Sephora. Plus multi-page ads from The Gap and other major advertisers. Sanders notes that not only is Teen Vogue beating its rival kid books in ad sales, it's also selling "more pages than many women's magazines."

When it launched in 2003, Conde Nast set the guaranteed rate base at 450,000 copies. Last October, the rate base doubled, to 900,000. But circ was rising so fast Teen Vogue was already offering advertisers a bonus of another 100,000. Right now, its audited total circulation is just over 1 million, with newsstand sales trending upward as well. Another vigorous plus: what Teen Vogue calls "the It Girls," its online reader panel of more than 100,000 active members.

You can be sure Hearst's Black isn't simply tossing in the towel on Seventeen. She's already shaken up the masthead and will be doing more. But she'll be going up against a formidable Conde Nast team as she and Seventeen attempt to recapture category leadership.

There's Vogue's editor in chief Anna Wintour, who exercises oversight as editorial director of Teen Vogue; deft editor Amy Astley; and the redoubtable publisher Sanders herself--a trim mother of two, married to a member of the Newhouse family (which doesn't hurt). She graduated from Tufts, where at college and into her 20s she was a distance track athlete running 100 miles a week. Before joining Conde Nast in 1988 as an account manager for House & Garden, Sanders worked in Boston and Madison Avenue ad agencies for six years.

She made her way up the corporate ladder from ad director of Details magazine to publisher, then Gourmet publisher until about five years ago, when the company asked her to create and launch Conde Nast's first-ever teen publication.

In recent years, girls' magazines have changed, with more stories about sex, abortion and drugs, and with glamorous "bimbos" as their cover-girl "role models." Teen Vogue seems to suggest maybe, without being didactic about it, the teen books ought to clean up their acts. Its March issue cover lines featured "Sweet 16 parties," "Should your school day start later?" and "Romantic white dresses," as well as how to earn a summer internship. April's issue includes a report on how more schools are cracking down on "dirty dancing" at the prom, and a cautionary feature on "Big spenders: Are you a shopaholic?" plus another titled, "I saw my friend die," about "drunk driving's deadly toll."

Is squeaky-clean what kids want? Maybe they do. Teen Vogue's circulation figures seem to say so. As do their ad sales. I'm anxiously awaiting my granddaughter's definitive take. So far, she thinks Sanders' magazine is "cool." And when I interviewed 16-year-old actress Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts' niece, who's on the cover of Teen Vogue and plays the title role in a new flick, Nancy Drew, young Emma said the mag is her fave.