Magazine covers have inspired songs like “The Girl I Love is on a Magazine Cover” and “Cover Girl”, posters featuring images from Life magazine and even jigsaw puzzles of artwork by Norman Rockwell for The Saturday Evening Post.Even in an age of Twittering, Facebooking, MySpacing and YouTubing, the graphic artistry and prominence of magazine covers enable them to attract attention. Madison Avenue is taking notice, creating advertisements that are designed to look like them. Some ads are for magazines themselves, like a campaign for the Magazine Publishers of America that seeks to promote the power of print by presenting fanciful covers from the future. Other ads produced to resemble covers, for brands like BVD and Tide, are for imaginary magazines like Hey Dude and Fresh Starts. Still other ads, for advertisers like DreamWorks Home Entertainment, Hummer and Fruit of the Loom, replicate the look of actual magazines like Parents and The Sporting News, including logos and typefaces.
One of the most extensive such campaigns is coming from Showtime, the pay-cable channel owned by the CBS Corp. To woo viewers for the 3rd season of the drama series “Dexter”, which began three weeks ago (see this previously on Morphosis) , Showtime will run ads in a dozen magazines that look almost exactly like the covers of those publications. Every coverlike ad depicts the actor Michael C. Hall in character as Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who kills other killers. The name of the series replaces the name of each magazine and is printed in the style of the magazine name.
For instance, GQ becomes DQ (Dexter Quarterly), with cover lines like “In cool blood”. The New Yorker becomes New Dexter, with a drawing of Mr. Hall by Edward Sorel, an artist who draws covers for The New Yorker. And Us Weekly becomes Dexter Weekly, with cover lines like “He’s drop-dead gorgeous”.
The idea was based on a theme used last year to sell Season 2 of the series, “America’s favorite serial killer returns”. That suggested the character is “a celebrity, part of popular culture, a cover boy”, said Len Fogge, exec vice president for creative marketing, research and digital media at Showtime.
The campaign is from the Red Group, an internal creative unit at Showtime, and the Initiative unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, the Showtime media agency. The budget is estimated at $4.6 million.
The other coverlike ads will appear in Details, Esquire, Interview, Los Angeles, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Wired. In Rolling Stone and Us, the ads will run on the back covers and be part of 8-page ad supplements about the new season of “Dexter”. In five magazines owned by the Condé Nast Publications unit of Advance Publications - Details, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired- the ads will be part of 4-page ad inserts. In the rest, each ad will appear as a single inside page.
In mock-ups of the ads supplied by Showtime, all are labeled with the word “advertisement” in small type atop each page. That is meant to satisfy guidelines of the American Society of Magazine Editors that are intended to draw a distinction between advertising and editorial content.“It’s all very fun, it’s all very tongue-in-cheek, and it’s all kept in the confines of the advertising unit”, said Gary Armstrong, chief marketing officer at Wenner Media, which owns Rolling Stone and Us. “So it shouldn’t confuse the reader”. Richard D. Beckman, president at the Condé Nast Media Group, a unit of Condé Nast, said the goal of such customized ads is to “connect with the reader in a resonant way”. Each ad is “very chameleonlike”, Mr. Beckman said, but at the same time “you can never let an advertiser represent to your readership that they’re creating advertising as editorial content”. Chris Mitchell, vice president and publisher at Wired, said he welcomed the “Dexter” ads, which underwent “a couple revisions along the way to keep it on the right side of the line”. “That’s always the fine line you walk”, he said, “giving the advertiser something truly breakthrough yet not wanting to step on the editors’ toes”.
