`Why guys can’t say the L-word.” “Not ralphing at your first keg party.” “How to make boys cry.” “Virgins! 5 reasons to wait.”
With articles like these addressing the apparently passionate concerns of ’90s teenagers, a slew of glossy magazines are slugging it out to attract readers and advertisers to one of the few growth segments in the publishing business.
This fall saw the debut of two titles-Quake, from Welsh Publishing, and Tell, a joint venture of Hachette Filipacchi U.S.A. and the NBC television network. And in March, the country’s biggest magazine company, Time Warner’s publishing unit, Time Inc., will show it’s taking teenagers seriously with Mouth2Mouth.
Teenagers also are the most ardent followers of the hip-hop and rap music scene, and publications such as The Source and Time’s most recent start-up, Vibe, provide a forum for profiles of rappers, displays of their fashions and discussions of their politics.
But the newest wave is teen glossies. And like, wow, lots of the articles are written in, like, the same excellent language heard where the kids hang out at the mall. Like in Sassy, a standard feature on health and beauty is called “Zits & stuff.” And in Seventeen a guy sky surfer explains the attraction of extreme sports: “What gets scary about doing fast spinning moves is that you get really dizzy. And when you come out of the spin, you’re dealing with the passing-out factor.”
There’s no mystery about the reason for this sudden spurt of activity in a field that’s been dominated for decades by Seventeen and Teen. Publishers are betting that companies selling makeup, fragrances, clothing, CDs, candy bars and cars will recognize the increasing numbers of teenagers and their ballooning disposable incomes and will flock to spend millions of dollars in magazine advertising to reach them.
“The market is more attractive than ever because the teen population is growing,” said Peter Zollo, president of Teenage Research Unlimited, a marketing research firm in Northbrook. “The children of Baby Boomers are reaching their teens, and the teenager population increased in 1992 for the first time in 17 years. There are 28 million 12- to 19-year-olds today-and between now and 2005 that number will increase by 15 percent.”
And even before this mini-boom, Zollo says, “their consumer influence has continued to grow even though their numbers were declining.”
According to Simmons Market Research, New York, spending by teenagers grew by 46.8 percent from $39.1 billion to $57.4 billion between 1980 and 1990, and will almost double again to $99.1 billion by the year 2000.
There could be room for another big hit in a teen magazine arena where the top three sellers-Seventeen, YM and Teen-together sell just more than 4.4 million copies a month and are geared to only the female half of the population.
Time Inc.’s Mouth2Mouth will be the first of the bunch to take a real stab at a “dual audience” approach with the idea that teenagers of both sexes share interests in music, movies, TV shows and celebrities. Angela Janklow Harrington, a former Vanity Fair reporter who sold Time on the concept and will be its editor-in-chief, says that teenagers today aren’t divided along gender lines.
“These kids do not have gender fears,” Harrington said from her office in Los Angeles. “They all saw `Wayne’s World,’ they all watch `Married With Children,’ they were all weaned on MTV.”
Harrington and her business-side counterpart at Time Inc. Ventures, director of development John Klingel, are characterizing Mouth2Mouth as a combination of Vanity Fair and Mad. By March, when 200,000 copies will appear on newsstands and 50,000 readers who responded to a direct mail test will get their first issues, Time will have spent “well over a million dollars” on the project, Klingel said. Then Time Warner management will nix or give the OK for a second issue.
In setting apart her prospective audience from the readers of the leading teen magazines, Harrington says they will be “media-aware, interested and interesting-but not interested in `back-to-school plaid’ or `how to make him love you’ or `48 ways to tie your hair into a chignon.’ “
Instead, Mouth2Mouth will be full of short, visually exciting pieces “with lots of humor and wit,” Klingel said. Reluctant to reveal much about her first issue, Harrington gave an example of what she plans as a standing feature-a celebrity interview of a movie star conducted by somebody like rap star Ice-T.
Fashion, beauty, boys
But the old-fashioned combination of fashion, beauty and boys that Harrington mocks is what has boosted YM (Young and Modern) to the No. 2 position in circulation, behind Seventeen (which turns 50 years old this year) and ahead of the more established Teen and the hipper Sassy.
Makeup advice from models, features like “Whew! Eight Things Guys Really Don’t Want From a Girl,” and a fashion spread that encourages girls to “show up in something seriously see-through” have helped boost YM’s circulation by 28.6 percent over the past year to 1.5 million, according to June figures from Audit Bureau of Circulations.
A current trade ad for the magazine describes the YM reader this way: “She’s not ashamed to say it. Hair matters. Hair is important. If anyone wants to tell her that she is shallow or vain or silly for caring so much about her hair, she would like to meet with you, maybe have lunch, and stick one of her combs in your eye. If there was a 24-hour hair channel on TV, she would watch it.”
And according to Publishers Information Bureau, YM’s ad revenues are up 50 percent for the first nine months of this year to $11.6 million.
The leader at 50
At Seventeen, which leads the pack with circulation of 1.9 million and $30.8 million in ad revenues through September, Janice Grossman, vice president and group publisher of parent K-III Magazines, is unconcerned. “Seventeen is the very first beauty and fashion magazine girls read,” Grossman said. “It’s like Coca-Cola in this country.”
Seventeen’s approach is straight down the middle of the road, and the articles dole out advice on nutrition, the dangers of smoking and sex.
In its November issue, the fiction feature is a blatant warning about the dangers of girls being obsessed with being thin. And a dramatic confessional describes the night a former varsity swimmer drove his mother’s car to a party, got drunk and ended up in a coma.
But even Seventeen is much more frank than teenagers 20 years ago would have dreamed. In an advice feature, a writer says she’s 17 and has had sex and asks about her rights to get birth control without her parent finding out.
Meaning-of-life questions
Trying a more sophisticated approach is Tell, the joint venture of Hachette, the publisher of Elle, and NBC. The TV network is using Tell as a way to communicate with teenagers about its shows, including “Blossom” and “Fresh Prince of Bel Air.”
But in addition to being an entertainment magazine-the premiere issue featured the Fresh Prince, Will Smith, on its cover and in a major feature-Tell’s editor said it is trying to help girls communicate with each other.
“We’re not trying to step in and be the parents who are missing,” said editor-in-chief Roberta Anne Myers, who previously worked at Seventeen.”But we are acutely aware of what the issues are for girls whose so-called traditional families are not there.”
For 16-year-old girls, Myers added, “everything is a `meaning-of-life’ question. Independence, dependence, forming their own identity with their peer group, sex and sexuality, and relationships. And they’re equally excited about everything, from the newest Smashing Pumpkins video to Bosnia.”
The most serious article in the introductory issue of Tell now on newsstands is an extremely frank discussion about sex among eight girls 15 to 19.
“There’s nothing that those girls talked about that teens aren’t curious about,” Myers said. “The strongest message that we can give them-they do feel an enormous amount of peer pressure-is look at all these different opinions. You can find a place for yourself somewhere in there.”
Like a best friend
It’s that kind of frankness that got Sassy in trouble when it started publishing five years ago. Religious groups petitioned Sassy advertisers Procter & Gamble and Maybelline and succeeded in getting ads yanked from the monthly. It’s toned down under the current ownership of New York publishing entrepreneur Dale Lang, and the advertisers are back. But open communication with its readers is still a priority.
“Sassy gets over 500,000 letters a year from readers,” said Sandy Haworth, Midwest advertising manager. “Because the magazine’s writers really write about their lives, it opens the floodgates. Readers feel as if they know them on a first-name basis.”
Sassy goes further than its competitors in talking about the nitty-gritty issues. One of its columns answers the question, “When you kiss a guy, are you supposed to put your tongue in his mouth if his is in yours?”
Advice like that is written by a staff (often with help from experts) who, though they may not be in their teens, write as if they’re talking directly to their best friend.
“Sassy’s strength, and also its curse, is that everything is staff-written,” said Tell’s editor Myers. “Teenagers are infinitely more interested in what other teenagers have to say than they are in what older people have to say.”
The first issue of Quake, which is on newsstands now with 300,000 copies, is a mix of all of the above.
“We’re trying to do it differently, with a combination of entertainment and fashion,” said Don Welsh, president of Welsh Publishing Group, New York, which has specialized in kids’ magazines. “The others get more into the problems that teens have. We’re staying away from that almost entirely.”
Welsh, who believes that advertisers such as TV programmers, cable networks, and movie and record companies will be interested in buying his pages, says he’s trying to make the magazine an Entertainment Weekly for 16-year-old girls.
Its fashion layouts include “What to wear on that first date.” And the main entertainment feature takes a quirky look at young romance in the movies of the past decade through the eyes of today’s teenagers.
So who survives?
Will girls who are used to finding answers to their most secret worries about boyfriends and flab answered by magazines like Teen and Seventeen find enough new in the upstarts?
The experts agree that teenagers are reading more-Time’s Klingel points to the extraordinary 400,000 copies of Seventeen sold as newsstands each month as an example-but doubt that all the entries will find an audience.
One consultant said the dual audience approach is a sure loser. “Sixteen-year-old girls are almost women and 16-year-old guys are almost children. They have no commonality of interests,” he said.
“Teenage girls are terrific advertising prospects,” said New York publishing consultant Martin Walker. “Not only do they have a lot of discretionary income, but they buy everything. It’s a great opportunity for marketers to do brand impressioning. But is there enough advertising to go around? Probably not.
“The cost of entry for the publishers and the cost of competition,” will mean a shake-out in the year to come, Walker predicted.
