Mega-Branding For MagaBrands

FishbowlNY reports the theme of this year's American Magazine Conference, the "annual pow-wow of magazine executives," to be held in Boca Raton in the fall: "Magabrand Revolution." According to MPA conference chairman and Men's Health editor David Zinczenko, the revolution will be televised, and simulcast, and blogged, texted, and podcasted, and, oh yeah, printed on glossy stock.

In short, these days, the brand's the thing, less so than even the namesake mag. In a video on the
AMC site (two platforms that taste great together!), Zinczenko says that in this brave new world, magazines need to "transcend the printed page" and give the reader/viewer/consumer what they want, whatever media they happen to be consuming (and frankly, print comes way behind TV and the Internet). For those who take their Magazine Journalism very seriously, this is the sort of thing that will get their back up, particularly coming from Zinczenko, who has elevated the art of mag-branding into something of a science (the term "Zinczenko-ization" was even floated at a panel of women's mag editors-in-chief last year, with little need for explanation).

But the explicit rendering of mags into brands is hardly his province alone — it's an inescapable industry-wide trend, just as the required move from print-only to multi-platform web presence et al is inescapable, for newspapers as well as magazines, obviously (cf. the New York Times). Still, it's something for which he has achieved renown, and even the acknowledgment of his competitors (said Details editor Dan Peres on the announcement that his magazine would be publishing a men's style guide: "We weren't sitting around and thinking, what can we do to compete with the Abs Diet?").

So, which came first, the chicken of Zinczenko's AMC '07 stewardship or the egg of magazine cross-platform brand expansion? And should magazines be worried about letting their play for broad brand recongition displace the depth of good journalism? "My take is that if you are a magazine with a Web site, you're a global brand," said Zinczenko via email, noting that the video shows that mags have plenty else to be worried about right now, notable the fact that the average consumer has three times more exposure to the Internet and 8 times more exposure to TV every day. Said Zinczenko: "We're in transition and need to take advantage, now."

Many mags obviously are, spinning their brand names outward (Glamour's "Big Book of Dos and Don'ts"; Esquire's "Things A Man Should Never Do Past 30"; the endless supply of Abs Dietbooks); spinning inward (USA Today and WSJ planned magazines, just announced), or, in the case of Oprah Winfrey and Rachael Ray, being spun off themselves. So, since magazines are branded to the Nth degree anyways, the next logical step is to brand that branding. How meta! Oh, funfact: If you listen carefully, you can hear someone offscreen saying "Go!" to Zinczenko just before he starts his introduction.