I love reading magazines, and buy far too many. But some of the marketing scams are beginning to really annoy me (As a small aside, people who call magazines “books” should be shot, and then frogmarched down to their local Ottakers, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders or library and shown what a “book” looks like).
I think it all started with some of the new Hollywood blockbusters a few years ago. Magazines like Empire would start releasing multiple versions of, say, a Star Wars cover, full in the knowledge that their sales would shoot up as collectors rushed to buy them all.
This moved onto more mainstream titles like FHM which also ran different covers.
The next phase was the multiple cover CD. Magazines like Uncut and Mojo often have quite worthwhile CDs attached to them, but why just one, when you can attach “Volume 2” to other copies? The women’s mags also offered different colours of vest or bag, but that seemed more like a choice and there was no real need to collect the lot.
If there was one issue of Q magazine I always bought, it was the December issue which comes with a “Best Of” the year CD. This year, that’s expanded into two, meaning two purchases are required if you want all the songs.
But I think we’ve now reached the nadir in this month’s Total Film magazine. With the Narnia films about to begin in an attempt to replicate the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, there’s an obvious fanbase waiting ready and willing. So what have the nefarious Total Film done? They’ve gone for the three “collectible” front covers which is almost par for the course. But they’ve gone further by sealing the magazines in opaque plastic bags, so unless you want to suffer the wrath of your newsagent, you don’t know what you’re getting. I forsee large WH Smiths in which all the bags are ripped. And frankly Future Publishing deserve that.
Of course, you don’t have to play the game and take part in this “collectable” nonsense, in the same way that I don’t have to buy both copies of Uncut magazine to get the pair of CDs. But many do. And these numbers get added to the audited ABC sales figures. I just hope advertisers realise that these inflated figures don’t count as additional eyeballs for these ads.