Death of a Magazine
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union DEATH OF A MAGAZINE BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Now that Life has been extinguished and buried alongside its famous competitors, in a mass-magazine grave, I am ready to confess my...
...I seem to recall, alas, that the vault had been my idea, which may explain why I still feel responsible...
...You and I both have weathered many storms in the past and, God willing, we'll weather this one too...
...For weeks thereafter we kept floating back to our offices, where we stared at walls or wandered through corridors that no longer seemed to lead anywhere...
...I don't think he ever knew...
...The whole gerry-built contraption, too frail to sustain either our computations or our hopes, heaved an eschatological sigh and fell with a crash at our feet...
...The sales presentations, in particular, were said to lack focus...
...When I joined Collier's, early in 1957...
...I glanced at the vault just in time to see the door falling off its hinges...
...Burlington Hosiery needs an all-around copy man...
...the top swinging back to form an easel...
...Well, that's a lot of nonsense . . . a lot of wishful thinking by our competition...
...We all lacked focus...
...About a dozen ordinary rectangular cards featuring warm-up material had been placed in front of the vault, concealing The Big Surprise...
...Bud's hands trembled as he began the "pitch...
...Bud had arranged a make-or-break meeting at General Mills headquarters and he wanted me there to lug the presentation around...
...From Julius Caesar...
...Get it...
...Ask Gary Fitch on Eighth floor...
...Inexplicably, at the height of a national economic boom, while millions of Americans were buying like crazy, our readers had jumped off the great spending carousel...
...Bud was supposed to spin the combination lock on the vault's door (Collier's and Woman's Home Companion: the right combination...
...I stood near him, removing each rectangular card on cue...
...Periodically, although without real hope, we checked the community bulletin board for any job possibilities that might be posted there...
...In any case, three weeks before Christmas and after several shaky rehearsals, we crammed the vault and its ungainly contents into a monstrous "presentations case" (fake leather...
...Monty's young secretary would type them and then, after he had signed each one, she would furtively tear them up...
...a favorite haunt of our small driven band, grew extravagantly longer...
...The oldest was a white-haired gentleman named Monty...
...and shipped it to Minneapolis...
...Nearly 100 salesmen had been set adrift in the disaster...
...Those letters were never sent out...
...We're not licked yet...
...If Sisyphus were alive today (and who is to say he is not...
...It soon became clear, however, that both our readers and our advertisers had grown alarmingly indifferent to our wares...
...As the catastrophe drew nearer, our lunches at Toot Shor's...
...I lunged-too late...
...He had been selling ad space for the corporation since before World War I, and he had brought in the Coca-Cola account at a time when "coke" to most people still meant a lump of coai...
...Some 50 stony-faced executives awaited us in a dark brown conference room...
...after all, I was merely incompetent...
...He was interrupted by a loud, soul-shattering crack...
...Under the leadership of a corporation vice-president, whom I shall call Bud, we formed a "strategic task force"-most of the executives at Crowell-Collier were veterans of World War II vernacular-and began to assemble our arguments...
...The plan my bosses finally agreed upon was to try to persuade General Mills to buy $1-million-worth of advertising, amounting to 100 pages in the two magazines during the coming year four pages in each and every issue of Woman's Home Companion (a monthly) and two pages in each and every issue of Collier's (a biweekly...
...With my colleagues in marketing T shared the delusion that if I could just reach the top of the pyramid-that is...
...It weighed 276 pounds...
...States of the Union DEATH OF A MAGAZINE BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Now that Life has been extinguished and buried alongside its famous competitors, in a mass-magazine grave, I am ready to confess my role in the entire domino-like tragedy...
...Moreover, what readers we were still able to attract did not, it appeared, pay much attention to the advertisements...
...Yesterday the bird of night did sit, Even at noon-day, upon the marketplace, Hooting and shrieking...
...I can assure you we're in business to stay, and the proof is right here in this vault...
...Now, postponing his fate, he appeared punctually each morning at his office-shirt starched, shoes gleaming-and fired off reassuring letters to his old accounts: Dear Mac: Don't be fooled by the Eastern press and their prophesies of doom...
...Then, in an effort to enliven the soggy numbers, we painted them on huge, round cards that we placed inside a specially constructed, simulated wooden vault...
...Not that it mattered...
...We're going to have a great year, Mac, and I'm counting on you for at least 13 four-color pages...
...At a timely moment during the General Mills presentation...
...whereupon the door would swing open to reveal all those round cards...
...This careless act hastened the fall of the Saturday Evening Post, which led to the fall of Look, which brought on the fall of Life...
...But I have wandered down the wrong corridor again...
...Bud and I hoisted the presentation case onto a small table and opened it...
...We made calculated use of our expense accounts at the bar, fearing that soon the bottles would be empty, the spigots tapped out...
...if I could count and tabulate those billions of individual daily purchases-I would be crowned king of the marketing hill...
...Because, gentlemen, we have the perfect combination for your marketing needs (Bud twirls the combination lock), a great selling opportunity for General Mills (Bud flings open the door), a truly extraordinary...
...Being young and careless of my talents, I had, a few years before, drifted into advertising and was soon lost in a wilderness of prickly computations, pyramiding statistics concerning the American public's buying habits...
...Now I know you've all heard those rumors that we're going out of business...
...We all sensed the sober truth, namely that Collier's and Woman's Home Companion did not compute...
...Perhaps those four slick, perished pterodactyls, or their rustling ghosts, will forgive me...
...And our advertisers were not far behind...
...My job was to put together arguments that salesmen could use-arguments about our audience's buying propensities, our "healthy" circulation, our competitive ad rates...
...It was, to say the least, an improbable idea, born of desperation and a touch of temporary insanity...
...When Bud finally worked his way down to the vault, he paused and smiled at his audience...
...Even when it was over, most of us remained strangely misty in our formulations and far from coherent...
...The day after Collier's folded, a New York Times reporter, probing for causes, singled out "the weak advertising promotion...
...I had been the sales presentations manager, and that reporter didn't know the half of it...
...The fact is, back in 1957, I killed Collier's...
...he would take a job in marketing...
...We learned of our magazine's demise via a telegram, or guillotine-gram, from Paul Smith, our president, two days before Christmas: this is to inform you that as of this date you have been severed from the Crowell-Collier payroll stop thanks for your part in the hard fight stop But most of us severed payrollees did not know how to stop...
...There followed months of statistical hysteria...
...I was telling you how I killed Collier's, or failed to save it, anyway...
...Each day our research director, an edgy young man who resembled Woody Allen, frantically punched the keys of a small desk-calculator, hoping the machine's mindless stutterings (which echoed those emanating from the executive suite) would somehow suggest The Solution, some magical combination of numbers that might dispel the gathering storm...
...We were poor little sheep who had lost our way, and having a fine old time...
...They emerged, inevitably, in the form of charts and graphs proving that our audience was fanatically hooked on breakfast cereals, pic mixes, baking flour and other products made by General Mills...
...Most of the schemes "to save the magazine" that we proposed during those anxious yet, in retrospect, sweetly buzzing days, were concocted in a fog of boozy euphoria...
...Look will hire three salesmen...
...We were survivors in life rafts, aimlessly circling our capsized mother ship...
...Actually, there were two capsized ships: Collier's and its giddy sister schooner, Woman's Home Companion...
...He was finally forced to resign, not because he had failed-everyone at Collier's did that-but because he had humiliated a superior by rejecting the man's sexual advances...
...I found that even at noonday, the bird of night did sit upon the market-place...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 1
