After Charleston, S.C.-based Garden & Gun launched in
2007, it was a given that citified Northerners would joke
about its unusual name. But the stand-alone lifestyle title,
which embraces Southern culture, is having the last laugh.
Its October/November issue is its biggest ever, with ad
revenue up nearly 200% vs. the same issue last year,
while average paid and verified circulation in the first half
jumped 10.1% to 236,097. And this spring, the magazine
won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence
in the Food, Travel and Design category.
PUBLISHER
REBECCA
DARWIN
FOOD
NETWORK
MAGAZINE
3
MAGAZINE OF
THE YEAR: VOGUE
Boasting increased ad pages
and an expanding influential
role off the page — a traffic-heavy website and the globally
successful Fashion’s Night
Out—Vogue continues to
keep things hot in a cool market.
EDITOR MAILE
CARPENTER
■ BY NAT IVES nives@adage.com
“RALPH LAUREN SAID TO me many years ago that
‘I don’t want to be too hot and I don’t want to be
too cool, I just want to be part of the conversation,
like Nike or Coca-Cola,’” says Anna Wintour,
Vogue’s editor in chief since 1988. “And that’s very
much how I feel about the magazine. Of course we
want to show what’s new—designers, actors, politi-
cians, opera singers, whatever’s important to our
readers—but at the same time, we have to not
frighten the horses, so to speak.”
The horses remain safely in the stable, but
Vogue is having a pretty hot year all the same. Its
ad pages through October increased more than 9%
to 2,125, fewer only than Brides and People, accord-
ing to the Media Industry Newsletter. Monthlies as
a whole slipped 1.5% in the same period. Its
September issue ran 584 ad pages, far more than
any other fashion magazine.
“Despite a tough economic climate, Vogue has
showcased impressive growth in ad pages and circulation—not easily done in today’s marketplace,” says Robin Steinberg, exec
VP-director of publisher investment
and activation at MediaVest USA.
Vogue’s first-half newsstand sales
also leapt 13% while the industry
slumped, partly but definitively not
wholly because of a great Lady Gaga
cover in March, which may have been a
little riskier than it looked to readers on
the coasts. “There are readers—we
heard from a few of them—who
thought she was not the traditional
Vogue cover choice,” Ms. Wintour says.
“But that’s sort of why we like to do it.
We don’t always want to be taken for
granted.”
“When I first came to Vogue and
put Madonna on the cover, that was considered maybe not
the right move for Vogue at the time,” she adds. “You need
to be able to, not reinvent yourself, but be confident enough
to do those things.”
Then there are the spoils of a September 2010 redesign
When Hearst
introduced
HGTV Magazine
last week, most
knew where a
big piece of the
inspiration lay:
Food Network
Food Network Magazine
earned a spot on the A-List in
2010. It returns in 2011, after its
January-through-October ad
pages surged another 13.8%,
according to the Media
Industry Newsletter, while
newsstand sales rose 5% and
total paid and verified
circulation grew 5.2%.
Subscriptions also increased
despite rising prices.
2
TIME
PHOTO BY PIER MARCO TACCA
1
PUBLISHER
KIM KELLEHER
“Despite a
tough economic
climate, Vogue
has showcased
impressive
growth in ad
pages and
circulation—not
easily done in
today’s
marketplace.”
to Vogue.com, which drew 790,000
unique visitors in August, up 124% from
Vogue’s influence keeps spreading, too, beyond media
proper. Fashion’s Night Out, the shopping promotion that
Ms. Wintour created in 2009 and proudly labels “not an elite
event,” had another big September. “When I was driving out
to Macy’s that first time with Michael Kors on my way to
meet the mayor, I just hoped someone would show up,” Ms.
Wintour says. “Next month all my colleagues, editors in
chief, are going to Tokyo to celebrate Fashion’s Night Out
there. It’s taken all kinds of dimensions that I had no idea
would happen.”
Some might say
that Time’s
great year
hasn’t been
entirely organic.
Its newsstand
sales grew, for
example, but it
benefited from huge external
news events such as the royal
wedding and the death of
Osama bin Laden. Its
subscriptions grew, but it
picked up a bunch of former
U.S. News & World Report
subscribers (even if they had
the option to ask for cash
refunds instead).
But we say there’s
something to be said for having
the strength, smarts and
position to take advantage of
events. In each case, Time did
that; its issue about bin Laden’s
death sold 332% higher than
its newsstand average across
the first half, a much bigger
bump than a rival newsweekly
achieved.
