O’Conall Street

Feminists of the world rejoice. The lad mag is dead!

So claimed Belfast radio station U105 last week. The report suggested lad mags relied on two things to fly off the shelves. Scantily clad celebrity babes and news on scantly clad celebrity babes. Sure, what red blooded male wouldn’t cough up a few quid for a good old drool over Big Brother’s Chanelle and then rejoice on the gory details of Chanelle’s latest fling. It’s a story as old as life itself. Gossip sells and juicy gossip sells even faster. In fact, our appetite for it appears pretty insatiable. And therein according to the morning drive-time radio report lies the lad mag’s problem. They just cannot keep up with the Internet for celebrity news and cannot offer the choice of naked celebrity cyberspace that specifically YouTube can. Bad news for the magazines and feminists too for it appears lads want more of what the lad mags sold and faster and they will go anywhere to get it!

Interestingly the ladies haven’t fallen foul of the same circumstance. Quality women’s magazines actually have good articles and attract a serious readership and for the gossip craving girls there are the cheap and cheerful weekly rags to keep the Coronation Street blues at bay which are also available online.

So ‘Nuts’ has been cracked and according to my local radio station FHM will need a lot more rpm with sales reportedly falling across the sector. The solution may lie online and on mobile where the red tops are rapidly becoming players. Lads do like their page three mobile and their desktop footie. But then it’s a woman calling the shots at ‘The Sun’ these days.

This presents the PR industry with a new challenge and leaves advertisers with access issues to this lucrative market. Getting to this historically hard to reach sector - the Lad mag reader - may just have got a little more difficult. Will new media marketing now be the route into our boy’s heads and wallets or will a new type of traditional publication emerge to fill the gap?

Or….. as Mark Twain once sort of suggested and Chanelle fan’s will hope - rumors of their demise may be greatly exaggerated!  

Or….. as she who sometimes is obeyed likes to say ’Ill be a post feminist in post patriarchy’!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Celebrity, Consumer, Public Relations, The Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.