This week's winner in the shameless self promotion category is (drum roll please): AT&T Magazine. 

I get that custom magazines need to be brand builders - that's part and parcel of what these magazines do; it's how they justify budgets often. But it's hard to build brand when no one is paying attention, whivh is exactly what happens when you create a magazine that serves your interests alone and ignores those of that pesky group of people called your readers.

Beyond the self serving articles (cite a few here), it's the machine-gun scatter of "AT&T" throughgout the book that makes me flip through the entire "issue" without any attempt to engage in the content. I tried to count the mentions but gave up when I encountered 22 on ONE page -- it's in the heds and deks; it's in captions; it's in body copy; it's even in the actual images. This from a magazine called -- are you ready? --  "AT&T Magazine." I kind of know it's from AT&T without the reminder every 10 words or less. Without offering any real value to the reader experience, the constant brand reinforcement is the equivalent of putting up a thousand billboards on a trans-arctic highway . 

The fact that AT&T magazine arrives in my mailbox withgout aqny effort on my part only exacerbates the engagement issue. With nothing invested in the issue, I have little reason to let it add to the clutter of my llife. Paid sub magazines already have crossed the theshold of reader engagement; free magazines have to make that initial connection and just shouting out the brand name over and over doesn't make that connection happen.  

The Kardashians and Geico

I was going to write about the Kardashians proposed new magazine. The reality entrepreneurs had a rumored deal with American Media to create a magazine that would be all Karadashians all the time. While everyone was having a good time satrizing the idea, the week of buzz about why the magazine is has morphed into buzz about why the magazine isn't.

If it ever was published, it's likely I never would have read a word of it -- not my type of content -- but I bet a lot of people would have. Maybe not. We might never know. On the one hand, it represents everything I hate about magazines -- shallow content, superficial topics, and I can imagine a breathless tone. Yet on the other hand, would the Kardashians be that much different than Oprah Winfrey and her magazine and media empire? Or Martha Stewart? Or Rachel Ray.

They all accumulated a community of followers and transformed those into readers of their magazine. It's just that the Kardashians racked up their community in a different way. And their model -- to have someone else publish it but maintain editorial control -- may have struck the traditional publishers as sacrilege, but that's the way custom publishing works. Just because the client exercises editorial control, doesn't mean the editorial becomes a bottomless pit of vapid content.

 I'm not surprised that a traditional publisher would balk at it, but really, is America Media, publishers of Star and National Enquirer, really standing on the high ground of editorial integrity here? Isn't that like the Kardashians complaining about not having any privacy?

So while that magazine sits on the back burner, indefinitely or forever, we're left to talk about another entry into the custom magazine world, "G Magazine."

Sounds promising doesn't it? Well, before you get your hopes up, G is the "magazine' of Geico, which doesn't mean it has to be bad.

It just is.


There's more content in a Geico 15-second commercial than there is in this 8-page 3x5 "magazine." But that's probably a good thing. The pages that try to offer content are so half-baked, so empty of any reason to engage with either the images or words, so just plain amateurish, that it's almost embarrassing to read it.


I have nothing wrong with corporate magazines. I think there are lot of very good ones being published. (Here's one produced by The Pohly Company for Hannaford.) But if you call something a magazine, make it a magazine. Give it real content; tell some stories, imbue some life into it with a voice, a personality. Create some sense of structure and rhythm to it. Otherwise, you sully the word magazine -- which probably doesn't bother anyone except magazine people --  but more importantly for corporate publishers, you ruin any chance you have of actually engaging with your readers with content that adds value to your customers and prospects' lives.