Inspired brains never sleep
July
18
Hachette Filipacchi Media’s Elle is down 21 percent versus a year ago, to 327 pages. Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar wasn’t closed as of July 17, but a rep estimated that pages would total about 280 pages, a decline of 27 percent. Sister pub Marie Claire is off 20 percent, to 139.
Condé Nast won’t put out its September results until July 21, but industry sources predict declines will be in the 20- to 40-percent range.
Fashion- and luxury-dependent Vogue and W are expected to be on the high end of that range while Glamour, which has a broad ad base to pull from, is thought to be down less. Allure is going up against a record 2008 September issue a year ago, when it carried 235 pages, although the beauty pub’s biggest issue traditionally has been October.
All the Condé Nast fashion titles’ numbers will be skewed by the absence of last year’s supplement tied to the glitzy Fashion Rocks concert, which was canceled this year.
The only title in the field likely to be up in September is Time Inc.’s younger and still-growing People StyleWatch, which will be up 10 percent to 86 pages.
With core fashion, beauty and luxury advertisers cutting back drastically this year, publishers had to scramble more than usual to fill their September issues, which have served as a category barometer.
Elle moved its September on-sale date forward two weeks to give salespeople more time to hawk pages, even if that meant foregoing the presumed single copy sales advantage it might have gotten by being on the newsstand earlier than its competitors. Of course, whatever benefits such tactics might have brought for September’s issues may well come at the expense of October.
