Advertising: A Multiplicity of Magazine Covers, and Just as Many Reasons

A Multiplicity of Magazine Covers, and Just as Many Reasons

Miley Cyrus in various moods was on the cover of the March issue of Cosmopolitan - three times, on three covers.

HOW many front covers does a magazine have? The logical answer - one - is outdated.

Time's April 29/May 6 issue had 12 covers worldwide, including Jay Z. Citi ads ran inside the covers of some United States issues.

In an effort to woo readers - and generate additional advertising revenue - magazines are being published with two, three, four or more front covers, typically appearing one after another as if a printing press had run amok.

At first, a magazine with more than one front cover seems like a house with more than one front door. But there are many reasons for readers and marketers to embrace the concept, as evidenced by a growing acceptance among industry stalwarts like Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith and Time Inc.

They are expanding front-cover real estate on major publications including Cosmopolitan, Entertainment Weekly, Fitness, Food Network Magazine, Fortune, Harper's Bazaar, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, People, Self, Seventeen, Sports Illustrated, Teen Vogue and Time.

“It has become more of a ‘go-to,' ” said Jed Hartman, group publisher for news and business at the Time Inc. division of Time Warner, whose duties include oversight of Fortune and Time.

“It's hard to find something with the power of a magazine cover” to attract attention, Mr. Hartman said, so “when you bring out a surprising version of that cover, it can be very impactful.”

Multiplying the number of front covers - each bearing a different image and, on the inside, a different ad - joins a panoply of nontraditional approaches at magazines. Among them are split covers, bearing a variety of images that readers are encouraged to collect; flip covers, printing a magazine in two sections with a back cover that becomes a second front cover when turned upside down; and gatefold covers, which fold in or out to form exotic shapes.

“Part of our job is to entertain people,” said Paul Fichtenbaum, editor of the Time Inc. Sports Group, who plans to run multiple front covers on the coming issue of Sports Illustrated devoted to the 2013-14 National Football League season.

“And it's an opportunity for us to be really creative,” he added. “You want to take that chance any time you can.”

Multiple front covers are indicative of efforts being made by traditional media like magazines to freshen their offerings - and, frequently, find new places for ads - as competitors in digital media continually come up with innovations, from Facebook's introduction of short-form video built into Instagram to plans by Twitter to provide location-specific ads for retailers.

(Still, in a nod to which century it is, when a magazine has more than one front cover in print, its digital version does, too. “You can always expect more, not less, on the digital editions,” Mr. Fichtenbaum said.)

Although there is apparently no consensus on when magazines began adding front covers, it has been at least a decade. Michael Clinton, president for marketing and publishing director at the Hearst Magazines unit of the Hearst Corporation, said he believed it “started with a few of the editors of the fashion and beauty books, who wanted to show different images of the cover personalities, putting their foot in the water.”

“It allows editors to get more mileage out of a cover shoot,” he added, which is often an expensive part of an issue's total budget, and “for advertisers, it's a bit of a ‘conquest' in the front of the book and gives them a big bang for their buck right out of the gate.”

Mr. Clinton's reference is to a practice by publishers to almost always sell the ad space inside all the front covers to a single advertiser. Often, he explained, “we go to the advertiser that might have had that position secured” - that is, had already bought the ad space inside the front cover.

Typically, an ad inside a front cover sells for more than an ad page in that issue because of the cover's visibility and heavier paper stock. Thus, additional ad revenue could offset higher printing costs.

The Publishers Information Bureau, which tracks ad revenue and ad pages for the magazine industry, includes multiple front covers in its tallies, but there is no bonus for them. “A full-page ad gets counted as a full-page ad,” said Cristina Dinozo, director for communications platforms at the MPA - the Association of Magazine Media, which administers the bureau.

Among brands and marketers that like to buy front covers in bunches are Citigroup, Diageo, Glidden, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Maybelline, Procter & Gamble and Xerox.

“We're interested in new ideas and new approaches, new ways to connect with our broad client base,” said Dermot Boden, chief brand officer at Citigroup.

“Some may not be relevant or practical,” he added. “This particular one, we felt we just couldn't resist.” His reference was to Citigroup's buying ads on the insides of multiple front covers of the April 29/May 6 double issue of Time, devoted to the magazine's annual list of influential people.

Editors and publishers acknowledge that the rewards come with risks.

“If you did it too much, it would dilute the effectiveness and impact,” said Jason Wagenheim, vice president and publisher at Teen Vogue, part of Condé Nast. His December 2012/January 2013 issue carried three front covers celebrating the boy band One Direction.

“There may be some fatigue factor for readers,” said Eric Schwarzkopf, publisher of Fitness magazine, owned by Meredith, which last ran multiple front covers, three, for the July/August 2012 issue. “We don't want to annoy or upset them in any way.”

To help avert that, the magazine executives agree, ideas for multiple front covers ought to originate with editors rather than sales departments.

“If you don't have a story to tell, if you do it for the sake of doing it, it's a gimmick,” Mr. Clinton of Hearst Magazines said.

One idea roundly dismissed as a gimmick is running multiple back covers. “When you start to mess with the back cover, it can create confusion at retail,” Mr. Schwarzkopf said. “That's not something we want.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 24, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Multiplicity of Magazine Covers, And Just as Many Reasons.