Advertising: What's So Special About the Cover?

Maybe magazines shouldn't run advertising on their covers, ever. But if they're going to start, better they should do it now than later, and better they should do it deliberately than pell-mell.

And they are going to start. That much has been clear for some time, and was made clearer still by yesterday's news that Scholastic Parent & Child magazine has begun running unobtrusive ads on the lower-right corner of its cover. While Scholastic is the first consumer magazine to cross the line (the first that I can think of, anyhow), other magazines have been tiptoeing up to to it: most recently, Esquire, which implanted a Discovery Channel ad behind Barack Obama's face, and Ladies' Home Journal, which used an advertiser-supplied photo of Ellen DeGeneres as its cover image.

That sort of tiptoeing presents a real problem for the American Society of Magazine Editors, which tries to maintain industry norms governing the independence of editorial from advertising. ASME's rules now say that "the front cover and spine are editorial space" and must remain ad-free. But just why is that, again? ASME CEO Sid Holt says it "reflects the longstanding practice of consumer magazines. This is an issue not only of preserving the editorial integrity of the magazine but also of protecting the brand experience for consumers. Covers are our No. 1 consumer-marketing tool -- I don't think anyone wants to mess with that."

Perhaps that's too conservative a stance, however. In newspapers, the taboo against page-one ads has fallen without any appreciable damage to the independence or reputation of the papers that carry them, among them The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Earlier this week, I batted around this question with an editorial guru who spends lots of time on question like this. He thinks magazines are bound to follow newspapers sooner or later, and to think they won't is mere preciousness. "Isn't the front page of The New York Times at least as sacred a place for journalism as the cover of Shape?" he asked.

If ASME really thinks it's important to keep advertising off the cover, it should make a rule against having any advertising on the cover in any form, period. But it's delusional to think that by approving and even applauding boundary-testing experiments like Esquire's it's not hastening the day when the cover will be just another premium ad position. If it's going to happen, why not get out ahead of the issue and make sure that whatever advertising does make it onto the cover is honest and clearly labeled -- as is the ad unit on Scholastic -- and not some kind of shady stealth-marketing (a la LHJ) that confuses consumers and raises real questions about editors' independence?