We’ll prove men want it more than once a month

Tim Brooks takes a pop at those who are writing off the men’s weeklies before they’ve appeared.

Imagine a restaurant critic who didn’t know the difference between Thai and Cantonese cuisine. Or indeed a media critic opining on the tabloid Times, sight unseen.

The magazine sector is used to this kind of undiscriminating treatment, however. Perhaps it’s not surprising when there are 3,000 titles on sale – nobody can stay abreast of that lot.

So there have been some interesting reactions to the announcements from IPC Media and EMAP of our near-simultaneous launches of weekly magazines for men: Nuts and Zoo Weekly respectively. Two things stick out: first, the eagerness to batch them and label them “lads’ mags”. But they’re not a batch, and Nuts is not a lads’ mag; it’s a men’s mag.

Second, there is the dismissive way in which magazines aimed at men are discussed. “Just how much more can the lads take?” asked the Evening Standard, promising that “both will serve up the predictable diet of babes, football and fun”. “Beer and babes,” chorused the sober, babe-free Wall Street Journal. We confess, it’s true: men like women, sport, and having a laugh.

Women’s magazines seem to escape this treatment: perhaps media commentators never read them either? Women buy 8 million weeklies each week, and nobody seems to think the worse of them for liking the stuff, nor thankfully of the publishers who indulge them.

This was the starting point for IPC’s development of Nuts. Eight million for women, zero for men. Why? We recalled that when we launched Loaded ten years ago, the received wisdom was that men would not buy glossy monthlies (unless they were about cars or music). Yet today, men’s lifestyle magazines attract 1.8 million buyers a month, driving retail sales of about &£65m, and the same again in advertising revenues.

Just as Loaded reinvented the idea of what constituted a men’s magazine, so we believe Nuts and Zoo Weekly will define an entirely new category of magazine: the men’s weekly lifestyle title. While there is a natural interest in the “head-to-head” battle, we believe this nascent market will be big enough to accommodate both of us and indeed more. By the end of 2005, this sector could be as big as the men’s monthly sector at retail. No woman would mistake Closer for That’s Life, or Now for Bella. And male consumers – though possibly not media commentators – will notice and act upon differences in tone and style between these new weeklies, and others that will follow.

So lose the lazy labels, and let Nuts and Zoo Weekly get out in the market and locate their readers. If we succeed, the overall magazine market will grow. These titles will offer advertisers something new: a high-frequency, high-volume, high-quality colour opportunity to talk exclusively to men. Which is one of the reasons why some normally infrequent users of magazines, such as Dixons and Blockbuster, are advertising in Nuts’ first issue.

Tim Brooks is managing director of IPC Ignite!