Homegrown Scoop targets celebs in Canada
Just when you were thinking grocery checkouts would collapse under the weight of Jessica Simpson’s boobs, Jessica Alba’s butt and Jennifer Aniston’s broken heart, along comes Weekly Scoop
to pour maple syrup over all this celebrity trash. But will it serve up enough dish about Britney, Bennifer and Brangelina to stick around?
Launching today, the celebrity glossy, published by Torstar which owns the Star, is the firstever English- language Canadian glossy celebrity weekly. However, unlike its long- established hebdo counterparts in Quebec, it will focus mainly on Hollywood and international stars, rather than local personalities. Which is good business but bad culture. One reason Quebec movies and TV shows do better than English- language Cancon is because there’s star- making machinery at play down the 401. Here? Not so much.
Weekly Scoop’s Canadian content comes from A-list celeb sightings in the Great White North where the stars shoot movies, attend film fests, ski at Whistler, cottage in the Muskokas or Laurentians or just hang.
There’s plenty of material, at the end of a summer that saw Canada finally recover from the SARS crisis that had previously sent Hollywood North south. Thanks also to the Toronto International Film Festival, which just wrapped up, Scoop had no trouble filling its first issue with glitterati captured on the streets of Toronto and Vancouver. As for Canadian stars, unless they’re internationally known like Rachel McAdams, they don’t stand much of a chance. So this week there’s a story on new Canadian Idol Melissa O’Neil and a picture of Cheryl Hickey of Global’s Entertainment Canada, and pages on the latest movies from David Cronenberg ( A History of Violence) and Atom Egoyan ( Where The Truth Lies). There’s not much more. From the cover, the only way to tell Scoop is Canadian is by the giant headline about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s current stay in Edmonton. It teases “ Wedding Bells in Alberta? Or is Brad just the babysitter?” ( Okay, if you must know: Brad looks “ glum” while Angelina is partying up a storm. It would appear that Jolie used her kids as “ emotional flypaper” to lure Pitt away from Jennifer Aniston.) An American magazine would never mention Alberta on its front. The other tell- tale Canadian sign is the cover price: There’s only one. It’s an introductory deal of $ 1.99, marked down from $ 3.79, well below U. S.- based Star or People, which charge $ 4.79.
“ The cover is critical: It has to intrigue them and catch their eye at the checkout,” says publisher Kathryn Swan, whose 20- year career in magazines was most recently capped at Rogers’ MoneySense. The cover is so important because celeb magazines rely on newsstand sales, not subscriptions. There’s a high ratio of editorial content to ads in all these books. This week’s Scoop has only nine pages of ads.
“ I would say we’re pretty much on target,” Swan says. The rest of the debut issue is composed of 91 pages of celebrity style, gossip and partying, with pointers to where stars wine, dine, shop and stay while here. If readers want to “ scoop their look” the fashion pages reveal where the products are available north of the border. As a magazine junkie frustrated by not being able to find the goods in Toronto ’ hoods, I have to welcome that.
“ It builds a closer connection with the readers,” says Swan, adding that research shows 88 per cent of us would opt for a Canadian magazine over a U. S. offering, if given the choice. Which is why Swan is confident that Scoop can scoop out a place in the crowded celeb mag market, the fastest growing segment in the trade. That while sales of newsweeklies, business periodicals and men’s mags have flattened out or dropped.
“ There has been a 15 per cent year over year increase in ( celebrity magazine) sales,” says Swan.
According to U. S. Audit Bureau of Circulations figures for the first half of 2005, Time Inc.’ s long established People was up 1.3 per cent to 3.8 million, with 183,000 selling in Canada. Bauer Publishing’s three yearold In Touch grew 49.7 per cent to 1.12 million, with some 99,000 reaching Canadians. Wenner Media’s Us Weekly’s total numbers rose 23.9 per cent to 1.67 million, while enjoying a circulation of 74,000 in Canada. Meanwhile American Media Inc.’ s racier Star saw total circulation jump 20.9 per cent to 1.42 million, with 120,000 of those selling here. Those numbers don’t count the very high “ pass- along’’ rate that these mags enjoy, as any trip to the health club or hairstylist will reveal. The market is so juicy that even England’s OK! magazine jumped in last month to squeeze out some of the action, with publisher Richard Desmond boasting that he’ll kill the competition. ( Word is, he’s committing suicide with his overly genteel material.)
Swan, for her part, has an initial print run of 100,000, and a circulation target of 65,000, which may not be all that ambitious considering she’s landed more than 13,000 “ pockets’’ — where magazines essentially rent prime checkout display.
That means retailers think it’s going to move. As for Scoop’s target audience, it’s a demographic of heavy celeb mag readers, mostly women aged 18-49. That older group would explain Scoop’s relatively polite tone, not as bitchy as other mags in its category. Now the question is, can Scoop stand out among all the other stalkerazzi rags? Swan says she has a million dollar ad campaign in the works to raise awareness of Weekly Scoop.
She’s going to need it.
Late last week I lined it up alongside People, Star, In Touch, Us, OK!, the National Enquirer and even the newly redesigned celeb- oriented TV Guide, now dubbed Inside TV, and it was virtually indistinguishable, except perhaps for the curl in Jolie’s pillowy lips.
That’s both bad — and good. Bad because it has to differentiate itself in order to build an audience in a market where the U. S. competition is essentially dumped after recouping its costs in its home market. Good because, although Weekly Scoop
doesn’t have the economic edge of the dumped competition, it’s still the same kind of celebrity trash. For more Zerbisias go to www.thestar.blogs.com