AMI Picks up Business Outsourcing Deal with Playboy Magazine

The "bolder steps" are becoming clearer, and they appear to be good ones.

When Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders recently spoke about needing "bolder efforts" to save Playboy's print publication, there weren't any specifics. Today, news hits that Playboy has outsourced the business end of the magazine -- ad sales, marketing, subscriptions, distribution -- to American Media Inc., the giant Florida-based publisher, home to Star, Men's Fitness, and other publications. (They're even reporting it in Russia.) The five-year deal is intended to return the magazine to profitability by 2011, reports Chicago Tribune.

Thirty jobs at Playboy Enterprises could be lost in the shift, according to reports, but some of those people might land at AMI.

Briefly, this is a smart move. It leaves the heart of the magazine, the editorial, in-house and outsources the part that has been giving the company a headache for decades, at least since the Reagan administration teamed up with the Religious Right to scare away advertisers from the magazine. Since then, we keep hearing about circulation drops, but circulation can be fueled by a thicker magazine. Just think what kind of marketing and promotion the company could have done with the tens of millions of dollars in advertising money it lost as a result of the government-Religious-Right collusion? AMI's business muscle should come in handy in addressing that problem.

Still no word on an outright sale of the entire company or other strategic moves by Flanders.

Not Much New in Latest Playboy Restructuring Plans

You won't find much new in the latest Folio: report on the restructuring at Playboy Enterprises. Yet again, the magazine is struggling. Yet again, the licensing division is quite profitable. Yet again, there are no specifics from CEO Scott Flanders about what type of "bolder steps" are needed to fix things at the flagship magazine.

Might I suggest quality? I'm a broken record. But still, they can't cut their way to a new business model at the magazine. They need to rethink what makes people read the magazine, and what will attract advertisers in a big way.

Nothing new.

Updates: Playboy CEO Threatens Seppuku; plus SF SPCA, Conde Nast, Levi Johnson & More

• As a follow-up to my post a couple days ago on the troubles at SF SPCA, I wanted to share this short story from CBS5 TV news in San Francisco. It's just more reporting on the mess at that organization.
• I'm just thinking that it must not be much fun to work at Conde Nast these days. After their recent magazine closures (supposedly the last), now they're doing layoffs at one of the surviving mags.
• Meanwhile, The New York Times provides a visual aid for people trying to comprehend what a smaller Conde Nast could possibly mean in this crazy, upside-down world, *sob sob sob*
• A while ago I reported the most important news in the history of the world, or at least in the annals of the Sarah Palin saga: The father of her grandchild is going to pose for Playgirl (presumably the web site, since it stopped publishing a print Playgirl magazine a year or so ago). He's apparently been working out, and his lawyer says that the photo shoot is a foregone conclusion.
• Playboy CEO Scott Flanders, who's apparently been doing the rounds of the business press, is quoted by Reuters as saying, "Over my dead body will we quit producing the magazine in print." Though threatening to commit seppuku helps address fears (which we can now largely begin to ignore) that the magazine would be deep-sixed, it doesn't tell us more about a report in the Chicago Tribune that the publication could be radically down-sized.
• I hadn't intended sex to be a common theme of much of this list of updates, but it's turning out that way. Anyway, the Los Angeles Times reports that Hugh Hefner does write down his own tweets for Twitter -- but he doesn't tweet 'em himself; one of his girlfriends actually retypes them so they can be read by his more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. That's kind of like someone who recently called us to let us know they had just sent us an e-mail. But hey, at least he writes his own tweets.
  
• What the heck: Finally, because so many people seem to be getting caught with their pants down in prostitution and womanizing news, I figured I'd share this story from Times of India about a Tamil journalist arrested in a prostitution sting. Or wait, how about this minister in Nicolas Sarkozy's government who wrote in a book about his past experiences picking up young (just how young seems to be under dispute) male prostitutes in Thailand -- oh, and the minister just happened to be a vocal supporter of Roman Polanski. It starts to make David Letterman seem downright grandfatherly. Keep your pants on, folks.
  

More on the Playboy "Strategic Repositioning" News: More Clubs

Chicago Tribune has an interview that fleshes out the earlier Folio: article in which new Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders said there'd be a strategic repositioning of the company, though print'd stay around.

The Trib article tells us where a big focus of the company will be going forward: Clubs. The one Playboy Club in existence, in Las Vegas, is apparently doing well, even in the recession.

Back in its heyday, Playboy had dozens of clubs, including huge (and musta-been expensive) resorts in New Jersey and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Years after Christie Hefner shut them down, she was asked about that, and she noted that Playboy had a good run with clubs; it's hard to make clubs (restaurants and entertainment venues) work for long, and Playboy had more than two decades of success before the market changed. (In particular, the idea of "key clubs" went out of fashion, though the company was also hurt by losing its lucrative casino gaming licenses.)

So this strategic repositioning is probably a smart move, re-adopting something that worked in its past, and it could be successful if the company properly updates the concept to the modern day. It seems to have been a big success at the Palms in Las Vegas, and there are plenty of other destination cities around the world where a Playboy Club could do quite well.

As for the flagship magazine, though Flanders seemed clear in the Folio: interview that the mag was here to stay, the Trib article puts up some parameters: "Playboy has no plans to shut the magazine, but has hinted at drastic cuts in frequency, circulation and pages. Playboy TV has room to grow, Flanders said, and the company's subscription Web sites have held their own against piracy and competition from free sites."

Of course, just like in the 1960s, '70s and early '80s, a successful destination entertainment business can help fuel the print side. There can be positive feedback in both directions. So, a rising tide here could life the print boat. Hopefully.

Publishing News -- Playboy to Undergo "Strategic Repositioning" but "Print Isn't Going Anywhere"

New Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders has appointed a new president for the company (Alex Vaickus) and told Folio:'s Jason Fell that the media company will undergo a "strategic repositioning" this fall.

What exactly is meant by that remains to be seen, except that Flanders explicitly said the company's flagship magazine, Playboy, will remain in print. Despite a rotten 2009 (like the rest of the magazine industry), Playboy has a future with Playboy. “I am absolutely committed 100 percent to keeping Playboy in print,” he told Fell. “The magazine is the cornerstone of what we do, it’s what the brand was built on."

The big performer in the company's stable is its international licensing activity. Maybe they should also get a casino license again -- wasn't that once one of their major sources of revenue? That'd be a pretty darn big strategic repositioning, if you ask me.

New Playboy CEO Puts the Kibosh on Sales Talk?

And no, I'm not certain that I spelled "kibosh" correctly.

Anyway, news comes that Playboy Enterprise's new CEO is the widely rumored Scott Flanders, currently the CEO of Freedom Communications, Inc., a California family owned newspaper and television media company. In an interview in the Chicago Tribune, Flanders says a number of interesting things -- almost all of them right -- including his commitment to working for Playboy's long-term success and not a quick sale.

I thought this comment was pretty important, showing that he understands the company he will be heading, starting July 1:

Playboy already has a very powerful brand, a very powerful asset. It participates across virtually every media platform. In many of those areas, Playboy was a pioneer. Having said that, it is still a relatively small company. While it punches above its weight, I believe Playboy's best days are in front of it.

I'm always a bit skeptical when a corporate chief says our-best-days-are-ahead-of-us sort of stuff (because they all say it, even if their Titanic is about to hit the corporate iceberg), but the above comment suggests that Flanders knows both his new company's limitations and its potential. His grounded optimism becomes even clearer when he defends print publishing:

I remain a believer in print. The consumer experience is much more tactile and comfortable with print. Particularly with magazines, there is a visual experience. Not just for the content and the editorial, but also for the advertising. The newspaper and magazine industry do not have an audience recession. When you add the print readership and the 45 million pageviews. ... The audience for Playboy is larger than it has ever been.

You can read the entire interview here, including his comments about moving from a libertarian publishing company to one perceived to be liberal (but, in reality, has largely been libertarian) and about the actual health of Playboy Enterprises (compared to the perception).

Flanders replaces interim CEO Jerome Kern and is the permanent replacement for Christie Hefner, the longtime Playboy company head who left in January.