Two-Faced Magazine : Orange Coast Tries Contrasting Covers

COSTA MESA —  Orange Coast magazine’s July issue has a split personality.

On the cover of half the copies that hit the newsstands on Tuesday, the de rigueur face of a Hollywood celebrity appears. This month, it is actress Nancy Travis, drenched in eye-pleasing yellow light and wearing a stylish summer bonnet courtesy of a Corona del Mar fashion boutique.

But the other half of the magazines printed this month sport a troubling black-and-white photograph of a pair of Orange County “teen-age criminals” wearing Raiders patches, dark sunglasses and headbands.

A mistake? Some media experts say it very well may be. But for publisher Ruth Ko, the two covers, which are being circulated randomly across Orange County, represent a bold stroke in market research that is going directly to the readership.

After years of criticism--some of it from within its own staff--that the slick, glossy magazine is too fluffy and panders far too much to the Newport Beach social elite, Ko has ordered a three-month experiment to see if readers want the magazine, which carried a cover price of $2.95, to be more issues-oriented.

“We constantly have people say, ‘Why do you always have a celebrity on the cover?’ ” said Ko, who took over the 18-year-old magazine in February after its former owner filed for bankruptcy court protection.

“We are now going to see what our readers think.”

To that end, readers are asked to mail in an enclosed postcard after checking off whether they want to “keep up the 18 years of tradition”--the celebrity cover, that is--or to “bag the celebrities” for more “local faces, places and issues,” even though those faces may be those of the county’s growing number of youth gangs.

It is a unique marketing ploy that media, advertising and marketing experts say could either be a masterstroke or a mishap that will sink the magazine even deeper in its financial quagmire. The stark contrast between the two covers makes the strategy all the more a crapshoot.

“When magazines begin to test the waters with that much diversity, I guess it doesn’t take much to imagine it could be risky,” said Toni Alexander of IntercommunicationsInc, a Newport Beach advertising and marketing firm that occasionally buys ads in Orange Coast for clients.

But the chance the publication is taking, Alexander said, may result in a reversal of its decline in advertising revenue. Many local companies have shunned Orange Coast, fearing that ads for their products would reach only a limited market.

She also said that the increasingly urban county is in need of a more diversified magazine that tackles current hot topics as well as arts and entertainment.

“My hat is off to them,” she said. “The magazine seems to be trying to stretch a little and see if there are more people out there in Orange County who want to be presented with urban issues instead of how happy it is in Vanilla-ville.”

The experiment is a departure, however, from the strategy Ko outlined in early March, when she took over, that there would be no “visible changes” to the magazine. She bought a controlling 83.2% interest in the publication from Wayne Stewart, a former real estate developer who was filing for financial reorganization under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. The parent company was renamed Orange Coast Kommunications, playing on Ko’s last name.

The magazine was not included in the bankruptcy filing. But at the time, Ko acknowledged that, like many other publications, Orange Coast was finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet as the recession continued to cut into ad sales.

Alan Halcrow, editor of Personnel Journal Magazine in Costa Mesa and an officer for Western Publishers Assn., speculated that the marketing test, in which 18,500 copies of each cover were printed, is aimed not so much at readers as at the advertisers who would ultimately be footing the bill for the magazine’s new format.

He also said that the magazine may have ill-timed the market test by having it run during the summer, when almost all other periodicals--including news magazines--are offering lighter cover fare. A better time to launch such a readership research project would have been in the fall, when harder-edged articles are the norm. “I’m just surprised they are doing this now,” he said.

Ko said that the idea was not planned out with media experts but came to her in the middle of the night six weeks ago. She awoke suddenly, she said, and envisioned the two-cover marketing strategy, which will cost about $7,500 in the next three months.

“I was really intrigued by it,” Ko said.

She then convened her editorial board, which had long advocated a tougher magazine, and began planning the cover split.

“The celebrity covers have always made us successful,” she said. “But I said: ‘OK, let’s give it a try. I’ll go along with you guys.’ ”

Orange Coast editor Palmer Jones said that she and her staff were excited by the new cover idea. She had been moving the magazine toward issues-oriented stories for the past several years, she said. In fact, the teen-age criminal story is in both magazines and is the latest in a series of stories on serious social and business topics.

This month, for instance, Jones said, the magazine ran a piece on the aging North County. In August, the cover story will be about the Los Angeles riots and the increasing likelihood that such disturbances could happen in Orange County.

“I know a lot of people perceive us as too fluffy,” she said. “But on balance, we try to have a wide range of coverage.”

That might not be the right direction, though, said Imran Currim, a professor of marketing for the UC Irvine School of Management.

Local magazines that become too broad, Currim said, face the possibility of alienating most readers while trying to please them all.

“My gut reaction is that this will have more disadvantages than advantages,” Currim said.

On the one hand, the strategy will most likely draw reader attention. But on the other hand, it may turn off longtime, loyal customers.

“It can confuse the reader about the image of the magazine,” Currim said. “There is the possibility that the reader might think that the magazine does not have a focused objective or mission.”

Ko, a professed celebrity cover fan, said that she has not received any responses from readers in the first two days after the magazine’s latest issue went on sale. She has been able to gauge the immediate response, she said, from face-to-face encounters with readers, who overwhelmingly favor the glitz of Hollywood to the grit of the streets.

“I already have a strong feeling about this,” she said.