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As magazine publishers increasingly face the question of paid product placement and the blurring of the sacred line between editorial and advertising, the August 22 New Yorker has hit the stands with its much-publicized featuring of a single advertiser, Target, throughout the entire issue. Depending on who you ask, the move is wildly innovative or alarmingly shocking. “It seems like a pro-active move to maintain financial vitality at a very challenging time,” wrote Jon Friedman of MarketWatch, about the issue. “They must meet the clamor for the delivery of information, news and entertainment in increasingly convenient and timely ways.”
But Lewis Lazare of the Chicago Sun-Times calls the move “the most jaw-dropping collapse of the so-called sacred wall between editorial and advertising in modern magazine history.” The deal between the New Yorker and Target, he writes in his opinion piece, resulted in “a 90-page publication where it is almost impossible to discern any line of demarcation between Target’s advertising and the New Yorker editorial product.”
Friedman countered that “it’s very hard for me to believe that a typical reader couldn’t figure out the difference between a Target ad and a New Yorker article.” He adds that he sees no reason to worry “that, say, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik is going to slip in something diabolical when he writes about Paris’s crisis fetish in the current issue.”
Lazare’s main beef with the New Yorker issue is that there were pages and pages of copyless Target illustrations that weren’t marked as advertisements. “In ‘ad’ after ‘ad’ it would be quite easy to confuse them for New Yorker editorial content, because all of them are done in a stylish format closely resembling the cartoons and illustrations for which the magazine has become famous,” he wrote.
Target advertising executives must be proud of the ad placement coup they’ve pulled off, he said, but “New Yorker staffers, most notably Editor David Remnick, can only wipe the egg from their faces.”
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