the timboucher experience

I’m not really a big magazine person, but I have been looking at them under a mental microscope lately. There is just so much information jam-packed into them that I think most of it doesn’t even consciously register on the average magazine reader. Which may be exactly the point: if you become conscious of the techniques they use, their effectiveness drops off.

Towards that end, I would like to examine one staple of all magazines: the letters to the editor section. This first blurb comes from a Newseek of July 17, 2006. This particular section is a summary of responses received about a cover article they ran on Johnny Depp.

One reader said the article reminded her that “celebrities are human, too, with their own private lives and problems,” and went on to thank Depp for “being willing to share with us his immense talent and a small part of his private life.”

I chose this quote because I think it perfectly encapsulates the true underlying message behind all celebrity-oriented media. We are to worship them and be thankful for their “immense talent” while simultaneously remembering that they are they are regular people. Their talent, fame and wealth set them up as role models for us, but this idea that they are “human too” enables us to relate to them, despite their great distance from us, and puts their attitudes and behavior within easy reach of our grasping hands.

This next one comes to us from the July/August 2004 issue of AdBusters and reads:

I’m not old enough to vote, but I’m paying attention so that I’ll make an educated decision when I can. That’s hard with all the bullshit on TV, though. Two months ago, MTV launched 20 Million Loud, a campaign encouraging 20 million more young adults to vote than the last election. I tuned in for an interview with John Kerry. The host of the show gave a short bio on Kerry’s college life, to make the audience connect with him, and then the senator answered some questions. One guy, about 19, asked, “Senator Kerry, you seem like a cool guy. But tell me, how cool were you in college?”

I expected more, even from MTV. What are these young people going to base their vote on? MTV has convinced 10+ million of them to vote with this campaign; so these people tuned in, seeking information to help them make a decision. But now they’re basing their vote on a candidate’s coolness. These brainwashed idiots will affect the election, and thus, the rest of the world. Good luck humanity. Thanks, MTV.

This letter, in turn, promotes the purpose of this magazine. The magazine’s goal is to encourage a certain profile of person to look down on pop culture as impure, trashy and manipulative. All of which pop culture may well be, but the magazine does not encourage this same analysis of its own contents. But it is perfectly safe and worthwhile to publish a letter where a “responsible young person” (who honestly sounds like either a plant or a fake) decries the valuelessness of other media outlets with whom they compete. All their other letters either criticize other media outlets, such as Fox News, ABC, Channel One News, etc. The pieces that they run that seem to be critical to AdBusters are only critical insofaras they are trying to point out times when the brand image of the magazine is inconsistent with itself. This isn’t really an attack on the magazine so much as it is proof that people “get” the message they are trying to convey and don’t want the magazine to veer off-course from it at all, since their own emotional identity and status as loyal audience members are tied up in it.

It seems that the trick of Letters to the Editor is that you choose the ones which overtly state back to you in other people’s words the messages which are implicit within the magazine. That is, your goal as a modern media outlet is to enable people to feel like they are experts, and to emotionally bond with your brand because you allow them to feel that way. Publishing a letter to the editor written by your audience member (whether or not they agree with you on specifics) serves to validate their experience of the magazine. It proves to the audience that their expertise and identity are valued, and enables the media outlet to more accurately guage the effectiveness of their underlying message.

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