Whose LIFE is it Anyway?

LIFE was once a popular national weekly magazine. Its "brand" was immediately recognizable - the cover always had a red rectangle in the upper left corner with "LIFE" written in white. Every inch of the rest of the cover was always one photograph. They were good photographs, but just one per issue. It was a big deal to get on the cover of LIFE (similar to the more recent notoriety of being on the cover of TIME or PEOPLE). LIFE put politicians and actors and dogs and world cataclysms on its cover.

The headlines, on the other hand, were pretty boring. They obviously weren't used for the purpose of enticing the readers to buy the magazine. (For instance, the issue that featured the story of Texas sniper Charles Whitman had the headline, "The Texas Sniper.") The picture was the headline.

LIFE offered something other than hard-hitting news stories. It used photographs. There weren't a lot of words inside the magazine; rather, the pages were filled with photographs. LIFE told the story of life in the United States in pictures.

And, then it disappeared. LIFE didn't keep up with the changing life in the United States. I'd actually forgotten about it until it started showing up as a weekly insert in The Washington Post. The insert has the LIFE logo and the one picture on the cover, but LIFE itself is a mere shadow of its once vibrant self. It's smaller in size and has a mere 20 pages. It's an insert that looks like LIFE.

I picked it up today for the first time. Here's what the ads were like. The back cover was a full page Dell ad. The front inside page was a full page ad for something called "Dream Dinners." There was one half-page ad inside for HP printers. The only other products advertised in the magazine, each with one or more full page ads, were for drugs - Nexium (for heartburn), Requip (for restless leg syndrome) and Lyrica (for nerve pain). Not much going on.

Lessons? What is this? Is this one of the new advertorial magazines we're seeing more of? Or, is it trying to be a real magazine? Change or die. Don't ever stop thinking about how to keep your marketing relevant to your market. LIFE forgot that. Match your message to your market. Who's the market for this weekly advertising insert/magazine? Certainly not our teenagers or the Gen X folks. The only people who are going to be interested enough to open the pages of this LIFE are those old enough to remember the real thing. If I'm wrong on that, someone's really off base. It's in a newspaper, which has no youthful readers. Who cares? I can't help but wonder whether this is LIFE's last hoorah. It's outsourced its distribution operations to papers such as the Post and I presume is paying advertising prices for that. There's always a back story. It's important to find out and understand the whole story before copying anything you see from the outside. Regardless of the bask story here, even if the older population were my market, I'd take a pass on spending any money in the new lifeless LIFE.

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