Men’s print magazine Shut Up & Take My Money launches
Australian independent publisher D’Marge is turning its weekly blog series for men which launched in November 2014, Shut Up & Take My Money, into a 160-page print magazine.
The magazine will be published twice a year and will showcase luxury products and brands, as well as the innovators behind them.
Luc Wiesman, founder and editor-in-chief at D’Marge, told Mumbrella: “We had always been perceived as a blog and it wouldn’t matter how much bigger we got, people would always refer to us as a blog, so we said we need to do a bit of a shift here.
“D’Marge is actually a publisher so we thought print is going to be something that will appeal to both brands but also to men in Australia.
“We speak to a lot of brands and we work with a lot of luxury brands and the feedback we get from them is that digital is still experimental whereas print is what they do, it is what they got.
“As soon as you say you have a print title all of a sudden all people say is ‘Oh cool, how much is it paid, when can we be in it?’ So we found it was a much easier sell,” he said.
Wiesman insisted brand confusion with KFC’s latest ‘Shut up and take my money’ campaign was a non-issue as the magazine’s digital equivalent had been using the phrase for longer than the fast-food giant.
“We’re quite comfortable with how long we’ve been using it, we’ve got a very strong cache if it comes to that but I don’t think it will.”
Weisman would not be drawn on whether the publisher would seek to trademark the term.
The first edition’s advertisers include Gucci, Omega, Cartier and Alfa Romeo, and also features an exclusive interview with Nike’s head of design.
“Each page is an individual product or it’s four stories, rather than pages you get in other magazines where there is five different products on one page, it doesn’t look like that at all.
“With each product or brand that we talk about, we give an in-depth look at why it was created, who was behind it and why it appealed to consumers,” Wiesman said.
Shut up & Take My Money will be sold in 1,000 newsagents nationally for $14.95. It will also be available across the Singapore Airlines network and can be purchased online with a downloadable digital version.
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2017 is the exact right time to launch a printed magazine for men about consumption, named after a seven year old meme.
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Where can I sign? I want to jump on this new medium, the next big thing, before it gets caught up in some programmatic-real-time-bidding-arbitrage-viewability-viability-white/blacklist-extremist scandal.
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It’s the future….. again.
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Goodness, it’s like being back at Bauer and Pacific – all those clients saying “Oh cool, when can we be in it?”.
“Stop throwing money at us, we’ve got quite enough” was always our answer.
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Regardless of the naysayers, the product looks great and fulfills a need they had from advertisers. Will it be sustainable? Who knows, but with the support of the Singapore Airlines network, at least there will be a readily identifiable audience. News Corp’s Qantas Mag, DJ’s Mag and their ilk aren’t going anywhere, so there’s no reason why this one can’t succeed.
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Where can us men buy it? At the barbers after we’ve had our mustache waxed?
More broadly that seems to be to me one of the fundamental problems for print these days, lack of availability. Aside from airports where can you purchase these bloody things? Shelf space is at a premium in retail shops. Newsagents are full of birthday cards and punters having a punt on whatever day’s lotto it is. You have to go searching specifically for a newsagent that stocks a decent range with a topic you’re interested in.
Opposite me on the train yesterday a sprightly gentleman in his sixties reached into his briefcase and drew aft a quarter drawn copy of The Australian and proceeded to peruse it. How very quaint I thought. Don’t see that too often these days.
Maybe like records, they’ll one day have their renaissance as some future people look to collect magazines that are quality collections of words and images on topics that they value as core to their identity…
In the interim best of luck to them.
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