In 2006, World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the World Wrestling Federation) had a problem. Despite a booming business on television and an audience of 14 million, its two magazines couldn’t seem to hold on to their readers. So WWE‘s brass turned to men’s magazine veterans Tony Romando and Rob Bernstein to help them turn the publications around. Romando and Bernstein merged the two magazines into a single publication, ditched the fanzine approach, and instead turned WWE into a lifestyle publication more along the lines of Maxim or FHM.
Two years later, the new strategy is showing results. Not only was WWE profitable within its first year, but during the first half of 2008, when many consumer publications watched their circulation flatten out or continue to plummet, WWE grew 13 percent, and their ad revenue is up 22 percent. In the meantime, WWE now has seven international editions, and this year, it launched a new publication, WWE Kids, aimed at younger fans.
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We caught up with WWE editor Rob Bernstein, who previously worked at Maxim, Yahoo! Internet Life, and Ziff Davis’ short-lived Sync, to give us the inside scoop on how they did it.
What did you do when you first got to WWE?
We came in and thought it would make more sense to combine the two magazines, since the two audiences overlapped so much, and give them one publication that covered the entire world of wrestling. We also wanted to take that men’s lifestyle vibe and apply it to the WWE magazine product. A large portion of the WWE magazine audience is male. Although there are female readers, we’re really targeting that male audience. When we arrived here, the magazines were really like fanzines, with low production values.
Why did they have two magazines to begin with?
There were two shows on TV — Raw on the USA network and Smackdown on MyNetworkTV. [WWE has since added a third show, ECW (Extreme Championship Wrestling), on the SCI FI channel.] The brands are very different. They have different Superstars (male wrestlers) and Divas (female wrestlers). But there’s a large crossover. Some fans like wrestling so much they watch both shows. So those fans had to purchase both magazines in order to get their wrestling news. We decided to increase the newsstand price for the single publication to $6.99. I believe it was $3.99 or $4.99, but for two publications. So it’s now a little bit cheaper for fans.
What have you heard from your readers about the new approach?
They love it. Before, the magazine only had dated wrestling information. They just regurgitated matches the fans had seen maybe two months before. We transformed it into a highly polished magazine that not only celebrates the world of wrestling but reaches outside the ring and tackles issues of health, grooming, cars, video games, music, movies, DVDs — you name it. It’s now like some of the celebrity magazines that allow readers to enter the world of the Hollywood elite. What we’re doing is allowing readers to spend quality time with the Superstars and the Divas.
| “Tapping into a global brand does at least half the work for you.” |
Why is the lifestyle angle so important to the readers in a way that that the other approach wasn’t?
It allows the reader to identify with these individuals they see on TV. It allows them to say, “Hey, I like that film too,” or “Hey, I agree with them, that’s an awesome band.” It allows us to connect the readers with the wrestlers on the show, the same way that section in US Weekly, “Stars are Just Like Us,” helps the fans connect with celebrities.
Did WWE know they wanted you to do this? Or did you and Tony come in and say, “Here’s what we think we should do”?
The corporate brass here realized their magazines were broken. They didn’t know how to fix them, but they definitely knew they were broken. Readership was on the decline, as was advertising. So they contacted Tony, with whom I had worked at Ziff Davis, and brought him in as vice president of publishing. Under his supervision and game plan, we turned it into a lifestyle publication. He thought that would allow us to reach a wider audience.
How long did you think it would take to turn around?
We were hoping to get an increase of about 25 percent in readership early on. We didn’t expect to break a profit in the first year. We were investing in photography, editors, and writers. But in the first year, we were profitable, which is pretty unheard of in the magazine world. Most publishing houses have three-to-five-year plans where they hope to break even. We broke even in year one. We more than doubled our audience in the two years we’ve been here.
This year, Wal-Mart, which has more than a thousand magazines on its news racks, wanted to increase profitability, so they started cutting back on titles. One of the publications they cut was Sports Illustrated for Kids. But when we added a new publication, called WWE Kids, we were able to get it on the newsstand to replace SI for Kids. SI is a strong brand. That Wal-Mart would drop them and replace them with WWE Kids is an awesome win for our team.
| “We encourage readers to call us any night of the week. When the phone rings, the editor has to pick up the phone and respond to feedback. We can take that information and incorporate it back into the magazine. Fans love it.” |
How do you explain the growth in readership? What are you delivering that readers want, that other pubs aren’t giving them?
There are two different things there. First, we’re providing content that the readers were starved for and not getting before — interviews with the talent at WWE and a level of access they never had before with the old publications.
Beyond that, we leveraged the resources of what’s really a global brand. Specifically, its national television exposure. You can’t get better advertising. Other publications, they don’t have that outlet. But three nights a week, we’re reaching over 14 million fans and putting the product in front of them. The producers find ways to expose the magazines to fans in the shows. Sometimes, it’s the Superstars carrying the magazines and reading them on the shows. Sometimes it’s an advertisement that pops up during the show. It’s a level of direct contact with the fans that other magazines just don’t have.
A couple of other things we do that are really cool that I haven’t seen at other magazines: We actively reach out to our fans. We actually ask them what they think about the magazine and what they want to see in the magazine. We publish a phone number in every issue, and we encourage readers to call us between the hours of 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST any night of the week, seven days a week. There’s an editor who’s actually carrying the phone with them everywhere they go, and when the phone rings during those hours, the editor has to pick up the phone and respond to feedback, field questions, address criticisms, take detailed notes of whatever is on the reader’s mind, and report back to me and Tony so we can take that information and incorporate it back into the magazine. Fans love it. They feel like they have an active role in the magazine, that they’re helping guide its direction. That’s key. They’re a part of the process.
Really? You have your readers call you at night?
Yeah, that helps get rid of all the young kids who just call up to see if they can get an autograph. It allows us to get a more adult response. When we first started that phone line, we did it between 2 and 3 a.m. The phone would ring off the hook. That’s how badly fans wanted to get in touch with the company to provide their feedback. The point of doing it that late at night was to get the really dedicated fans. If you’re willing to stay up between 2 and 3 a.m., you deserve to be heard. But it became impossible after a while to get editors to stay awake during those hours, so we moved the hours up.
What else do you to get to know your audience?
Every day, editors scour the message boards, we Google ourselves, we read hundreds of letters that land in our magazine inbox, and we read what our dedicated readers are saying about us.
If you were to go back to a more mainstream magazine tomorrow, what would you take from what you’ve learned in this niche?
If I were to go back to a publishing company, I would probably say, “Listen, one thing that seems to be working really on newsstands now” — and it’s pretty obvious to say, but it’s worth repeating — “is that global brands seem to translate really well into the magazine world.” Oprah. Martha Stewart. ESPN. Rachel Ray. Brands that people believe in and feel comfortable with.
There are probably some pretty strong untapped brands out there that publishing houses could tap into. Ellen DeGeneres, maybe? Women seem to love her. My wife loves her. Would people be willing to read a magazine spearheaded by her? Yeah, I think so. I think it would be wildly successful.
The other thing about global brands is that they have other mediums in which they can leverage the product. WWE has national television exposure and a really successful Web site. We can take those really strong arms of the company and use them to promote the magazine and drive subscriptions and readership — and just let fans know that we exist. That’s half the battle. The newsstand is so cluttered; how do you stand out? Tapping into a global brand does at least half the work for you.
That sounds like it would be bad news for unaffiliated magazines.
It’s certainly a challenge for magazines that are just trying to break into the newsstand. Publishing houses are trying to launch titles all the time and figure out ways to build mass audiences and excite Madison Avenue. It’s pretty hard to do when you can’t tap into an existing brand.
So at WWE, is the Web site totally its own thing, not a mirror of the magazine, as Web sites are for many other publications?
You have to remember that WWEis a television company and a television brand. So the Web site provides up-to-date results and breaking stories. The magazine provides something that a Web site can’t. That tactile feel. Those glossy photos. There’s a poster in every magazine that we print. That’s part of the value we offer.
What kind of writer does well at the magazine?
You have to have a good sense of humor. It’s a men’s lifestyle magazine. It’s filled with fun captions and pop culture references. You need to be able to entertain and make people laugh. WWE is all about entertainment. You need to able to come up with great ideas that wow the reader, both visually and editorially. We tapped editors that we’ve worked with before because sports entertainment is foreign to a lot of people in the publishing world. People from Rolling Stone, FHM, and Maxim — they just get it.
Where does WWE go from here? How do you grow further?
We already have seven international editions, and we hope to add another 11 by the end of 2009. That would give us 18 international editions of WWE magazine. Wrestling is an international phenomenon. You think it’s a U.S. thing, but it is so popular abroad. They do shows in Europe and South America all the time. Wrestling translates. People get it.
So which Superstar or Diva should we be keeping an eye on?
John Cena. He’s probably among WWE’s top three. You may know him from Gillette or Subway commercials. He’s an incredible entertainer. He really connects with fans. He has a top-selling rap album, and he’s broken into film. He has a new movie coming out next year — an action movie called 12 Rounds, directed by Renny Harlan, who directed Die Hard 2. Cena is poised for mega-stardom.
How to create a successful magazine on top of a successful brand:
1. Add value: Use the magazine to give readers something they aren’t getting on the show, rather than just a regurgitation of what they’ve already seen.
2. Get vain: Seek out what your readers are writing about you — on your forums or elsewhere on the Internet — and read it.
3. Pass out your number: Give the brand’s fans a way to get in touch with you. Then listen to them, and make them feel like they’re helping shape the magazine.
4. Get symbiotic: Use the television show, and its Web site, to promote the magazine. Reader awareness is half the battle in a world of crowded newsstands.
E.B. Boyd is a San Francisco-based freelance writer.
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