The publishing world offers plenty of choices to men in their 20s, yet few of those choices are general interest and can serve the needs of a variety of mailers. With the recent shutdown of Swing, the list of general interest choices has become shorter.
Fast Company focuses on business and entrepreneurship, SPIN covers music, Maxim covers women and fitness while Details has evolved into a pop culture magazine, according to Chris Sugden, director of finance and operations for the 3-year-old general interest magazine P.O.V., New York.
His magazine is stepping into what he believes is a void in the 20-something mailing list market with its change of management Dec. 1 from Direct Media, Greenwich, CT, to Novus Marketing, Tarrytown, NY. Incidentally, the 468,000-name file of Maxim, New York, was brought to market Jan. 1 by Stevens-Knox, New York.
Sugden said the shift was motivated by a need to increase the magazine's exposure to mailers.
“It was a time and effort issue more so than anything else,” he said. “Novus is suited for our kind of magazine. They are more independent without multiple titles, they like that niche type of business.”
The current P.O.V. file, short for Point of View, contains 174,000 names, and an active direct mail prospecting effort has raised its subscriber base to nearly 250,000. P.O.V. mailed 10 million pieces each of the last two years and expects to mail a similar volume this year.
P.O.V. tries to appeal to a wider audience than its competitors by addressing a wider range of topics. It has a work-and-play mission that covers careers, business, investing, travel, sports, entertainment and relationships. Sugden said the magazine is targeted to “the guy that distinguishes himself through his career who also wants to have a life.”
Novus is marketing P.O.V. as a file of the new consumer who understands the current trends and technology and is ready to buy into them. Said Britt Vatne, Novus vice president of sales, “The market needs this subscriber; he is the mail order consumer of the next century.''
