by Mark Dapin
I could not see why it was important to know which image the advertising manager thought looked most like the Ralph guy – although, interestingly, he chose one that closely resembled himself – nor which song was favoured by the marketing manager (‘Tubthumping’ by Leeds anarchist band Chumbawamba). I could not think of an object to bring, so I stole James the picture editor’s object – an old-style TV remote control. Happily, we were not called upon to justify our choices, since I had forgotten to ask his reasoning. I also stole Chriso’s song, Regurgitator’s alternative hit, ‘I Sucked A Lot of Cock to Get Where I Am’, although it more appropriately described the meeting than the magazine.
Everybody played with their toys for an hour, had their little jokes, and tried to say the right thing. The best of them struggled to be helpful. The worst of them gyred and gimbled around Nick like slithy toves. As in many such meetings, a popular pastime was inventing new Ralph acronyms, such as ‘Real Australians Love Pizza Hut’.
I sulked and brooded, presented James’s object, and pointed to the guy on the collage that looked most like me. Then I said we would have to drop the idea of being ‘politically incorrect’. It made us sound like One Nation, the sort of people who called Aboriginals ‘boongs’ and Asians ‘slopes’, and it was no wonder nobody liked us. I said I would not produce a ‘politically incorrect’ magazine. Anyone who spoke against me looked like they were calling Nick a slope, so nobody did.
Nick said, ‘The one thing every Aussie guy wants on his tombstone is, “He was a good bloke”’, and he was right. Ralph had to stop sneering and leering and heckling, and start to approach life with the bemused innocence, unthinking tolerance and awkward athleticism of a nice guy.
It also needed to become more professional. An attitude had grown up that it was not necessary to do the work to get the story. This began with Jack, the music writer who did not listen to CDs. Jack ‘admitted’ soon after he left Ralph that not only had he not played a review CD for two years, he had not attended the Big Day Out he was supposed to have watched for Rolling Stone.
Australian music journalism is indefensible and amateurish, grown out of a street press with no journalistic standards. The clomping, insipid, derivative Australian content of the local edition of Rolling Stone stands out against the slick, imported US prose like a thrower in a room full of dwarfs. Jack was a fine music journalist, but chose to secretly abandon reviewing the songs in favour of reviewing the packaging. Tim had already replaced Jack with a reviewer who listened to records. I told the new guy he was not to compare the band with any other band, especially bands the readers would never have heard of; he was not to comment on the production, or even allude to the producer; he was to say what it sounded like, judge if the CD was any good, and make a joke.
I asked the same of the movie critic. I did not want to know who directed the film, or who his influences were, or from which black-and-white French-language classic he had borrowed the plot. First, I needed to learn what it was about – so I would know not to go if it was about ballroom dancing. Secondly, if it was a thriller, I wanted to know if it was exciting; if it was a comedy, I wanted to know if it was funny; if it was a horror film, I wanted to know if it was frightening.
I thought there were not enough movie reviews in the magazine, so I rang the reviewer to ask if he could do four more. He said of course he could. He would write them right away. I asked if he had seen four more films. He had not, but ‘somebody’ at Ralph had told him that was not important. Whenever he could not attend a screening, he wrote his review from a press release. I told him things had changed, and marked him for dead.
Tim had arranged for a travel writer to supply us with monthly travel pieces. He handed in a piece about great rock-and-roll hotels, which included the Chelsea in New York, where Sex Pistol Sid Vicious had stabbed to death his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. I had always wanted to go to the Chelsea, so I asked the writer what it was like. He did not know. He had never been there. I allowed his contributions to drop away.
I told everybody that from now on reviewers were to be accountable for their opinions, which they had to form though personal experience. This proved a surprisingly difficult concept to get across. Several months after a DVD reviewer was appointed, he asked for money to buy a DVD player, since he had never owned one. The staffer who cross-tested DVD players also neglected to put DVDs in them, although he had, he assured me, plugged them in and turned them on.
My zeal to force the writers into authentic experiences led us in some groundbreaking directions. Freelance journalist Owen Thomson rang and asked if I would take an article about dog-training. I said I would, but only if he dressed up in a dog suit and undertook the training himself. Owen did so, at Ash’s house, and knocked a chunk out of Ash’s stereo speakers as he scampered around the carpet – just like a real dog. The story presented, for the first time, the experience of barking-control and newspaper-fetching from the point of the view of a domestic pet. Every subsequent time Owen offered me a story, I said he would have to wear a dog suit. It toughened him up for the challenges to come.
Brad said I should read every letter that came into Ralph – and he read them all himself too. Eighty per cent of correspondence was about the cover girls, and it was a cover girl – Gabrielle ‘the Pleasure Machine’ Richens – who changed Ralph’s fortunes. Richens was a beguilingly beautiful English model who came to Australia for a two-week photo shoot and met Canterbury Bulldogs Rugby League forward Solomon Haumono. When she returned to the UK, Haumono followed her, risking his $200 000 a year contract. East-coast Australia was amazed. This was an event unprecedented in the history of sport and sex. A bloke was risking a world-class footballing career for a sheila. The drama deepened when Haumono’s best mate, St George five-eighth Anthony Mundine, flew across the world to bring his mate home.
‘I’m going to be in, I’m going to be out,’ promised Mundine, his jaw set like a commando. ‘I’m going to bring back my brother Solomon.’
The Daily Telegraph printed a map of Mundine’s epic journey, so readers could follow his progress. It was not a very complicated map, since all Mundine did was fly QF001 Sydney-Bangkok-London. He did not even take a stopover. When he returned with Haumono, it completed a fantastic Aussie folktale. What greater love could a man have for his mate than to bring the wrath of his own coach on his head for flitting off to England when he should have been resting between games?
Both Cleo and Ralph wanted photo shoots with Richens. Nick was publisher of the two titles, but we did not negotiate a company-wide deal with Gabrielle. We did not share shots. Richens did a Cleo cover for nothing, as models often do for women’s magazines. She even posed for a blurry topless portrait. Ralph paid her several thousand dollars – more than we had offered any model up to that date – to wear a brocade corset on the cover and a partly see-through shirt inside. Richens had been in Loaded, so she knew how to work a men’s magazine. She managed to look at once seductive and innocent, predatory and vulnerable, exotic and attainable. The only change we had to make to her image was removing the boob-job scar from near her armpit. That winter, every man in Australia wished he were Solomon Haumono. Then Richens dumped him.
Richens sold 63 000 copies for Ralph, up 12 000 from the previous issue. House of Fetish, the supplier of the brocade corset, shifted 400 units to men who wanted to dress their girlfriends as Richens, and women who thought the trick was in the underwear. Word came down through Brad that even James Packer liked the shoot. (Previously, Packer’s only known comment about Ralph was that it was ‘shit’). Many of the cover girls we later photographed asked to be shot in the same style as Gabrielle Richens. We won publicity on The Footy Show – something Nick had always craved – and even the mainstream press gave us a mention.
Brad urged me to get Richens regularly involved in the magazine, but by this time she had signed up with celebrity agent Max Markson. I had a meeting with Markson, Richens and the inevitable third-person-with-no-discernible function.
In real life, Richens glowed even brighter than she did on our highly processed cover. She spoke with the Mars Bar-melting charm of a South London schoolgirl, just common enough to bring her down to only two or three levels above the rest of us. We talked about making her a Ralph spokesperson, or giving her a column, but Markson asked for $10000 a month, more than our entire talent budget for the year. She tried one column of hints about how to please your girlfriend, but she could not come up with much beyond ‘buy her flowers’, so we had to drop her as a writer. We used her once more, on the spurious justification that she was our ‘lingerie reviewer’, then she went off and did a nude shoot for Playboy.
Richens worked so well because she was the sexual celebrity of the moment, the woman everybody was talking about. Ralph had rejoined the national conversation. The only woman attracting a similar degree of attention was poor Mimi Macpherson, sister of supermodel Elle, and reluctant ‘star’ of a wildly notorious video. The year before, a tape of Mimi having sex with her then boyfriend, Matthew Bennett, was widely duplicated and screened at football clubs and bucks’ nights across the country. Mimi denied she was the woman in the video, but Bennett admitted to the Sun Herald that he had made the tape. The Mimi video had become available on the internet, which was creeping into everybody’s home and office, when Mimi agreed to pose in swimwear for Ralph – for twice the record sum paid to Richens. Mimi’s terms were complicated and detailed, and included the stipulation that she have her choice of stylist, hair-and-makeup and photographer – Elsa Hutton, who did a lot of work for Cleo – and that we fly everyone up to Fraser Island. It broke Brad’s heart to spend so much on a shoot – he wanted to fix the fee at $1500, which was what he paid a cover girl for The Picture.
When the prints came back, we discovered the stylist had persuaded Mimi – who had refused to model lingerie – to pose topless with her arms across her nipples. Mimi ran a whale-watching business, so she spent ninety per cent of her time in the ocean. Her back was scaly, like a fish, as a result of what we called ‘Mimi Fungus Disease’, an apparently common consequence of wearing a wetsuit all day. It cost us thousands of dollars in Photoshopping to cure Mimi Fungus Disease, cover her freckles, and smooth over her sunburn and peeling, but the issue sold even more than the Richens cover.
Ralph had no marketing to speak of. Sydney was strewn with Metrolites, backlit billboards flanking bus shelters and kiosks, and FHM hired them every month to show off its new cover. Metrolites were a striking, spectacular form of advertisement that said the magazine was out; it had a certain woman on the cover, certain coverlines, and therefore certain contents. There were no stickmen, or references to housework. At marketing meetings, we would while away the hours discussing idiotic ideas such as paying a third party $250 000 to produce a Ralph calendar in which Australia’s top models would each dress up as their favourite science fiction character, but Nick would not hear of buying Metrolites. He did not think they ‘worked’.
I realised that if we timed our release date to coincide with FHM’s, we could use their Metrolites anyway. The ads drove customers to the newsagency, where a pile of FHMs sat beside a pile of Ralphs. Even though he had intended to purchase the new FHM, a buyer – most of whom could not, at first, tell the two magazines apart – might pick up the new Ralph instead if it had a stronger cover. There was another reason to match FHM’s release dates: many readers bought only one magazine, so every time FHM got a first-week sale, it potentially eliminated one of ours. If FHM came out earlier in the month – which it did – a lot of people would inevitably see it first and buy it first. When we went head-to-head, FHM’s sales immediately suffered and our sales prospered. We knew this because they quickly moved their sales back even further. I insisted we, in turn, move back to meet them, and a battle of nerves ensued, at the end of which both magazines’ cover dates were sometimes two months out. ‘Cover date chicken’ was my sole theoretical contribution to the inexact science of magazine marketing.
The Metrolites – as opposed to stickman advertising – could also reasonably be assumed to ‘increase readership’. Readership figures are a publisher’s sleight of hand. They are gathered by Roy Morgan Research and disseminated to media planners, who are supposed to believe they more accurately reflect the people who read a magazine; as opposed to sales figures, which only reflect the people who buy it.
To discover how many people read a magazine, the research company shows them a small colour photocopy of the cover. If they recognise that month’s cover, they are deemed a reader. These figures are particularly meaningless for a title such as Men’s Health, where all the covers look the same, or Penthouse, which nobody admits to buying.
Ralph regularly scored a higher readership than FHM, even when FHM was outselling us, because Ralph is an easy name to remember and FHM is not (even the people who worked on it called it ‘FMH’). The Metrolites – giant, glowing representations of the cover – could only help people to recognise the product.
As well as the Metrolites, FHM had a deal with the Sunday Telegraph, by which the Telegraph’s gossip pages promoted each new issue in return for exclusive rights to a preview photograph of the cover girl. Ralph had nothing. Our press releases – contracted out to a private company – were farcically misspelled, syntactic spaghetti. It took more time to correct them than it would have to write them ourselves. I asked for a private meeting with Nick, and said Ralph desperately needed marketing. He told me I was mistaken. There would always be some people who had not heard of Ralph.
I relayed his comments to Brad.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, sagely, ‘in the same way that there will always be some people in Marrickville who haven’t heard of the Dalai Lama.’
Meetings never stopped, and action rarely started. The boys I grew up with would have been more honest and perceptive, more creative and useful, than many of the people I was forced to attend meetings with. While I sat through the suggestions of adult middle-class women and a grown-up private schoolboy, I listened to the voices of the half-formed men in my photo album, and I realised I was writing for them. Ralph would have been their magazine, a laugh to enjoy with a fag and pint and bag of Smith’s chips. I came to be the person that Brad wanted – the one who loved the magazine – because I loved the readers, because they were a part of me.
A man who was supposed to be a magazine genius arrived from IPC London, and gave a speech urging publishers to diversify from their core product through brand extensions such as bed linen. He believed that magazines, like religions and fertility cults, should have festivals. We shared our marketing people with Cleo, and they came up with the idea for a Ralph stand at the Cleo Festival in Darling Harbour.
Marketing reported back that they had shifted 2000 copies at the festival. Two thousand! If 2000 Cleo readers were prepared to shell out $5.50 for a magazine for their men, surely we had gained the respectability and popularity we had been fighting for. It was not until weeks later that I realised they had all been given away. Ralph readers were the boyfriends of Cleo readers, and hundreds of copies were passed to men who would otherwise have bought them.
Several times, I asked Brad what were my responsibilities as editor.
‘Whatever you like,’ he said.
He meant I could involve myself in any area I thought I might be useful, but I did not want involvement, I wanted control. I told him I wanted to run Marketing and Advertising, and he gave me a thin smile of aggressive, benevolent tolerance. He said I had no chance.
Every editor has problems with advertising. Editors believe there are a certain number of pages in their magazine that are ad pages, and the rest editorial. Ad staff do not like selling ad pages, because it is too difficult. They like selling editorial pages: casual product endorsements in the story; sly pictures of the brand in the photography; they like regular pages to be ‘presented by. . .’ an advertiser.
Advertisers know that readers do not trust advertisements, that nobody is ever going to take notice of, for example, a stic
kman telling them to buy something, but they do pay attention to journalists’ impartial recommendations. Advertising salespeople have no problem with journalists making impartial recommendations, providing they impartially recommend the products of companies who have paid to advertise in the magazine. (Public relations agencies claim any positive editorial mention is worth five times an advertisement – ten times if it is a positive mention of a bank.)
If advertisers cannot sneak into a regular feature, their next most favoured option is advertorial – a page of the magazine that looks like an editorial page, is written in the same style as an editorial page, but is not about something interesting such as hitmen or penguins, but something boring such as tinea or fruit salad. Advertisers believe that because the ad is set in the same typeface as a story, the readers will read it with the same sort of interest and excitement they would a feature. They think readers are stupid.
Ralph’s new advertising staff, Scott and Dave, were dedicated, energetic and resourceful, and had a barely possible job. We fought a lot – as they tried to sell the space around Ralph’s every page number to Heineken, or run Mitch Dowd underwear in every fashion spread – but I admired them. They did not give up as they pushed against the largely unyielding media-buying ‘industry’. Media buyers hated Ralph as if Ralph had done something to them personally. Most junior and mid-level media buyers were women, and not prone to crawling around on their hands and knees in a negligee while their man watched TV. They were young, career-driven professionals, who had hoped their boyfriends might grow up and share some responsibility around the house, become more worldly and less sexist. They were being asked to support a product whose ad campaign suggested they were only good for fucking and cleaning, and even then only when there was nothing much on the box.
