Sex & Money

by Mark Dapin

  Media buyers say their industry is ‘based on relationships’. There are Ten Immutable Rules of Magazine Publishing. Rule Number Six is: When Somebody Says Their Industry Is ‘Based On Relationships’, It Means They Do Nothing Useful.

  There is a body of media-buying theory which can be summarised thus: it is best to place the client’s advertising in the same media as the client’s competitors (herding), or it is not. Media buyers spend a great deal of time analysing what competitors are doing (in effect, what other media buyers are doing) and trying to predict what they might do next year, so they can either do the same thing, or not. Herding is the most popular option, because it gives the buyer one less decision to make.

  Clients herded out of Ralph: fashion clients, men’s fragrance clients and motoring clients. FHM, the ‘international brand’, posed as cosmopolitan where Ralph was parochial, sophisticated where Ralph was ocker, but still had difficulties establishing itself with media buyers. The only titles the media buyers supported enthusiastically were the niche fitness title Men’s Health, and Condé Nast’s short-lived GQ, on which every dollar spent was a dollar burned.

  The total media advertising spend in Australia is about $7.5 billion, of which magazines are worth only 7.5 per cent, about $562.5 million. Men’s lifestyle titles’ share of that figure is 1.8 per cent, about $10.1 million, or 0.13 per cent of all money spent on advertising. The figure has remained relatively stable since the birth of the genre. The sum spent by advertisers, however, is 10 per cent greater than this, because media buyers take a 10 per cent cut of everything a client spends. Often, media buyers will justify their apparently pointless existence by saying they will use their bulk purchasing power to negotiate the client a 20 per cent discount across all magazines in a year. If they succeed, they earn their 10 per cent plus a bonus. On the surface, they deliver media value to their clients, but they want their clients to keep spending as much as possible, so they can keep getting their commission.

  Senior media buyers tend to be in sales; the best negotiators spend their time smooth-talking money out of clients, rather than arguing down advertising rates. They wheedle ad reps to wheedle editors to squeeze the client some ‘added value’, which usually takes the form of the horribly disguised editorial endorsements.

  Ralph needed urgently to win the approval of media buyers. At our many long meetings, we had many long discussions about how this should be done. We agreed to avoid the mistakes of the past – an earlier, typically scatological feature had alienated Glad Wrap, which felt its brand had been cheapened when it was suggested it might be funny to stretch it across a toilet seat; and Chokito, when readers were recommended to drop a bar into a swimming pool, where it would resemble a floating turd. I took all faeces and farts out of the magazine, and even blanked out the ‘uc’ in fuck. I tried to make the magazine more acceptable to media buyers (and middle-class magazine buyers) by making it read better and smell better.

  While these ideas drew no opposition, there was a strong current of opinion that the best way to win over female media buyers was to throw a party and seduce them. The Ralph party was to be a lavish celebration of the magazine’s achievements, where advertisers and media buyers alike would be overpowered by free canapés and champagne, and another of Nick’s speeches. Preparations for the party went on for weeks, with everyone at meetings urged to draw up their own guest lists. When it became apparent that we had too many potential guests, I was asked if it was necessary for my staff to attend.

  I was incredulous. I said I would not go if the staff could not go. The corporate people never understood that the staff thought of themselves as the magazine. Seddo had recruited an exceptional team. Most worked tremendously hard. The art department often stayed until 10 pm on deadline week. Alex, the chief sub, worked similar hours. Dom, the lifestyle editor, never put in less than a sixty-hour week. There was no overtime. Throughout my years at Ralph, my staff worked – on average – ten unpaid hours a week, donating the extra time to the company. Mostly, they were not working to get a better job, but because they loved the one they had.

  The point of the party was lost in the planning. Everybody was still euphoric that James Packer had been impressed by the Pleasure Machine, and somehow she became incorporated into our arrangements. Advertising seemed to take over from Marketing. The bait for the party that was supposed to hook female media buyers became the chance to have your photograph taken with special guest Gabrielle Richens, and the image turned into a greeting card via a novelty printing process. Hardly any women took advantage of the offer, but that did not matter because hardly any women turned up, but that was not a problem because hardly any women were invited. It became a boys’ night out at the MG Garage, a trendy restaurant that also sold vintage sports cars. It was full of existing advertising clients – and my staff.

  In the beginning, the Ralph boys drank as a team, a gang. I watched them in the Globe – the pub next door – standing in a ring with their schooners in their hands, protecting the pile of sports bags in the heart of their circle. I was reluctant to join them. I did not think people wanted to drink with me. I thought they needed a manager, not a mate. I knew one of the great compensations of working was getting together on Fridays and bitching about the boss, and I did not want to inhibit that. I dreaded seeming like the trendy drama teacher, or the father who asks his kids to call him by his first name (although I did allow my staff to call me by my first name).

  As well, I did not want to sell my whole existence to ACP for $80 000 per year and unlimited Cabcharge dockets. I felt I should try to keep a social life outside of Ralph. The problem was, I quickly lost interest in talking about anything other than Ralph, because I loved my job, too. I fucking adored it. Despite the meetings and the idiocy, it was furiously exciting and extraordinarily fulfilling. ACP merchandisers counted the number of copies of FHM on newsagency shelves, so we always knew whether we were outselling the competition. When we were on top, it felt as if we had won the heavyweight championship of the world, or at least of the local police boys’ club. Not that I had any idea how either of those things might feel.

  It was boring talking to people who did not work at Ralph, who could not grasp the nuances in my voice when I talked about Nick, or Brad, or said the word ‘marketing’. I started spending more and more time at work, partly because I felt it was letting the staff down to leave before they did, but also because I could not think of anything better than getting on with the job. I felt obscurely betrayed when people left at the end of the day. What were they going home to? Dinner? TV? Dope? Sex? What could be better than working at Ralph, and making up jokes, and trying to beat FHM?

  I found weekends particularly aggravating. Hardly anyone turned up for work on Saturday or Sunday. Without the art department, there was nothing much to do, but I liked to pop in anyway, read a few proofs, check for reader emails, and see if anybody was lying under the desks asleep.

  I began drinking with art director Chriso, who was good-natured, shy and infinitely creative. He knew the audience because he used to be the audience: middle-class, unacademic, outdoorsy, patriotic, mechanically proficient, trendy and – as often as was reasonable – drunk. After a late night in the office, we would walk across Castlereagh Street to the Windsor Hotel for ‘a couple of beers’, which became a couple of beers an hour for the next six hours. Horribly, the Windsor did not close until 2 am, later 4 am. Even more horribly, Chriso and I were often there when the staff stacked the stools onto the tables.

  Ralph owed too much to other magazines. There was a mock advice columnist, the alcoholic and lecherous Dr Pecker, who was very funny, but barely distinguishable from Loaded’s mock advice columnist, the alcoholic and lecherous Dr Mick. There was ‘Bloke vs Bloke’, in which two men in similar or contrasting fields were quizzed to discover who was the most blokey, a larceny of FHM’s ‘Bloke Test’. These copies added little to the original ideas, but in the field of getting women to talk about sex, Ralph led the world. Several me
n’s magazines organised round table discussions in which girls discussed what they did and did not like about men, and whether they would give a blow job on the first date. The participants were generally the journalist’s friends, with various degrees of sexual experience and commitment to candour. Ralph’s associate editor Dom industrialised the process of talent selection for his monthly panel discussion, ‘Babes Behaving Badly’. He advertised in newspapers for women who were prepared to talk about sex and be photographed. He gave each respondent a personal interview, and had them tick boxes to say whether they had ever experienced – and would be willing to comment about – oral sex, anal sex, sex with an ex etc. He then took a Polariod of the candidate, rated her appearance between one and ten and, once she had gone, passed her picture around the office, to ensure his judgment was in line with majority taste. If the woman scored an average of eight or more – seven, if we were desperate – she made it onto the page with two others with similar preferences, to address questions such as, ‘What would you think if a boyfriend gave you a vibrator?’

  ‘Babes’ was educational and salacious. It was useful for the readers – the women were usually helpful, explicit and honest – but it was also Ralph’s Forum Letters (with pictures!). When one Babe confessed to picking up women in nightclubs for threesomes with her boyfriend, the readers erupted with joy, pouring out emails praising her initiative. After that, I instructed Dom to ask every Babe if she picked up women in nightclubs for threesomes with her boyfriend, but we were generally disappointed.

  Dom also produced ‘Sporting Challenge’, a section in which the journalist actually did what he said he did. Each month, Dom went up against a professional sportsman, tackling a footballer, slam-dunking a basket-baller, or punching on with a boxer.

  The magazine grew a new vitality, partly due to Carlee, the cadet I had hired when I lost my deputy. Carlee was an eighteen-year-old girl who came in on the end of a conga of bumbling, blustering and bored work experience kids. She wrote a couple of pub reviews that showed more sparkle than any of the rubbish in the in-tray, the out-tray or the too-hard basket, and I offered her the lowest-paid writing job at ACP. Carlee moved down to Sydney from Newcastle, and began a year-long attempt to drink as much as any man at Ralph (which was as much as any man in the world). While she was hungover, she did some excellent interviews. She seemed prepared to ask anybody anything – perhaps because she was too young to know any better. I sent her to a Star Trek convention, where the Trekkies take life on the Enterprize more seriously than their own nonexistent sex lives, and she asked William Shatner how it felt to have ‘shat’ in his name. When Spice Girl Geri Halliwell was appointed UN goodwill ambassador for contraception, I sent her to the press conference to demand why she had not stopped Spice Girl Emma B from getting pregnant.

  To accompany a story about the life of a prostitute, I had told a journalist to go out on the street with a picture of a hideously ugly bloke, and ask passing women how much he would have to pay to sleep with them. Unfortunately, the journalist tore an ad out of Ralph that featured one of the staff of Fox Sports. Responses ranged from ‘$50 million at least, and I’d have to be really drunk’ to ‘Oh, he’s really terrible,’ from a girl who offered him a hand job for $10 million.

  By the time I realised we were humiliating one of our few clients, the story had to go to the printer. We did not have any photographs of spectacularly ugly men lying around the office, but we had several pictures of Jack Marx, so we put in one of those instead, and changed the copy to read that we had asked the women how much they would charge to ‘perform various disgusting sex acts with hat-wearing journalist Jack Marx’. Jack, meanwhile, was shivering and sweating out alcohol in the detoxification clinic of Rozelle Hospital. When he got out, he walked across the road to the newsagent and bought a copy of Ralph. He read that no woman would have sex with him for $1 million, and went straight to the pub.

  I had rehired Jack as a casual writer. He was reunited with his spare set of clothes, which he had abandoned under his desk when he left. I felt I owed him a new start. We began the task of populating Ralph with an imaginary cast of characters, including talking penguins and ‘the Doner’, the cylindrical beast from which doner kebab meat originates. I had first asked Carlee to investigate the lifestyle of this elusive mammal, and suggested that falafel was its droppings, but it was Jack who discovered ancient Cappadocian cave paintings showing the hapless creature instinctively rearing on its hind legs when threatened, allowing the hunter to drive his spear directly down the middle of its body until the tip of the weapon embedded in the earth. ‘The Doner’, Jack wrote, ‘remained skewered in this fashion and, once the legs and cumbersome head had been removed, was roasted over a flame and carved on demand’. The custom continues unchanged to this very day.

  I sent a photographer out to take a picture of kebab meat turning on the wonderfully named ‘kebab machine’, but kebab shop owners chased him away, thinking he was sent by a competitor, or the public health department. The Doner – which had the head of a platypus and the feet of an elephant – led a strange and varied life in Ralph, surviving even to meet Anna Kournikova.

  The readers loved the girl-woman Anna Kournikova. On Brad’s brilliant suggestion, we established a dedicated monthly ‘Annawatch’ page, in which we kept track of what the beautiful young Russian tennista had done the previous month (nothing). Even more than Anna, they adored Catriona Rowntree and Suzie Wilkes, two big-chested Channel 9 presenters who were pretty but not glamorous, famous but not threatening. Month after month, we received letters and emails begging us to feature Catriona or Suzie. Since Channel 9 and ACP were both part of Kerry Packer’s PBL organisation, it might have been thought that the magazine group and the TV station could help each other out. We imagined we might have a better chance of getting Channel 9 girls than, for instance, FHM. This turned out not to be the case. Of all the TV networks, Channel 9 was the most hostile to Ralph. Channel 9’s public relations department was rude and obstructive like no other. Even when we knew, through personal contact, that Channel 9 stars were willing to shoot a cover for us, Channel 9 PR vetoed it. One employee advised us never to call back about anyone again. We shrugged, because everybody hated us, and we kept on asking and they kept on saying no. Channel 9 stars did not do men’s magazines.

  Then the girls from Channel 9 cop show Water Rats turned up on the cover of FHM. They had, of course, done the shoot for nothing. Neil at FHM was more surprised than we were when Channel 9 agreed. It was a slap in the face for us, as well as a kick in the balls, a punch in the eye, and a tweak on the nose. I pointed out at a meeting that it would have been inconceivable for this to happen in a vertically integrated organisation such as News Ltd. Rupert Murdoch would have worked the ‘synergies’ (just because synergies is used by stupid people does not make it a stupid word) to the advantage of both his broadcasting and print divisions. Nick, winging it, told me the component parts of the company were unconnected. Channel 9 was not obliged to help ACP, any more than ACP helped Channel 9.

  Nick was less concerned with organisational specifics than with general content. He told me he wanted Ralph to be ‘a cross between Loaded and National Geographic’. I went home and puzzled over how this could be accomplished, but he quickly discovered a popular science magazine called Focus, and declared that Ralph should be ‘a cross between Loaded and Focus’. I asked what he liked about Focus, and he pointed to a feature on polar explorers. I immediately contacted the writer and bought the feature. Unfortunately, I did not read it. It was written in impenetrable scientific language, had no narrative, few quotes, and was largely concerned with the nutritional content of the explorers’ meals. I asked Nick exactly why he had enjoyed the feature. He admitted he had not read it.

  Every Friday, by tradition, Ralph staff had a social drink in the office, as a prelude to an antisocial drink in the Globe. We were regularly sent cartons of beer by brewers who would not advertise with us. We also received vodka, bourbon, and all
kinds of alcopops. One night, I poured a guest a glass of vodka from the mysteriously acquired office fridge, to find the seal had been broken and the spirit replaced with water. It was hat-wearing journalist Jack Marx, of course, but by this time Jack had disappeared. The last I heard of him came in an indignant memo from Building Services. Somebody had emptied the Ralph paper recycling bin into the cardboard cruncher, and, like a crazy, fighting drunk, the machine had spat back half a dozen broken beer bottles in his face. I wrote an apology and said the anonymous culprit was prone to erratic behaviour, and no longer worked at Ralph. Building Services sent back a reply asking if it was Jack Marx. I refused to name names, but I did concede the villain was last sighted wearing a hat.

  NINE In which I disrespect the competition

  – Men’s Health, Max, GQ and FHM – and

  the censor

  Ralph had been beaten to the launch by Max, a monthly from Next Media, publishers of Australian Rolling Stone. Max was an honest attempt at putting together a British-style men’s magazine on one-fifth of the budget that would have been needed to make it a success. It was perfect bound, cleanly designed, crunchy, filling and nutritious.

  The scope of Max’s ambitions could be gleaned from the fact that its October 1997 issue named the twenty-five sexiest women in the world, making it one-quarter as good as FHM. When I started at Ralph, Max was selling in the low 20 000s, and it never did much better, but I admired the way editor Carl Hammerschmidt achieved a credible result with no money. I liked the affable Carl so much that, when I knew I was going to leave, I bought him, and made him my deputy.

  Carl’s last issue of Max carried an interview with sports commentator Neil Brooks. When asked the curious question, ‘What animal would you say best describes your sex life?’ Brooks replied, ‘A bulldog eating custard.’ In another answer, he said he wanted to die ‘just after telling Claudia Schiffer that I was not her gynaecologist after all’. Incredibly, he lost his job at Channel 7.