Sex, Lies & Advertising
By Gloria Steinem
“Sex, Lies & Advertising” was first published in Ms. in 1990, nearly two decades after a group of us founded the magazine. Keeping a feminist magazine afloat for those years meant there was hardly a night we didn’t wake up with sweaty palms, scared that we wouldn’t be able to pay our bills, and that we would let the movement down my closing our doors.
For years, many readers assumed Ms. had the power to pick and choose advertisers, and so were disappointed when we included traditional ads. But our triumph was that we managed to get those ads at all without compromising our editorial content. To separate ads from everything else, to raise the standard of a women’s magazine to that of the best general interest publication, was itself a miracle.
I’m re-sharing “Sex, Lies & Advertising” because these challenges span across generations and still exist today. Remember: When Susan B. Anthony started a magazine called The Revolution, she pointed out that freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press. If she had lived in this age of advertising, she might have added that freedom of the press belongs to those who pay its cost.
When Ms. began, we didn’t consider not taking ads. But we wanted to ask advertisers to come in without the usual quid pro quo of “complementary copy” — editorial features praising their product area.
We knew this would be hard. Food advertisers have always demanded that women’s magazines publish receipts and articles on entertaining (preferably ones that name their products) in return for their ads; clothing advertisers expect to be surrounded by fashion spreads (especially ones that credit their designers); and shampoo, fragrance, and beauty products insist on positive editorial coverage of beauty subjects, plus photo credits besides. That’s why women’s magazines look the way they do.
Advertisers who demand such “complementary copy” clearly are operating under a double standard. The same food companies place ads in People with no recipes. Cosmetics companies support The New Yorker with no regular beauty columns.
In recent years, advertisers’ control over the editorial content of women’s magazines has become so institutionalized that it is sometimes written into “insertion orders” or dictated to ad salespeople as official policy. The following are typical orders given to women’s magazines:
Dow’s Cleaning Products stipulated that ads for its Vivid and Spray ‘n Wash products should be adjacent to “children or fashion editorial”; ads for Bathroom Cleaner should be next to “home furnishings/family” features; and so on. “If a magazine fails for 1/2 the brands or more,” the Dow order warns, “it will be omitted from further consideration.”
S.C. Johnson & Son, makers of Johnson Wax, lawn and laundry products, insect sprays, hair sprays, and so on, insisted that its ads “should not be opposite extremely controversial features or material antithetical to the nature/copy of the advertised product.” (Italics theirs.)
Maidenform, manufacturer of bras and other women’s apparel, left a blank for the particular product and stated: “The creative concept of the campaign, and the very nature of the product itself appeal to the positive emotions of the reader/consumer. Therefore, it is imperative that all editorial adjacencies reflect that same positive tone. The editorial must not be negative in content or lend itself contrary to the product imagery/message (e.g. editorial relating to illness, disillusionment, large size fashion, etc.).” (Italics mine.)
The De Beers diamond company, a big seller of engagement rings, prohibited magazines from placing its ads with “adjacencies to hard news or anti/love-romance themed editorial.”
Procter & Gamble, one of this country’s most powerful and diversified advertisers, stands out in the memory of Anne Summers and Sandra Yates [who ran the company that published Ms. in the late 1980s]: its products were not to be placed in any issue that included any material on gun control, abortion, the occult, cults, or the disparagement of religion. Caution was also demanded in any issue that included articles on sex or drugs, even for educational purposes.
Those are the most obvious chains around women’s magazines. There are also rules so understood they needn’t be written down: for instance, an overall “look” compatible with beauty and fashion ads. Even “real” non model women photographed for a women’s magazine are usually made up, dressed in credited clothes, and retouched out of all reality. When editors do include articles on less-than-cheerful subjects (for instance, domestic violence), they tend to keep them short and unillustrated. The point is to be “upbeat.” Just as women in the street are asked, “Why don’t you smile, honey?” women’s magazines acquire an institutional smile.
Within the text itself, praise for advertisers’ products has become so ritualized that fields like “beauty writing” have been invented. One of its frequent practitioners explained seriously that “It’s a difficult art. How many new adjectives can you find? How much greater can you make a lipstick sound? The FDA restricts what companies can say on labels, but we create illusion. And ad agencies are on the phone all the time pushing you to get their product in.”
Often, editorial becomes one giant ad. An issue of Lear’s featured an elegant woman executive on the cover. On the contents page, we learn she is wearing Guerlain makeup and Samsara, a new fragrance by Guerlain. Inside are full-page ads for Samsara and Guerlain anti-wrinkle cream. In the article about the cover subject, we discover she is Guerlain’s director of public relations and is responsible for launching, you guess it, the new Samsara. When the Columbia Journalism Review cited this example in one of the few articles to include women’s magazines in a critique of ad influence, editor Frances Lear was quoted as defending her magazine because “this kid of thing is done all the time.”
Advertisers are also adamant about where in a magazine their ads appear. When Revlon was not placed as the first beauty ad in one Heart magazine, for instance, Revlon pulled its ads from all Hearst magazines. Ruth Whitney, editor in chief of Glamour, attributed some of these demands to “ad agencies wanting to prove to a client that they’ve squeezed the last drop of blood out of a magazine.” She also is, she says, “sick and tired of hearing that women’s magazines are controlled by cigarette ads.” Relatively speaking, she’s right. To be as censoring as are many advertisers for women’s products, tobacco companies would have to demand articles in praise of smoking and expect glamorous photos of beautiful women smoking their brands.
I don’t mean to imply that the editors I quote here share my objections to ads: most assume that women’s magazines have to be the way they are. But it’s also true that only former editors can be completely honest. “Most of the pressure came in the form of direct product mentions,” explains Sey Chassler, who was editor in chief of Redbook from the sixties to the eighties. “We got threats from the big guys, the Revlons, blackmail threats. They wouldn’t run ads unless we credited them.
“But it’s not fair to single out the beauty advertisers because these pressures come from everybody. Advertising wants to know two things: What are you going to charge me? What else are you going to do for me? It’s a hold up. For instance, management felt that fiction took up too much space. They couldn’t put any advertising in that. For the last ten years, the number of fiction entries into the National Magazine Awards has declined.
“I also think advertisers do this to women’s magazines especially,” he concluded, “because of the general disrespect they have for women.”
What could women’s magazines be like if they were as editorially free as books? as realistic as newspapers? as creative as films? as diverse as women’s lives? We don’t know.
We’ll only find out if we take women’s magazines seriously. If readers were to act in a concerted way to change traditional practices of all women’s magazines and the marketing of all women’s products, we could do it. After all, they are operating on our consumer dollars; money that we now control. You and I could:
refuse to buy products whose ads have clearly dictated their surroundings, and write to tell the manufacturers why;
write to editors and publishers (with copies to advertisers) that we’re willing to pay more for magazines with editorial independence, but will not continue to pay for those that are just editorial extensions of ads;
write to advertisers (with copies to editors and publishers) that we want fiction, political reporting, consumer reporting — whether it is, or is not, supported by their aids;
put as much energy into breaking advertising’s control over content as into changing the images in ads, or protesting ads for harmful products like cigarettes;
support only those women’s magazines and products that take us seriously as readers and consumers.
Those of us in the magazine world can also use the carrot-and-stick technique. The stick: if magazines were a regulated medium like television, the demands of advertisers would be against FCC rules. Payola and extortion would be penalized. As it is, there are potential illegalities. A magazine’s postal rates are determined by the ratio of ad-to-edit pages, and the former costs more than the latter. Counting up all the pages that are really ads could make an interesting legal action.
The carrot means appealing to enlightened self-interest. Many studies show that the greatest factor in determining an ad’s effectiveness is the credibility of its surroundings. The “higher the rating of editorial believability,” concluded a 1987 survey by the Journal of Advertising Research, “the higher the rating of the advertising.” Thus, an impenetrable wall between edit and ads would also be in the best interests of advertisers.
Even as I was writing this [in 1990], I got a call from Elle, who was doing a whole article on where women part their hair. Why, she wants to know, do I part mine in the middle?
It’s all so familiar. A writer trying to make something of a nothing assignment; an editor laboring to think of new ways to attract ads; readers assuming that other women must want this ridiculous stuff; more women suffering for lack of information, insight, creativity, and laughter that could be on these same pages.
I ask you: Can’t we do better than this?
Interesting to think what came after this moment in the 90s - Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, O, The Oprah Magazine — a whole new and improved generation of women’s magazines that served up exactly what she describes here.
I remember reading it in 1990, and now, again, it's clear that not much has changed. Indeed, in some ways it's gotten worse.The strong-arming by potential advertisers, their fear of supporting news outlets that support the marginalized, their fears of being targeted next...