We Need to Talk About Playboy
By: Helene Dick, Associate Strategist
This article is safe for work. And now, Hef’s magazine is too.
As you may have heard, Playboy recently eliminated full frontal nudity from the pages of its flagship US magazine. The very first non-nude issue just hit newsstands, which has been unheard of since Hugh Hefner’s beginnings in 1953. This is a big deal, because naked ladies is kind of Playboy’s whole thing. It’s what we brand strategists call a “unique selling proposition (USP).” The USP of baring it all is what grew Playboy’s audience to 5 million subscribers in America and even more worldwide. But with this whole SFW thing, Playboy is now walking away from what made it famous. Can the brand survive while killing off its own core proposition? The answer is already out there: Absolutely.
Here’s proof:
- Advertising spend on the magazine has immediately increased. AdAge reported that the first no-nudity issue saw a 55.5% uptick in ad pages. Dodge took out an ad, making it the first Detroit car company in almost 25 years to do so.
- Playboy successfully tested out the strategy on its web property, which grew 258% in one year. Additionally, the age of the average site visitor dropped from 47 to just over 30.
- More subjectively, the publication is better off for the change. The magazine underwent a total redesign and the revamped Playboy is undeniably slick. The editorial is interesting, the interviews are stellar, and, yes, the women are still beautiful.
The Commoditization of Porn
So why is nudity out at Playboy? Because the brand became a victim of its own revolution.
Starting in 1953, Playboy led a liberalization of sex that wielded massive influence. Just how much influence? A federal judge once ruled that the Library of Congress violated the First Amendment rights of the blind by not producing a braille edition of Playboy. That was the Playboy Braille Budget Battle of 1985, and it really happened. Look it up.
By the nineties, nearly half of searches on the world wide web were for porn. (Why? Because the Internet was for nerds in the nineties, that’s why.) Nowadays everyone’s online and everything from job searches to dog food shopping to wedding registries happens on a dot-com. Yet porn holds steady at more than a tenth of Google searches. It’s estimated that porn is eating up about a third of the Internet’s bandwidth.
So, for Playboy, censorship isn’t about more family-friendly advertising dollars. It’s about reclaiming relevance. No-nudity Playboy is genius because it’s switching up its competitive set. Instead of fighting a losing battle with Pornhub and its ilk, Playboy believes it’s better off competing with the likes of VICE. (In a New York Times interview, Playboy’s chief executive said “the difference between us and VICE is that we’re going after the guy with a job.”)
The Power of the Playboy Name
Most other “lad mags” are already defunct, but Playboy will endure. Its current subscribers may only amount to 800,000, but the magazine is no longer the money maker anyway. The majority of the company’s dough is earned through global licensing agreements. The magazine is just the flagship storefront.
Playboy understands the strength of its brand — one that’s easily as recognizable as Nike or McDonalds. So instead of being limited by nudity, they chose to transcend it. Of course, sex remains a core part of Playboy’s proposition. As Wired commented: “Playboy is attempting to cast and portray women in a way that feels multidimensional. They still play into a fantasy, for sure, but if Playboy gets it right, the fantasy can be an intelligent one — maybe even one that women readers can dig, too.”
In summary, Playboy’s strategy stands as a reminder of the power of a brand name:
“If you systematically dismantled the entire operation of the Coca-Cola Company and left them with only their brand name, management could rebuild the company within five years. Remove the brand name and the enterprise would die within five years.”
- Nick Shore, as quoted in Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan
