Playboy's first non-nude issue has been on for sale the past month, and the media empire claims its re-robed strategy is working with advertisers.
The 63-year-old magazine's March issue featured 42 advertising pages, which is a 55.5 percent increase from the same issue last year. In addition, 1,200 more newsstands carried the issue, and Playboy claims it's selling well. About 75 percent of the stock has sold out at Barnes & Noble.
"What we were experiencing (before the switch) is we would get in a lot of proposals from consumer-facing brands for huge digital ad buys, then there would be hesitancy before we could actually close the insertion order," said Playboy CEO Scott Flanders. "Now we're getting requests for proposals asking us for ideas."
In fact, the company claims that ever since it announced their new direction in October, it has held more than 300 meetings with new and existing advertisers. Print advertisers in the March issue include brands such as Stolichnaya Premium Vodka, which has been an advertiser since the 1980s, and Dodge, which was the magazine's first Detroit-based auto advertiser in 25 years. Dodge also was a sponsor Playboy's Super Bowl party in San Francisco this year.
Meanwhile, Flanders said the safe-for-work strategy, which it has been employing on Playboy.com since August, 2014, has led to a 400 percent growth in its online audience. It now gets 16 million unique global visitors per month, and 31 million users across its social media platforms. More importantly, the median age of visitors dropped from 47 to a much more advertiser desirable 30.5 during the same period.
As a result of its larger footprint, Flanders said Playboy's digital ad revenue is up 75 percent compared to the first quarter of 2015. Todd Alchin, partner and chief creative strategist at media buying and planning agency Noble People, agreed that Playboy's strong name recognition still gives it a leg up, and jokes aside, the magazine has always had a commitment to journalistic articles.