Song & Dance

We noticed in the Sunday Times magazine a twenty-five-page advertising supplement promoting the Times’ “Arts & Leisure Weekend.” That would be this coming weekend, and it would encompass hundreds of events across the country (even spreading to Europe). What type of thing are we talking about here? Mostly it is theater and art shows, but also includes—somewhat oddly, we thought—restaurants, spas, health clubs, and “attractions.” It’s fun to browse through the supplement to learn what is going on in your own neck of the woods—but also to learn what other necks of other woods the New York Times seems to occupy throughout this bitterly divided land. The supplement constitutes fully a third of the issue, so it must be a big deal. (Paid for, apparently, by four full-page ads in the pagination by “Weekend” presenters Volkswagen, Mastercard, UBS, and Microsoft.)

Lots of publishing companies are trying this sort of thing, including our own little enterprise here at The Rake. Surely the Times is trying to fight the same weight as the New Yorker, which has quietly cultivated the New Yorker Festival into the gold standard in this particular area of the publishing biz. And the NYer Festival has merely been the locomotive at the front of a spiffy train of similar events and services that complement the book, and no doubt account for the magazine’s celebrated return to profitability last year. The New Yorker’s events and marketing department today is a wide-ranging juggernaut of brand-extension. (We noticed, for example, an advertisement in last week’s issue for a new service at Cartoonbank.com, the New Yorker’s online store, that resells New Yorker comics. The ad was promoting a new feature: Licensing cartoons for corporate reports and presentations. Go, Bob Mankoff, go! When will you return our call?)

So what is the story with every little festival accosting the good readers of America? You kind of have to make allowances for a huge diversity of offerings–from the shite “home tours” to the cerebral book signings to full-blown parties—but basically they are of a piece. The “branded editorial event” is the sort of marketing and “brand-extension” operation that can do two things. One, it “leverages relationships” with potential advertisers. Two, it offers interesting real-life opportunities to readers. Without offering both of these things, though, we feel like these things are a tremendous waste of effort—not to mention a possible distraction from a magazine that might improve its position in the world by merely being a better magazine.

Now, the New Yorker has a delicate and valuable brand that automatically lends any event a certain class and panache, a certain attractive world view. We suppose the New York Times does too, but it is interesting that they brand this event as a particular section of the newspaper. Each section of the paper surely has its own identity and voice, and this is probably a good thing—for the paper, but not necessarily for a festival. We wonder what the “Week in Review Weekend” would look like. Lots of events celebrating short-term memory? A movie marathon of “Memento”?

There’s a lot of cork in this particular wine, but if you’re lucky enough to live in New York, you may drink long and deep. From our point of view, the real value of the “Arts & Leisure Weekend” will be the limited number of Manhattan events that really flex the muscle of the brand. The “Times Talks” series, tacked on as the last page of the supplement, is where New York readers really luck out. We here in the Twin Cities can go to Gold’s Gym any day out of the year, with or without the imprimatur of the New York Times. But if you’re in Manhattan this weekend, you could see Times reporters interviewing Kiefer Sutherland, Billy Joe Armstrong, Chuck Close, Bill Murray, and Amy Tan—and that’s just in the first twenty-four hours. Blue-chip advertisers like Microsoft, Mastercard, and VW probably don’t care about these tiny little first-come-first-seated events at the City University of New York. But without them, they’d be underwriting a whole lot of events that would go off just fine without them or the Times.

And that is ultimately what the print-media festival is about. Coincidentally, it is precisely what print advertising is about: You are an advertiser, and you want good customers. So you associate yourself with a brand that already has them. All that’s left to be sorted out is who pays whom for the privilege. And whether readers actually get something they didn’t already have.—The Editor in Cheese