Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 824

sell very well on the newsstands which tends to bring about a better profit ratio proposition than subs. So, we decided to have a real mock up test as if we were selling soap or something else. We took ten areas, and we had, in those ten areas, I think we put in about one hundred thousand copies. We had all the promotion in each of those areas just as if it was a national promotion, t.v. spots, newspaper ads, the works. The test was extraordinarily successful. I think the sale on that test issue was around eighty-five to ninety percent sold which is very, very high. Most people are quite happy with sixty or seventy percent.

So, we decided to go ahead to the hard consternation of many of my colleagues here who considered that all of the magazines that we produced this was the most in-[?] magazine that we had. I have to say that every time we produced a new magazine most of our colleagues inside the building looked down upon it. Sports Illustrated was called muscle, sweat by our friends here. They thought it was terrible that we should do a thing like that. They were more shocked by the fact that Harry was such an enthusiast for Sports Illustrated when he wasn't exactly much of a sports fan. But anyway, People was really the lowest. That communicated itself somewhat to the advertisers. So, at the beginning while we were selling very well on the newsstands we weren't getting very much advertising. But then we ran somebody Simmons [W.R. Simmons & Assoc. Research], some one of those companies did it, which does audience studies, did its first audience study including People. It turned out that People was getting eight readers per copy. Well, the damn broke and the advertisers started to flood in because obviously, it was a very





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help