September 26, 2003 26 September 2003 Absolut Teams With Esquire for Reprint
Last week the The New York Times newspaper informed about the cooperation between Absolut company and Esquire magazine for their October issue of US edition where you can find small booklet with 7 of the 32 pages dedicated to Absolut Heritage campaign ads. Whole text from the newspaper can be read under this news article.
In ”Sunset Boulevard,” when the silent-film star Norma Desmond is told she ”used to be big,” she replies imperiously: ”I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”
Now, a big article from Esquire magazine — the biggest ever, according to its editors — is getting small, but in this instance the shrinkage is intended as homage.
Bound into the October Esquire, one of four issues this fall celebrating Esquire’s 70th anniversary, is a 32-page booklet designed as a pullout minimagazine. The booklet, planned as the first in a series of previously published fiction and nonfiction, reprints a cover article from the April 1966 Esquire titled ”Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
The article, by the author Gay Talese, has been hailed as a paragon of what was called new journalism, and indeed, the editors have declared it ”the greatest story ever told” in the 70 years of Esquire. Because the article is about 15,000 words — far longer than typical magazine articles today — Esquire executives were apprehensive about the reprint costs. Enter the Absolut Spirits Company, seller of Absolut vodka, which agreed to be the sole advertiser in the pullout.
”All that real estate dedicated to stories, you just can’t do it these days” without sponsor support, said Kevin C. O’Malley, publisher at Esquire in New York, part of the Hearst Magazines division of the Hearst Corporation.
Esquire’s approach dovetailed with Absolut’s heritage campaign, which was introduced in November by TBWA/Chiat/Day in New York, part of the TBWA Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group. The Absolut advertisements in the minimagazine — 7 of the 32 pages, including the back cover — are from that campaign.
”The multipage format gives us the opportunity to tell what we consider ‘the greatest story ever told,’ the Absolut story,” said Jim Goodwin, vice president for marketing at Absolut Spirits in New York, owned by the Swedish distiller Vin & Sprit.
Absolut Spirits paid Esquire a sum estimated at less than $500,000 for the advertisements in the booklet, bound into 700,000 copies of the October issue. Absolut also received an additional 25,000 booklets, which it will distribute at events, as well as sponsorship of a ”bachelor bar” to be designed by David Rockwell for the Esquire Apartment, a penthouse opening on Oct. 9 at Trump World Tower.
The Sinatra article, for which Mr. Talese was paid an honorarium for the reprint, Mr. O’Malley said, was selected by the magazine’s editors from a field that included articles by Richard Ben Cramer, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer and John Dos Passos.
Mr. O’Malley said those articles, and others, may still turn up in the reprint series, which will probably appear two or four times in 2004 and have single sponsors.
Mr. Goodwin said while Absolut Spirits has made no commitments to Esquire for next year, ”the logic that led us to it in the first place, to tell our story over multiple pages, should hold up.”
