Imponderables: Fun and Games (8 page)
Read Imponderables: Fun and Games Online
Authors: David Feldman
M
agazine publishers
would like to put a number
on every page of their magazine. But many publishers freely agree to withhold pagination for full-page advertisements, particularly for “bleed” ads, in which the material covers the entire page. In a standard ad, an outside border usually allows for pagination without interfering with photographs or artwork. But many advertising agencies demand that their image-enhancing bleed ads not be marred by anything as mundane as a page number; publishers contractually accede to this requirement.
High-circulation magazines often publish many different editions. When you encounter letters after a page number (e.g., 35A, 35B, 35C), you are reading a section designed for a particular demographic or geographic group. Readers often find these editions annoying, because they impede the flow of the magazine (try finding page 36 when the regional edition occupies pages 35A through 35Q).
By customizing their editions, magazines can not only attract advertisers who might be uninterested or cannot afford inserting messages in a national edition, but can charge considerably more per thousand readers reached. If
Fortune printed an
edition targeted at accountants, for example, a software company with a new accounting package might be convinced to advertise in this edition but would not find it cost-effective to try the national edition. Even nonbleed full-page ads designed for regional or demographic editions are rarely numbered, since one ad might appear on several different page numbers in different editions.
J. J. Hanson, chairman and CEO of Hanson Publishing Group, Inc., adds that another reason for omitting pagination is that some ads are actually preprinted by the advertiser and inserted in the magazine: “Often those preprinted inserts are prepared before the publisher knows which page number would be appropriate.” Scratch and sniff perfume strips and liquor ads with laser effects are two common examples.
At a time when one designer-jean advertiser might book ten consecutive, nonpaginated pages, and regional, demographic, and advertising supplements can dot a single issue of a magazine, finding a page number can be a mine field for readers. But a gold mine for the publishers.
Submitted by Samuel F. Pugh of Indianapolis, Indiana.
Thanks also to Karin Norris of Salinas, California; and
Gloria A. Quigley of Chicago, Illinois.
W
e’ve answered why page numbers are missing from magazines. Now, from our correspondent Karin Norris: “It has always annoyed me to have to hold my place and search for the remainder of the article, hoping the page numbers will be there.”
We hear you, Karin. In fact, one of the great pleasures of reading
The New Yorker is the certainty
that there will be no such jumps. We had always assumed that the purposes of jumps was to force you to go to the back of the book, thus making advertisements in nonprime areas of the paper or magazine more appealing to potential clients. Chats with publishers in both the newspaper and magazine field have convinced us that other factors are more important.
A newspaper’s front page is crucial to newsstand sales. Editors want readers to feel that if they scan the front page, they can get a sense of the truly important stories of the day. If there were no jumps in newspapers, articles would have to be radically shortened or else the number of stories on the front page would have to be drastically curtailed.
Less obviously, magazine editors want what Robert E. Kenyon, Jr., executive director of the American Society of Magazine Editors, calls “a well-defined central section.” Let’s face it. Most magazines and newspapers are filled with ads, but with the possible exception of fashion and hobbyist magazines, readers are usually far more interested in articles. Magazine editors want to concentrate their top editorial features in one section to give at least the impression that the magazine exists as a vehicle for information rather than advertising. J. J. Hanson, chairman and CEO of Hanson Publishing Group, argues that sometimes jumps are necessary:
An article that the editor feels is too long to position entirely in a prime location will jump to the back of the book, thus permitting the editor to insert another important feature within the main feature or news “well.” Many publishers try very hard to avoid jumps.
The unhappiest version of a jump is one where an article jumps more than once so that instead of completing the article after the first jump, the reader reads on for a while and then has to jump again. That’s almost unforgivable.
Hanson adds that another common reason for jumps in magazines, as opposed to newspapers, is color imposition:
Most magazines do not run four-color or even two-color throughout the entire issue. Often the editor wants to position the major art treatment of his features or news items within that four-color section. In order to get as many articles as possible in that section, the editor sometimes chooses to jump the remaining portions of the story to a black and white signature.
Of course, advertising does play more than a little role in the creation of jumps. Most publications will sell clients just about any size ad they want. If an advertiser wants an odd-sized ad, one that can’t be combined with other ads to create a full page of ads, editorial content is needed. It is much easier to fill these holes with the back end of jumps than to create special features to fill space.
The New Yorker
plugs these gaps with illustrations and funny clippings sent in by readers, which, truth be told, may be read more assiduously than their five-part book-length treatments on the history of beets.
Submitted by Karin Norris of Salinas, California.
A
caller on a radio talk show asked this question indignantly, as if the ball industry were purposely perpetrating a fraud, at worst, and foisting unnecessary decoration on a ball, at best. Before you accuse basketball manufacturers of making a needless fashion statement, consider that most basketball players need all the help they can get manipulating a basketball. A basketball is too big for all but the Kareems and Ewings of the world to grasp with their fingers. Those “fake” seams are there to help you grip the ball (similarly, quarterbacks make sure their fingers make contact with the seams when passing).
Basketball manufacturers make two kinds of seams, narrow and wide. National Basketball Association professionals prefer the narrow-channel seams, while many amateurs, particularly young people with small hands, use wide-channel seams.
L
loyd Johnson, ex-executive director of the Society for American Baseball Research, led us to the earliest written source for this story,
Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player
, a manual published in 1867 that explained how to set up a baseball club. Included in
Beadle’s are such quaint by-laws as “Any member
who shall use profane language, either at a meeting of the club, or during field exercise, shall be fined _____ cents.”
A chapter on scoring, written by Henry Chadwick, assigns meaning to ten letters:
A for first base
B for second base
C for third base
H for home base
F for catch on the fly
D for catch on the bound
L for foul balls
T for tips
K for struck out
R for run out between bases
Chadwick advocated doubling up these letters to describe more events:
H R for home runs
L F for foul ball on the fly
T F for tip on the fly
T D for tip on the bound
He recognized the difficulty in remembering some of these abbreviations and attempted to explain the logic:
The above, at first sight, would appear to be a complicated alphabet to remember, but when the key is applied it will be at once seen that a boy could easily impress it on his memory in a few minutes. The explanation is simply this—we use the first letter in the words, Home, Fly, and Tip and the last in Bound, Foul, and Struck, and the first three letters of the alphabet for the first three bases.
We can understand why the last letters in “Bound” and “Foul” were chosen—the first letters of each were already assigned a different meaning—but we can’t figure out why “S” couldn’t have stood for struck out.
Some baseball sources have indicated that the “S” was already “taken” by the sacrifice, but we have no evidence to confirm that sacrifices were noted in baseball scoring as far back as the 1860s.
Submitted by Darin Marrs of Keller, Texas.
I
n professional football, careers and millions of dollars can rest on a matter of inches. We’ve never quite figured out how football officials can spot the ball accurately when a running back dives atop a group of ten hulking linemen, let alone how the chain crew retains the proper spot on the sidelines and then carries the chain back out to the field without losing its bearings. Is the aura of pinpoint measurement merely a ruse?
Not really. The answer to this Imponderable focuses on the importance of an inexpensive metal clip. The National Football League’s Art McNally explains:
If at the start of a series the ball was placed on the 23-yard line in the middle of the field, the head linesman would back up to the sideline and, after sighting the line of the ball, would indicate to a member of the chain crew that he wanted the back end of the down markers to be set at the 23-yard line. Obviously, a second member of the chain crew would stretch the forward stake to the 33-yard line.
Before the next down is run, one of the members of the chain crew would take a special clip and place that on the chain at the back end of the 25-yard line. In other words, the clip is placed on the five-yard marker that is closest to the original location of the ball.
When a measurement is about to be made, the head linesman picks up the chain from the 25-yard line and the men holding the front end of the stakes all proceed onto the field. The head linesman places the clip on the back end of the 25-yard line. The front stake is extended to its maximum and the referee makes the decision as to whether or not the ball has extended beyond the forward stake.
Thus the chain crew, when it runs onto the field, doesn’t have to find the exact spot near the 23-yard line where the ball was originally spotted, but merely the 25-yard line. The clip “finds” the spot near the 23-yard line.
Submitted by Dennis Stucky of San Diego, California.
T
he popcorn business in the United States ain’t peanuts. Americans, the largest per capita consumers in the world, eat over 10 billion quarts of popcorn annually, thus generating over $1 billion for the popcorn industry.
About 70 percent of all popcorn is consumed in the home and approximately 30 percent is bought in theaters, carnivals, amusement parks, stadiums, etc. But over 75 percent of the
revenue from sales comes
from popcorn bought outside of the home. About $250 million, or around one-quarter of
all popcorn
sales, is delivered by movie theater concession sales.
To understand how crucial popcorn sales are to the movie industry, consider the economic facts of life for the movie theater exhibitor. Each owner tabulates his “nut,” the total fixed costs and overhead needed to keep the theater open. In a large city, with a medium-sized house in a nice district, that nut might be about $12,000 a week. Let us assume that this theater, the Rialto, shows first-run movies and has booked the latest James Bond thriller for the Christmas season. The owner has committed the theater to this picture many months in advance. Often, because distributors want to place their movies in houses that can run them for a long time, he might be forced to stick with an already faded movie in his theater until James Bond comes to the rescue. If
Friday the Thirteenth Part Thirteen is grossing only
$8000 a week, the owner must eat the $4000 difference between his nut and his gross.
Even James Bond does not guarantee the exhibitor endless riches, for the film distributor wants his piece of the 007 action. And it is a rather large piece. The exhibitor does not pay cash for the right to run a movie; he gives the distributor a percentage of his gross, after the nut is deducted. In the case of most first-run movies, exhibitors must pay the distributor
90 percent of the net. If James Bond grosses
$62,000 the first week, a superb showing, the exhibitor deducts the $12,000 nut from the gross (leaving $50,000), keeps a measly 10 percent, or $5000, for himself, and then sends the rest of the money to the film’s distributor (usually, but not always, the company that produced the movie). By the fifth week of James Bond’s run, the theater might be lucky to clear $1000 a week from the ticket receipts.
But do not cry for the theater owner. He has a secret weapon: the concession stand. Popcorn. Soft drinks. Candy. The movies may pay the bills, but the concession stands send the family to Florida in the winter.
Let’s look at how concession sales affect the bottom line of the Rialto. In large cities, about 15–20 percent of all customers will stop at the concession stand (in smaller towns, even more customers eat), and the theater owner figures to gross about $1.25 for every customer who walks through the turnstile, meaning that the average purchase is over $5. The key to making money in the concession area is maintaining a high profit margin, and the items sold do a terrific job. The average profit margin on candy—77 percent; on popcorn—86 percent; on soft drinks—a whopping 90 percent. For every dollar spent at the concession counter, the theater operator nets over 85 cents.
This is the theater’s average cost for a large bucket of “buttered” popcorn that might retail for two to three dollars:
Popcorn—8 cents
Butter Substitute—4 cents
Bucket—30 cents
Yes, the bucket itself is the most expensive component of your popcorn purchase. Even if the Rialto were to use “real” butter, which most consumers can’t distinguish from imitation, it would only add five more cents to the cost.
Remember that the Rialto has netted $5000 from the admissions to the first week of the James Bond movie. But it will gross almost $10,000 and will net over $8000 from the concession stand. And on the fifth week, when the Rialto nets only about $1000 from admissions, it will earn almost $3000 extra from food and drink sales.
Considering the importance of popcorn, the largest grossing concession item in profits, why would exhibitors deny the tradition of popping their own corn? Even in the twenty-first century, a good majority of theaters still pop their own. Many exhibitors believe that popping their own corn adds luster to what is an impulse item. The sound of the popping and the aroma of fresh corn and (usually) fresh oil is tantalizing to the vulnerable. And it is slightly cheaper for theaters to buy kernels rather than purchase already popped corn from a food distributor.
But the crucial question remains: Does on-site popping increase sales? A growing number of concession experts at the big movie chains believe that there is no evidence that on-site popping affects purchases one way or the other. Most of the big chains do not have a strict policy at all on the question. While one theater chain, Walter Reade, told
Imponderables that its sales are higher in sites with
on-premise popping, a representative from Loew’s disagreed strongly, arguing that none of the research and none of Loew’s internal experiments support the contention that consumers are driven into even a frenzy-ette by their proximity to exploding kernels.
There are plenty of reasons why managers dislike on-premise popping. Equipment can get messy and smelly, offending both workers and potential customers. Poppers can also break down, and as simple as it may sound, managers must constantly train high-turnover employees how not to wreck the equipment. Commercial prepopped corn is uniform in size and taste, whereas homemade popcorn is subject to the vagaries of oil temperature and stubborn kernels refusing to pop. Most important, theaters never run out of prepopped corn. No manager wants to see his sales force frantically loading the popper while customers wait impatiently in line, contemplating bolting for the theater.
If there were much consumer resistance to prepopped corn, you would see machines in every theater lobby in America. But the quality of packaged corn can be as good as fresh-popped. The crucial element in consumer acceptance of popcorn is its moisture content. Moisture is the enemy of popcorn, and “old” popcorn can be restored by being placed in the heating chambers that virtually every concession stand possesses. Left at room temperature, popcorn reabsorbs moisture from the atmosphere. In the warmer, at an ideal 135–155 degrees, the moisture is driven out. The lesser moisture in theater popcorn is what makes it taste better than its packaged, unheated counterpart found at supermarkets or ball games.
If concessions are the crucial moneymaker for theaters, why aren’t stands more adventurous in their offerings, and why don’t they offer more choices?
The key to this answer is a favorite word of all food purveyors—
turnover
. The theater owner wants to be able to process as many customers as possible in a short period of time. Now that double features have become a thing of the past for most theaters, concession stands must brace themselves for an onslaught of customers arriving at approximately the same time. More than 80 percent of all concession sales are completed immediately after the ticket purchase, before the customer has taken a seat in the theater. Nothing will turn off a potential customer more than long lines at the food stand. The fewer choices a customer has to make, the less anxiety the customer feels and, most important, the
faster the
customer is likely to decide what to buy. Most concessionaires have found that when they introduce new products, such as chocolate chip cookies or frozen yogurt, it eats into the share of money that their old products would have garnered but does not generate additional revenue or attract patrons who didn’t previously buy food at the theater.
Loew’s has found that by decreasing its number of food and drink options, it can generate faster turnover without causing any consumer resistance. It purposely does not emphasize its candy display and provides only 12 options, since it has found that any more choices only tend to befuddle the customer and slow down his or her decision-making process. Even so, candy provides about 20 percent of Loew’s concession sales.
Hot dogs provide about the same profit margin as popcorn, but their gross sales are minuscule in comparison. Hot dogs are provided partly as a meal substitute for those taking in a movie at the lunch or dinner hour. Hot dogs are problematic because, unlike popcorn, they can’t be resold the next day. Concession stands can sell only a limited number of hot dogs efficiently. With the rotogriller, the horizontal contraption with rotating silver tubes, hot dogs cook quickly but can shrink during movies considerably shorter than
Lawrence of Arabia
. The pinwheel cooker, the ferris wheel arrangement where spiked hot dogs rotate over a heating element on the bottom, cooks fewer dogs more slowly but at least doesn’t turn quarter-pounders into cocktail franks.
Frozen desserts are a particular bane to concessionaires. They represent about only 1 percent of sales. Bon Bons are the biggest frozen item only because the theaters can sell them with a hefty profit margin. If theater owners tried to sell gourmet ice cream cones, they would have to charge several dollars a scoop to maintain their profit margin, and then pay for it in messier theater floors. Freezer cases are particularly vulnerable to employee ineptitude. If a worker turns off the freezer switch by mistake, profits melt along with the ice cream.
If Brussels sprouts would sell in theaters, concessionaires would find a way to cook and sell them. American audiences simply reject the attempt to foist any products other than the big three (popcorn, soft drinks, candy) on them. The concessionaire merely responds to what the consumer wants. If we really cared that popcorn be popped at the theater itself, it would be.