Mould the front page!

Walking past a newsstand in Munich or Hamburg last autumn, it would have been hard to miss the German version of FHM. On the cover, Pamela Anderson, wearing bra, pants and a provocative pout. Nothing unusual about that, but this cover had real stand-out quality. FHM Germany had produced the world’s first moulded cover. Manufactured from plastic and fixed to the magazine’s front page, the logo, coverlines and, in particular, Ms Anderson’s prominent business assets literally stuck out by twenty millimetres. The result: a near sell-out issue, a collector’s piece and great PR for the magazine.

In recent years, editors and publishers have focused on getting maximum marketing value out of each front cover. Where once the cover was cobbled together on the day the magazine went to press, now there are cover conferences, cover approval meetings and retrospective cover performance reviews. And the task of putting together a great image, compelling coverlines and eye-catching design on the cover has become the single most important task on the editorial floor. Nail your rivals with a dazzling cover, goes the mantra, and the sales will flow.

But competition drives innovation, and the newest cover trend is to seek ever more sophisticated ideas to give your title the edge in the combat zone that is the newsagent’s shelf.

Moulded covers

The German FHM moulded cover was the most striking example. Produced by Edinburgh-based company Magnetic Advertising, who have a patent pending on the idea, it synchronises a digital cover image and coverlines with a plastic moulding process. One drawback is the time restraint involved in attaching the plastic mould to the magazine, which is why FHM Germany produced only 100,000 moulded Pammys, about half of their total print run. But Magnetic Advertising MD, Guy Hundleby, says the cover had a stunning effect when readers first saw it on the shelf. "When you looked at the men’s monthly section, it quite literally leapt off the shelf," he says. "As a means of getting the target reader to notice the magazine, it was a tremendous success."

Talking covers

Another novelty cover fast becoming a collector’s item on eBay, is the sound-card cover. Empire magazine was first with its heavy breathing Darth Vader cover in 2005. Readers turned the front page – a dramatic full-on shot of Vader’s head - to hear the Star Wars iconic villain’s famous (and seriously chilling) ‘voice’ - like a deep-throated, nicotine-induced wheeze.

Top Gear also produced a sound cover in July 2006. This time, the reader turned the cover shot of a red Ferrari to hear the car accelerate from 0-60mph in exactly 3.7 seconds. The thunderous roar was a genuine recording of the new Ferrari 599 GTB taking off from a standing start on the test track. Once again, the novelty didn’t reach every reader – for cost and production reasons, only 35,000, about one-sixth of the magazine’s circulation, reached the newsstands. If you have one, treasure it.

Bloody covers!

Perhaps the most surprising and ghoulish idea of all was Metal Hammer’s July 2006 cover of the heavy metal band Slayer, noted for their association with blood in their music. The cover incorporated a full-size clear bag containing a blood-like substance, and as the reader handled it, the ‘blood’ ran over the image. Magnetic Advertising, who also produced this cover, subjected it to rigorous testing, dropping heavy weights on bundles of copies to make sure there was no unfortunate haemorrhage. Such weird ideas are always a gamble, but the Metal Hammer cover was perfectly on brand message - and strong sales kept the publisher’s blood pressure healthy.

Lenticular covers

The most popular cover novelty today is probably the lenticular cover, which offers a variety of effects from 3D, morphing, and live action. Developed from a technique used in the Thirties to give us saucy winking seaside postcards, the lenticular cover is produced by creating a number of images which are digitally sliced and printed directly to the underside of a sheet of clear plastic etched with parallel prismatic lenses. As our eyes move from side to side, or the cover is tilted, we see images that appear to hang above each other, giving the impression of 3D depth; images transform into another object or person, or actually move across the page.

Several British magazines have successfully produced lenticular covers – for example Top Gear’s fast-shifting Ferrari (2004), Empire’s climbing Spiderman 2 (2005), and Wallpaper’s ‘mechanical’ moving metallic dress created by fashion designer Hussein Chalayan and sent only to subscribers (2007). Last year, NME became the first weekly to run a lenticular cover with its Pete Doherty cover marking its Cool List issue, and American music magazine Rolling Stone celebrated its 1000th issue by printing – and selling – two million copies with a lenticular front cover featuring a montage of 154 major rock stars of the past 40 years and a back cover lenticular ad for Target department stores. Editor / publisher Jann S Wenner proudly claimed this to be the most expensive cover in history, but refused to reveal how much, although reports have suggested a figure of $500,000 (£250,000). Total Film’s 2006 Superman cover also scored a first in that the lenticular image was set in the centre of a conventionally printed mock-up of a newspaper front page. In the centre of ‘flat’ newspaper type, Clark Kent transforms miraculously into the man of steel himself.

We are likely to see more animated lenticulars in the future as the process becomes more sophisticated, a considerable breakthrough for paper magazines in a digital age. By capturing movement we are actually printing in the fourth dimension, time. As Devonne O’Gorman, spokesperson for America’s leading lenticular company National Graphics, says, "When a lenticular piece involves animation, it is actually a mini movie of sorts."

The restraining factors are cost and time. In Britain, a lenticular cover typically costs about £500 per thousand copies, and it takes four weeks to complete the manufacturing process. Hand finishing is the preferred option for greater accuracy, as machine production operates within a 2-3mm tolerance – giving a potentially blurry result.

Publishers are increasingly ring fencing part of their marketing budgets to inject the element of surprise into their covers: one strategically-planned sell-out ‘special’ can provide a handy ABC boost. Techniques used in recent years include Rugby World producing an embossed trophy on the cover to push their World Cup issue, and several magazines using substantial boxes or cardboard envelopes to make their titles conspicuous on the shelf. Uncut’s January 2008 issue was housed in a cardboard wallet and contained a CD and a book as well as the magazine. Last Christmas’s issue of Match also came in an impressive box – containing six gifts from mini-ball to skills DVD – but it came at an impressive price too. At £9.99 – more than £8 on top of the normal price – this was a dramatic example of how an occasional lavishly boxed one-off can command a premium price.

Die-cut covers

In children’s markets, cover innovation is becoming a regular tool to grow sales. Learning is Fun, Dr Who Adventures and Play & Learn Thomas and Friends were just three that gained extra presence last year with one-off supersize issues – while Bob the Builder came with a special size and a die-cut handle. The use of die-cutting - punching holes in covers for creative and dramatic effect - is an effective way to grab attention. Last November, Country Life produced a striking die-cut advent calendar cover with 24 push-out windows each containing typical English rural images.

And, in line with its imaginative editorial offering, Computer Arts now has a die-cut cover every issue, and its sister title, Computer Arts Projects, has won two consecutive PPA production awards for innovative covers. The first was for a daring brown paper bag cover, mounted with a set of crayons – unmissable on the newsstands but also a perfect brand signifier for a magazine that sells to supercool young digital designers. The second winning cover – promoting a special feature on music industry design - was presented as an LP record sleeve.

Change covers

The most cost-effective ‘novelty’ cover is probably the change cover, where several different versions are produced for one issue, giving readers choice, added interest, and the opportunity to collect. Radio Times has produced more change covers than any other magazine - for example, four covers each for the Queen’s 80th birthday, the Winter Olympics and the Rugby World Cup, and an impressive eight covers to celebrate the July 2005 Live 8 concert.

The economics of change covers are surprisingly comforting to the bottom line, although they are only effective with high volume titles, allowing the full choice of covers to be visible and obvious at point of sale. Apart from the initial cost of shooting or sourcing between two and eight covers, the production cost is limited because up to four covers can be printed in one press run and easily divided in the bindery so that retailers get a good mix.

But change covers can create unseen problems as well as PR opportunities. On one of the first ever change covers, June 2000’s Marie Claire, a slim, size 6 Sophie Dahl appeared on half the covers, and a more ample size 12 Pamela Anderson on the remainder. As a social experiment and a publicity tool, it was a huge success: the overwhelming majority of readers bought the svelte Sophie Dahl cover. The downside was that an inordinate number of Pamela Anderson covers made up the bulk of the unsolds. The danger is always that readers will be actively turned off by one of the change cover choices.

An extreme version of the change cover is to produce a huge number of different covers of one issue. The innovation-hungry Top Gear produced 60 separate covers to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Ferrari last June. But the prize for most extravagant cover novelty goes to Loaded, which printed 100 different covers for their millennium issue of January 2000, a tour de force for the editorial team who used images of unlikely lads-mag cover stars like the Queen, Basil Brush, Rod Hull and Emu and the Daleks, as well as the usual girlie covers. Tongue very firmly in cheek, the magazine offered a prize to the first reader to collect all 100. Nobody managed an entry.

And while we’re talking big, it will take a long time to beat the record of American Maxim magazine, which built the largest cover on earth to celebrate its 100th issue in April 2006. Made from vinyl mesh and laid out in the desert outside Las Vegas, the cover, featuring Eva Longoria, stretched 110 feet and could be seen from over-flying aircraft – though not, as the publisher’s hype claimed, from space.

Moulded covers, lenticulars, boxes, split runs, die-cutting: they all demonstrate that cover innovation has no limits. We can expect thinner, crisper looking lenticulars, more examples of moulded covers, and constant innovation in the area of boxes and bags. Perhaps, in some markets like motors, film, men’s or women’s glossies, the future may be the bagazine, where the magazine is just one of a range of goodies in a smart container – provided they can keep on the right side of retailers’ increasingly stringent display restrictions. Or, if we were to leap forward not so many years, the magazine front cover itself could be a wafer-thin LCD screen, which the reader would activate to produce true video.

One day, in a galaxy not so far away, magazine publishers may be creating yet another in-house department: their own special effects studio…