First Issue Review: Eve- Naked Ambition From BBC Worldwide
When Newsline interviewed Eve editor Gill Hudson a few months ago (see Interview: All About Eve – Editor Gill Hudson On Launching A New Women’s Title), she wasn’t keen to define an age group for BBC Worldwide’s first foray into women’s glossies. In her first editor’s letter she only goes as far as to say “For all those who grew up with the glossies and suddenly found they’d fallen off the edge of what Magazine Land had to offer them, this one’s for you.”
Yikes, that could sound horribly familiar to anyone who tracked the rise and rather too rapid fall of Aura (see Publishing Of Aura And Wedding Day Suspended As Parkhill Looks To Liquidation). Yes, just as Aura said, older women have careers beyond the kitchen, sexual urges, disposable incomes and even brain cells to boot. Unfortunately they are so fulfilled it seems that there were no gaps in their lives for Parkhill’s offering to fill.
Can Eve do better? It can certainly afford to fail to be an instant winner more than Aura could, as BBC Worldwide is likely to pack more of a punch in the promotion department than the much smaller scale Parkhill Publishing.
Promotion is what Eve will need to get noticed. Firstly because the market is notoriously crowded and secondly because BBC Worldwide don’t seem to have perfected the art of a grabby cover- when was the last time BBC Good Food leapt off the shelves at you? The depthless black and white photography and dull fonts of Eve somehow manage to be too dull to be glamorous and not cool enough to be classy. The effect is something that looks like a Sunday supplement.
The content tells a different story. Within Eve’s busy pages Hudson seems to have succeeded in picking the “best of the rest”. Reportage on mistreated au-pairs, the world’s oldest mum and how young girls are growing up faster than they used to was straight from the pages of Marie Claire. Celebrity fashion gaffs (the old jokes are still the best) was pure Cosmopolitan. Make-up artists picking the best products from high street lines- very Elle.
This is not necessarily a criticism. The standard of content is high and the tone intelligent, even if odd juxtapositions like “where to buy a ‘huggable hunk’ life-size male doll” and a “How I survived Auschwitz” short on the same page leaves the mind reeling slightly. For me at least, magazine buying ranks alongside red wine and candle-lit bubblebaths as indulgent escapism, therefore familiarity is no bad thing- I want to be challenged, but it mustn’t be hard work!
What does make the content different is the emphasis on reader participation. Not confined to being the inevitable make-over victim, readers are also commandeered to give out advice on the problem pages and test make-up. Furthermore, almost every article ends with an entreaty to visit the website www.allabouteve.co.uk and discuss the issues raised online. Currently the website looks pretty yukky, but if it’s relying on reader input to grow, it may improve with time- the BBC has a not inconsiderable reputation for websites after all.
Aah, those famous initials again. The beeb may not be linking Eve to a particular chain of programming, but that does not mean she runs free from product placement. References to Aunty appear within the first few pages: “For other insights into the future, visit www.bbc.co.uk/science”, “Hear from women worldwide on Everywoman, BBC World Service…” etc. This rises to a crescendo with the “How To…” section, where “the BBC’s top experts” dole out information on everything from health to money, merrily plugging their TV show/web page/radio programmes along the way. Its a small annoying feature of what is otherwise interesting and useful information, though.
Either the concept of the magazine or the company behind it has succeeded in convincing the advertisers. The usual women’s glossy suspects haven’t been shy to sign up, with Lancome, Russell & Bromley, Christian Dior, Giorgio Armani and Max Factor among those making the opening pages a firm affirmation of where Eve’s target market lies. Let’s hope that those women give in to temptation.
Review: Anna Wise