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Taking a gamble on grandparents
A Gulfport entrepreneur rolls the dice on a magazine targeted at those affluent, but difficult to reach, Baby Boomers.
By SCOTT BARANCIK
Published July 12, 2004
GULFPORT - With roughly 3,000 consumer magazines to choose from in the United States, you'd expect at least one to target the country's estimated 70-million grandparents.
You'd be wrong. The same publishers who bestow the reading public with such titles as All About Beer, Crazy for Cross Stitch! and Arthritis Today aren't tugging on the grandparent lure.
But a Gulfport great-grandmother is.
Late next month, Christine Crosby and her husband, Jonathan Micocci, will launch GRAND Magazine, a bi-monthly publication targeted at well-to-do Baby Boomers with grandkids. Comedian and new grandpa Billy Crystal will grace the cover. About 100,000 copies will be distributed.
"This is the wealthiest, highest discretionary-income market there has ever been," Crosby said in an interview at her home, overlooking a hammock, a small pool and Boca Ciega Bay. "It is just a gigantic market that has been ignored."
According to AARP, Americans 50 and older account for half of all consumer spending but just 10 percent of all marketing.
Crosby, 58, comes to the task with both personal and professiona l acumen. A parent at 17 and a grandmother by 34, Crosby had a high school diploma and no savings when she co-founded a tiny photocopier rental and repair business in 1976. By the time a publicly traded company acquired it in 1987, making her a paper millionaire, the business had 350 employees and $25-million in revenue.
Crosby turned to book publishing, where she and a partner indulged a growing social consciousness with titles aimed at helping women and children. Her third venture, a quartet of child rearing magazines that included Tampa Bay Family and Black Family Today, earned Crosby another seven-figure payday when she sold them to a major media company.
GRAND Magazine may be her riskiest move yet. Industry veterans say there are few more reliable ways to squander one's savings than by starting a periodical. Crosby said that by year end she, Micocci and partners Judi and John Awsumb of Winter Park will have put $500,000 of their own money on the line, despite the fact that roughly 60 percent of new titles don't make it to their first birthday.
University of Mississippi journalism professor and magazine consultant Samir Husni doesn't think GRAND will be an exception to the rule.
Americans don't like to be reminded that they're aging, Husni said. They also don't like to be lumped together; grandparents ages 45 and 85 may not share the same concerns or interests.
"It's like, we have 270-million Americans who walk every day," he added. "But how many of them would buy a magazine called Walk?"
* * *
Growing up in the 1950s, Crosby dreamed of being a Delta Air Lines flight attendant. It was a glamorous fantasy amid a difficult reality. Crosby was one of seven siblings, and her father died when she was 10, she said. Her mother became seriously ill a couple years later.
At 17, Crosby was a child bride, living in her mother-in-law's home in Hollywood, Fla., a daughter in tow. "They were a wonderful family," she said.
By the mid 1970s, the marriage had ended. Crosby was raising two daughters and working as a title clerk at a Buick dealership in Orlando. She didn't have the time or confidence for anything more ambitious, she said.
A part-time sales job at a company that leased photocopiers was an unlikely catalyst for change. When the business folded less than a year later, she decided to try it out herself.
"I had an idea," she said, "but no credit history, no money."
Bryan King, Crosby's boyfriend at the time, helped her form a company and provided the initial $1,500 investment. She named it Delta Paper Co., after the airline.
The company grew rapidly under her leadership. Several times during its first decade, Delta made Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest-growing private companies, including a ranking of 21st in 1982.
In 1989, two years after Alco Standard Corp. (later Ikon Office Solutions Inc.) purchased her photocopier company, she published her first magazine, Central Florida Family. She added three other regional titles over the next six years. The Tribune Co. of Chicago bought Family Journal Publications Inc. in 1995.
Crosby said working in publishing inspired her to explore the resources available to "regular" grandparents, including magazines. "There was nothing for them," she said.
A number of magazines have perished pursuing the Holy Grail of consumer marketing - consumers 50 and older. In 1988, the company behind Reader's Digest bought a magazine called 50-Plus and renamed it New Choices. Other publishers introduced Lifewise, Longevity, Renaissance and Second Wind around the same time.
"The over-50 age group is simply too enticing for publishers to ignore anymore," Advertising Age wrote in June 1988.
None of the titles survived.
In 1986, Husni, who calls himself "Mr. Magazine," was so impressed with a student project called Grandparents that he pitched it to Meredith Corp., publisher of Better Homes and Gardens. Meredith paid the student $5,000 and launched Grandparents the following year.
"We had been trying to think of a way to enter that market," Meredith president Jim Autry told the Associated Press at the time. ""Grandparents has the emotional connection that other magazines don't."
Grandparents folded after three issues.
Husni said he learned a key lesson. "Just because there are a lot of grandparents with money out there doesn't mean they'll buy a magazine aimed at grandparents with money."
What makes the over-50 market so tough to crack? Age sensitivity may be one reason. On top of the inherent indignities of aging, American culture tends to ignore seniors. Editors at AARP The Magazine are so cautious about offending readers that they banned the phrases "Baby Boomer" and "senior citizen" from its pages, according to an article in April in the Los Angeles Times.
Ego may be another issue. People born during the postwar baby boom from 1946 to 1964 may be difficult to please, self-centered and reluctant to be lumped together, said Jim Fishman, head of AARP's publishing group.
"The great Boomer chant is "It's all about me,' " he said. "If a Boomer owned a cocker spaniel, he would never buy Puppy Love Magazine. He would only buy Cocker Spaniel Magazine."
Fishman pointed to the rise of specialty mags such as Brake & Front End and American Snowmobiler and the decline or demise of general-interest titles such as Reader's Digest, Life and the Saturday Evening Post as evidence.
Competition from AARP The Magazine is also a factor. With an average circulation of 22-million copies and a smooth-running distribution system - AARP members automatically get a subscription - AARP The Magazine may be the sole place some advertisers turn when they want to reach the 50-plus club.
Roughly 60 percent of its subscribers are grandparents. Billy Crystal? He was on the publication's March/April 2004 cover.
AARP The Magazine charges $385,000 or more for a full-page ad, compared with $8,000 at GRAND Magazine.
Even AARP, though, has struggled with the 50-plus monolith. In 2001, when its flagship magazine still was called Modern Maturity, AARP introduced - and two years later canceled - My Generation, a separate publication aimed at Boomers. Last year, Fishman said, AARP renamed its magazin e AARP The Magazine and began producing three different versions, one each for members in their 50s, 60s and older.
The differences in conten t can be subtle; most AARP members have no idea they are getting an age-targeted edition. Advertisers, however, can vary their ads among the three editions or focus on a single age group of readers.
"If you were an extreme mountain biker, you'd never pick up Biking," Fishman said. "You'd be bored by it."
* * *
Just because Grandparents went bust in 1987 doesn't mean GRAND Magazine will, said Micocci, Crosby's husband and business partner.
Few Boomers were grandparents 20 years ago, he reasons. Today, "Boomers like to make a big production out of things: buy the books, the how-to guide, the Dummies guide for grandparents. So I think culturally it's very different, and the demographics are very different."
GRAND will target younger, more affluent grandparents with its content.
"We are not going to reach them by their age," Crosby said, pausing a beat before delivering the second half of the couple's stock answer. "We are going to reach them by their life stage."
The magazine operation is starting small. Crosby and Micocci work from their home with the magazine's only other employee, an office manager/bookkeeper. Writers, photographers and others work on contract.
"My vision is to be a virtual company," Crosby said. "I have no desire to put money in bricks and mortar ... (or) to babysit employees."
The first few issues will be distributed only in Florida. Regional or national expansion will take place at the behest of advertisers or other stakeholders, they say.
Most of the 100,000 copies will be distributed free, a common way for a new magazine to build awareness and subscriptions. Some will be issued through grocery stores in higher-income areas, Micocci said. Others will be distributed through health care providers, retailer s or religious organizations.
A direct mail offer will be sent to a list of 10,000 Florida households of a certain age with income over $100,000. For "bragging rights," said Micocci, 52, he also hopes to sell a thousand copies at major bookstores.
The inaugural September/October issue will include a profile of 10 "active adult communities" recommended by the editors, as well as articles on vacations, healthy hearts and financial gifts. To flatter the reader, each issue's cover will feature celebrity grandparents such as Crysta l or Goldie Hawn.
It's a model Crosby and Micocci said they have run by skeptical ad buyers, consultants and branding experts. Crosby said the initial response from advertisers has been "fantastic," though she added it would be premature to name names. Even i f GRAND Magazine didn't land a single paid advertiser in its first three issues, a common scenario for industry startups, it has enough capital to stay afloat, Micocci said.
He admits he doesn't like being reminded he's over 50. But he loves being a grandparent, and he thinks plenty of other Boomers do, too.
"There are 70-million grandparents out there," Micocci said. "We don't have to appeal to all of them."
- Times staff researchers Mary Mellstrom and Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Scott Barancik can be reached at barancik@sptimes.com or 727 893-8751.
[Last modified July 11, 2004, 01:00:43]
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