Playboy, once seen as a risque adult magazine, but now a relatively tame magazine, is now launching a new website that is work safe. The persistent joke about reading Playboy for the articles has ignored the fact that it actually was a well written magazine, albeit one best known for the Centerfold. Playboy has launched a landing page with a signup on their new site, TheSmokingJacket.com, a nod to the fact that the company is as well known for it’s Smoking Jacket clad founder as for the bunnies and the naked spreads.
The idea of a non-pornographic gentleman’s lifestyle magazine being promoted by Playboy is intriguing, and definitely capitalizes on an extremely well known brand. In recent years, Playboy’s iconic magazine has been a money loser, with the value from the brand in royalties and merchandising, plus the pay per view movie channels being the dominant areas of growth. With the collapse of well known magazines in recent years, it will be interesting in Playboy can extend their brand to the non-adult fare.
In middle school, our science teacher brought in an interview conducted by Playboy, which was an extremely good interview, with much amusement from the class about the source. She told us she sent her poor embarrassed husband in to purchase the magazine for her to run off copies of the article for us to read.
While I’m certain that the school district had a copyrighted materials policy, I’m pretty sure that a purchase order for 50 – 100 copies of Playboy magazine would have raised red flags, even if they were able to cut out the pages of the interview without the “dirty bits.”