Targeting The Waiting Room

By Laurence Zuckerman

Christopher Whittle likes to boast that his company specializes in "guerrilla media." Right now the management of many major U.S. magazines is inclined to agree with him. Whittle's Knoxville-based Whittle Communications is preparing to assault the publishing industry with an audacious plan that would effectively ban many of the country's most popular magazines from a high- profile setting: doctors' waiting rooms. What is more, the 40-year-old publisher is so sure of success that he has already proclaimed victory without firing a shot. Declares Whittle: "The battle is virtually over, and we took no prisoners."

Well, not quite. Scheduled to debut next fall, the so-called Special Reports will offer 15,000 family practitioners, gynecologists and pediatricians in 125 market areas six oversize glossy magazines that emphasize family, health, sports, life-style, personalities and fiction. The quarterly magazines will contain 30 full ad pages each and only 27 minutes' worth of editorial material, geared to the average time a patient spends in a doctor's waiting room. Each month a Whittle representative will visit subscribing waiting rooms to restock a specially designed wooden display rack (which is furnished by Whittle) with fresh copies.

In return, Whittle is asking doctors to pay an annual fee, probably between $100 and $200. It is not at all clear that doctors are interested. One large publishing company has begun sampling the profession, and is so far finding minimal interest in Whittle's scheme. As for the advertisers, they are being offered a large captive audience and a pledge of exclusivity: all six magazines will feature only a single brand in any product category. That would relieve an advertising problem known as clutter, when ads for competing products jostle one another for attention in the same publication.

All this might have passed relatively unnoticed were it not for another, unprecedented feature of Whittle's plan: as part of the deal, he is asking doctors to cancel their office subscriptions to all but two non-Whittle publications. Not surprisingly, publishers of the magazines Whittle seeks to displace are enraged by his project. "Whittle's plan is not far away from book burning," exclaims T George Harris, editor of American Health, which offers 100,000 subscriptions free of charge to doctors. "We aren't about to roll over," declares Kenneth Gordon, publisher of Reader's Digest. John Beni, president of Gruner + Jahr USA, publisher of Parents and Expecting, vows, "Magazine publishers will strike back."

Why such a fuss over doctors' offices? Because few public arenas provide such a large captive audience. These page-flipping patients not only are counted in readership surveys used to determine advertising rates but often end up as subscribers. Losing such readers would be a severe blow to magazines like Expecting and PEOPLE, which find a substantial share of their audience in the waiting rooms.

Whittle, who along with former Partner Phillip Moffitt revived the foundering Esquire magazine in the early 1980s, believes that publishers have taken this valuable market for granted. After parting ways with Moffitt in 1986, Whittle took over the ex-partnership's business, which specialized in targeting hard-to-reach audiences with information-oriented advertising. Among Whittle's most successful innovations have been posterlike wall magazines placed in schools, health clubs and doctors' offices throughout the U.S. While distributing these materials, Whittle's people noticed that in most waiting rooms, the newest magazines are the first to be pinched; the issues that are left are often out of date, torn and dog-eared. "That's where we started from," explains Whittle. "We thought we could solve the physician's problem as well as the consumer's."

But serving the reader, say critics, is the least of Whittle's concerns. Competitors charge that Whittle's publications are nonmagazines, nothing but bound "advertorials" -- editorial copy that is designed to promote the interests and products of advertisers. Many magazines, including TIME, accept this form of advertising, but the American Society of Magazine Editors' guidelines require it to be labeled as such and clearly distinguishable in its look from the editorial text. "Whittle's whole magazine is done for the client," says American Health's Harris. "In a regular magazine the advertorial is like an island." Whittle, of course, insists that the editorial and advertising sides of the new magazines will be separate.

Many publishers are ready to compete with Whittle, but they are incensed by his attempt to exclude their magazines. Several are threatening to sue. "Once Whittle ties up too many doctors, then he chokes the marketplace and can be challenged under the antitrust laws," says Attorney John Hadlock, who represents Gruner + Jahr. But Whittle insists that he is planning to enter only a small percentage of the country's more than 200,000 medical waiting rooms and dismisses the threats as "legal sword rattling."

Whittle refuses to divulge which advertisers have come on board so far, but giants Procter & Gamble and Warner-Lambert are said to be considering committing multimillion-dollar budgets to the new magazines. Spokesmen for the two companies deny that any contracts have been signed with Whittle, who predicts that he will sell $37 million worth of advertising in the first year.

He will have a fight on his hands. A number of his competitors have indicated that they are developing special waiting-room plans of their own. One counter-move Whittle anticipates is that publishers may start offering doctors complimentary subscriptions. If so, he is ready to supply his Special Reports at no charge as well. That is hardly the issue. In a profession in which six-figure incomes are the rule, the cost of magazines has never been a big item.

With reporting by Joyce Leviton/Knoxville and Martha Smilgis/New York