Wal-Mart’s brought in the big guns from Edelman (and seemingly every political campaign of the last ten years) to help it beat back increasingly influential activist campaigns, sponsored in large part by union forces. This signals a radical shift in the corporation’s tactics - and when you bring in Michael Deaver, you’re really trying to send a message.

Read more about it in the New York Times today.

Turns out the editors at Maxim were certain their ribald sexuality and explicit come-ons would succeed, because the dowager queen of women’s magazines, Helen Gurley Brown, had already blazed the trail. From Maureen Dowd’s NYT magazine article, “What’s a modern girl to do?“:

“Oddly enough, Felix Dennis, who created the top-selling Maxim, said he stole his “us against the world” lad-magazine attitude from women’s magazines like Cosmo. Just as women didn’t mind losing Cosmo’s prestigious fiction as the magazine got raunchier, plenty of guys were happy to lose the literary pretensions of venerable men’s magazines and embrace simple-minded gender stereotypes, like the Maxim manifesto instructing women, “If we see you in the morning and night, why call us at work?”

Jessica Simpson and Eva Longoria move seamlessly from showing their curves on the covers of Cosmo and Glamour to Maxim, which dubbed Simpson “America’s favorite ball and chain!” In the summer of 2005, both British GQ and FHM featured Pamela Anderson busting out of their covers. (”I think of my breasts as props,” she told FHM.)

A lot of women now want to be Maxim babes as much as men want Maxim babes. So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it. “I have been surprised,” Maxim’s editor, Ed Needham, confessed to me, “to find that a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl type, that they’d like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends to take pictures of them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim representation of a woman, the Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That, to me, is kind of extraordinary.”

The luscious babes on the cover of Maxim were supposed to be men’s fantasy guilty pleasures, after all, not their real life-affirming girlfriends.”

Fellow men, may I just refer you to this best-of post from Craigslist: A letter from the Porn Stars of America.

Looks like some newpaper salespeople may be underestimating - or overestimating - their reader per copy number. By relying on an national average RPC* of 2.3, they may be overlooking much more favourable local readership numbers:

“… ABC and NSA … found a wide range in individual newspapers from 1.8 to 4.4 RPC. From this base, 38 daily newspapers confirm around 2.3 RPC — the national average — but 46 papers report a lower RPC and 153 papers show a higher RPC than the national average.

In other words, using 2.3 RPC to arrive at readership is only accurate 16% of the time. In the majority of these cases (65%), using the national RPC “underestimates daily individual newspaper readership by as much as 91%,” according to the report.”(Editor & Publisher)

These numbers might be a source of inspiration for some salespeople and publishers - if Goldman wasn’t forecasting a weak year ahead for the industry:

“The weak ad environment for newspapers has caused Goldman to scale back its 2006 growth forecast to 3.5 percent from 4.0 percent. … national ad growth would once again be weakest at 1.0 percent, followed by retail, 2.5 percent, and classifieds at 3.6 percent. The bright spot continues to be online newspaper revenues, which are projected to grow an impressive 25 percent in 2006. Despite this, online will still represent 5.0 percent of total newspaper revenues.(MediaPost)

Well, at least things are looking up for online and classifieds. Or should I say Craigslist?

*”newspaper specific readership estimate divided by paid circulation equals newspaper specific RPC”

And the debate begins again … Can women’s sports only earn mainstream attention by trumpeting their sexuality? In the past, Canadian women’s rugby, water polo and cross-country ski teams have launched tasteful calendars with a selection of nude and semi-nude poses. This month, it’s the turn of a group of international women curlers.

Now, Dordi Nordby aside, women curlers are not as “handsome” or “rugged” or “down-to-earth” as the men’s rinks. Take Ed Werenich up there. Or Randy Ferbey.

A market likely exists for a calendar like this - among both male and female curling fans. But is there any positive impact on public perception of the sport?* The women’s competitions don’t seem to draw as much attention as the men’s. Will an increased emphasis on sexuality draw more bums to the rinks and viewers to the tube?

“”I think the women are going to have to curl naked in order to get people out there,” [world champion skip Colleen Jones] said [in April 2004]. “I’m not kidding. You’re going to have to hope for an Anna Kournikova to come along to really jazz it up.”(Globe and Mail)

That may not be enough. Even Brandi Chastain’s heartfelt celebration of the US victory in the 1999 World Cup arguably only produced a bump in mainstream media coverage of women’s soccer - even though it remains an extremely popular sport for younger women.

*Yeah, yeah. Is it really a sport if you can win while smoking and drinking a beer?