Forced relatability and undisclosed influencer ads: "We owe magazines an apology"

I will take an editorial Celine ad over an undisclosed L'Oreal mascara ad on my FYP any day

One day in middle school, I remember standing inside an Albertstons (who remembers that grocery store chain?) with my mom. We were in line to pay at a register. There was a man in front of us who looked like he had the charm and aura to be someone famous. I grew up in Southern California so it wasn’t far off to think some distant, sitcom celebrity might be checking out in a grocery store in front of me after school.

My mom and I were looking at the rack of colorful magazines that lined the aisle alongside the conveyor belt for the register. The man turned around and mysteriously said:

“Don’t read those magazines. They are all trash.”

I believe two, opposite things can be true at once. I believe he was referring to the low-brow, gossip magazines and maybe he was someone who had been falsely reported on once.

And that moment stuck with me. I wrote magazines off for years.

Before that, I loved the day of the month when “Seventeen” magazine and “Teen Vogue” would arrive at my doorstep. I loved the feeling of physically flipping through the pages and smelling the perfume ads. I would even collect the Pottery Barn Teen and Limited Too ads that came in each month in the form of mini magazines.

Find more images from the Limited Too magazine in this Cut article

But as media has evolved the last 15 years since that interaction, I sometimes miss magazines. And I think we owe them an apology.

As a creator, I have leaned more into traditional media and magazines as inspiration for new videos and growth whenever I feel a creative burnout from seeing the same style of videos on the FYP, that is now primarily overrun with ads.

In fact, one of my most viral videos from this past year was when I bought a Vanity Fair magazine at my local Barnes & Nobles. In the video, I went over some of the quotes from Jenna Ortega’s interview inside and encouraged viewers to go get the physical magazine to learn more. This was not a sponsored ad. I genuinely just wanted to share my love of physical media.

@cocomocoeToday I learned Tim Burton keeps a jar of eyeballs in his bathroom 🖤 The Vanity Fair interview with Jenna Ortega revealed so much cool info about the upcoming movie “Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!” + “Wednesday” on Netflix, if you’re interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff! Who is excited to see the movie?! 💚 @Vanity Fair #jennaortega #beetlejuice #beetlejuicebeetlejuice #wednesday #wednesdayaddams #timburton #winonaryder #michaelkeaton #greenscreen

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I think this video performed so well because it was something different than what all of the other pop culture, green screen creators were doing. You can only share so many of the same Pop Crave screenshots before all of our content becomes the same.

I believe the virality of this video was a sign of audiences being hungry again for longer, editorial media vs the usual, short, soundbite content we have grown accustomed to the last few years.

And if you are a creator who feels burnt out by chasing all the same trends and algorithms as everyone else, you can find a wealth of inspiration from magazines that no video on your FYP could ever provide. That is what we will be discussing in today’s trend report.

Here is what editorial magazines got right that algorithms got wrong:

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