Press: Targeting The Waiting Room

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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.