Time Cover: Thinly-Veiled Twitter Ad?

Newsweekly’s cover of social media phenomenon looks like advertorial.

We’ve been covering the debate over ads on magazine covers (“The Great Cover Ad Debate”) at FOLIO: a lot lately. So far, we’ve limited the debate to magazines—fairly openly and brazenly—putting ads on their covers.

But what about magazines whose covers—while editorial by nature—look like an ad?

Take Time’s June 15 issue. The cover touts a somewhat generic mobile phone (it looks like an iPhone) with a Twitter update by the issue’s cover story author, Steven Johnson, reading: “I’ve written this week’s TIME cover story about how Twitter is changing the way we live—and showing us the future of innovation. Buy a copy!”

Is this low-cost design an effective way to promote the issue’s cover story on Twitter? An odd effort to make their cover look like a Twitter ad? Or something else?

Leave your comments below.

By Vanessa Voltolina --

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Generic?

Submitted by utahsaint on Mon, 06/08/2009 - 16:01.

"Somewhat generic phone"? If thats not an ad for Twitter and Apple's iPhone then I'm seeing a different image! That being said, I don't think Time are using the 2 images as ads, rather they are using the buzz of the iPhone (remember the 3GS was announced this week) and Twitter to try and sell more copies on the newstand.

Hyphens and such

Submitted by Megan on Mon, 06/08/2009 - 16:20.

I'm interested: What style guide does Folio follow? I've noticed you often hyphenate compound modifiers that include “ly” words, something most styles avoid-except in cases when no hyphen would create ambiguity of meaning (for example, when the “ly” word is an adjective). This doesn't seem to be the case so far in your magazine. Any thoughts?

In reading the context of

Submitted by TM on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 15:34.

In reading the context of those sentences I'm going to say those are em dashes, probably copy and pasted from Word and not using the actual HTML symbol code which would make them more em dash looking. At any rate, I agree that the phone is clearly an iPhone, and while the design is slightly annoying it plays to me more like a clever way of twitter-izing the main article coverline than as a veiled Twitter ad.

I agree with utahsaint, they

Submitted by SyrianForward on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 16:05.

I agree with utahsaint, they are using the iPhone and Twitter buzz for more newsstand sales. Going back to the ads on covers debate, I dont think the phone and Twitter harms the cover at all, the brands make it more attractive.

I think you're reaching.

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 06/15/2009 - 14:59.

I think you're reaching. It's an article about Twitter. The cover art shows Twitter on an iPhone--a popular method for Twittering. Plain and simple. At no point can you not tell that this is cover art. The readers aren't THAT dumb. Time shouldn't be to blame because a consumer brand and news overlapped.

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