On Valentine’s Day 2024, we got an insight into David Beckham’s magazine stack, when his wife Victoria shared that her gift to him was a copy of The Country Smallholder. Now we don’t know Posh & Becks, but we do know Andy Cowles, the man behind that cover. He explained to us how you get a former Spice Girl to buy this – or any other magazine – on the strength of its cover lines.
-I don’t think Posh bought that magazine. I’m sure one of her team bought it – she’s not going to be in Waitrose any time soon. But Brand Beckham, as we saw with that Netflix documentary, is trying to make the couple feel more relatable.
“If you make an Apple iPhone, is that an expression of art or engineering?”
This cover confirms a facet of David’s sense of identity – like it should with any reader. David is indeed a country smallholder – he does keep bees and chickens – as opposed to ‘just’ a multi-millionaire former footballer. Liz, the editor of The Country Smallholder, has a really, really clear idea who her customer is.
The cover looks upscale. With 17 sells and three pictures, that’s a hard trick to pull off. The secret is colour control. There is red and yellow in the hot spots, but it’s seriously matchy-matchy. Victoria would approve.
I look at the design of a cover as like a piece of string. At one end of the string, there’s the customer and at the other end is the brand. The middle – the wobbly bit – is content, and in a world where content is ubiquitous and free, it’s the role of content to enable, facilitate and make connections.
Think about what you can give them that they can’t get anywhere else.
For The Country Smallholder, ‘Free Vet Advice’ – which appears in the top left-hand corner of every issue – is the reason to buy the magazine. Vets are very expensive and hard to get to, but there are three columnists in every issue... offering advice for free.
Borrow from brands who do it better.
So many of the cover lines on The Country Smallholder are written off the Cosmo playbook. If you look at the cover of Cosmopolitan, every single line has the word ‘You’ or ‘Yours’ in it. It’s a great technique.
Magazine covers are relational.
The relationship that Liz has with her customers is deep and it’s emotional, because she empathises with them. She understands who they are, she really feels their pain, their joys and their hopes. She understands their aspirations and their shared values.
It’s about knowing who’s going to walk past your magazine.
When we design these covers, I write essentially for passing trade in Waitrose – which is why we have ‘You and your pigs’. Liz has got such authority she can say ‘Start keeping quail’ with a completely straight face.
Covers are both art and engineering.
If you make an Apple iPhone, is that an expression of art or engineering? You need both. If it’s pure engineering, there’s no emotional engagement with it at all. And if it’s pure emotion, you’ll never get the bastard thing to work.
A cover is a very complicated thing.
There are so many things happening in such a short time and in such a tiny area. You’ve got to balance things that don’t change, such as your logo, withthings which change all the time, like the visual imagery. Then you’ve got the technical delivery, the colours, the typefaces, the tone of voice.
The cover lines sit on the cover, but they are not separate from it.
Sitting on or with a photograph, they are designed to stimulate, facilitate and consolidate the relationship between the high-value people that you want to engage with, and a brand that has a distinctly unique tone of voice.
You need to create a sense of value.
You have one big splash and an explainer, one big marketing message and then you have some other things. That’s how it breaks. Sometimes I get a lot of other things on there, sometimes I don’t. You just need to hit your marks, cover your ground.
Cover lines are both an impact tool and a closing tool.
In the first instance, they help generate impact. In the second, they expose the conversation. But...there’s a tension between high-impact lines to grab attention and closing lines. I ran a cover workshop where I invited people to choose a magazine from a pile on the floor. This bloke picks up Mojo with a fantastic picture of Keith Moon, and when I asked why, he said, “It’s got a Blodwyn Pig interview in it”. That was the smallest cover line; he’d gone down the list and eventually thought, ‘Ah... I like Blodwyn Pig. I’ll buy it’.