Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,56
Upscale or down-to-earth? Should I talk about the recipes? You need to give me marching orders.”
“Why go through all that?” He sounded genuinely perplexed. “Just explain your vision. We’re Gourmet, and that speaks for itself.”
I studied him warily. In Gina’s world we had tried to figure out what the clients wanted to hear—and then made sure that they did. “I don’t know,” I began. “It seems kind of risky. Especially since you’re new and ad sales are bound to slump for a few months.”
“They’ll come back,” he said, with what I considered unearned assurance. I’d learned by then how personal ad sales are, and I knew that many of Gina’s accounts would follow her out the door. As a first-time publisher, Giulio would not be bringing old accounts along, and we were certain to suffer.
But he appeared to be unconcerned. “All you need to do is tell them your vision for the magazine.”
“That’s all?”
“Preview some upcoming articles, talk about why you’re publishing them. That’s all I ask; the rest is my job.”
I was uneasy and he sensed my discomfort. “This is how I see it.” He was so earnest. “On paper we look exactly like the competition. I can massage the figures a bit, but people aren’t fooled—we have the same demographics as all the other food and travel books. What’s different about us is our content. Nobody’s ever produced an epicurean magazine like this before; that’s what we have to get across.”
But getting anything across to ad reps is extremely difficult. They’re trained to have no affect, and no matter how fast you talk or how many jokes you tell, they sit like stones, giving nothing back.
This group was no different. “I tried everything,” I told Nick and Michael later. “When I told about sending Bruce Feiler off with a pocketful of cash to buy his way into hot restaurants, it almost worked. One of the reps actually asked a question.”
“What?” Nick wanted to know.
“He asked if Bruce had tried it at a Danny Meyer restaurant. When I said a twenty-dollar bill slipped to the maître d’ snagged an instant table at Union Square on a busy Saturday night, there was an actual gasp. Then the room went quiet; they were embarrassed that I’d tricked them into reacting.”
“But will they buy an ad?” Michael wanted to know.
“We’ll have to wait and see. But I worry that Giulio likes the magazine too much to be an effective salesman. The other day he brought his mother in. Can you imagine? She’s this lovely, very shy old lady, and she’s saved all her Gourmets going back to the fifties. When I took her down to the test kitchen, I thought she would faint from happiness. It was very sweet.”
“Don’t underestimate that man,” said Michael. “He knows exactly how to charm you. He just has a different set of tools than Gina. But I bet when you want to publish a serious investigative report he’s going to give you that same old line about not offending the readers.”
Edgy articles had always made Gina nervous, but Giulio was different. When I showed him Barry Estabrook’s article on the horrors of salmon farms, he was positively enthusiastic. The accepted wisdom was that fish farms were going to save the world, but Barry reported that they were just another form of animal factory, polluting the water, creating dead zones on the ocean floor, and filling the fish with antibiotics.
“Farmed salmon don’t even have orange flesh,” I said, showing Giulio the color wheel Barry had sent with the article. “But nobody wants to eat an ugly gray salmon, so the farmers feed them color pellets. These are the various shades of orange they can choose from.”
Giulio gave the wheel a spin. “Our advertising partners eat salmon too,” he said. “They’ll want to know this.” Later he sent me a note laying out his thinking. “As I see it, this is a win-win. The affluent epicures who already subscribe will be grateful; they want to know what’s in the salmon they’re buying. But younger readers are going to be especially interested; this is the kind of story that will make them realize this isn’t their grandmother’s Gourmet anymore. Stories like this set us apart.”
I hoped he was right, but I was not convinced. As Christmas approached I noted, with growing trepidation, that ad sales were not improving. I dreaded yet another new publisher; who knew who they’d send next?
Christmas at Condé Nast meant the annual Four