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If there’s one thing readers of this blog are guaranteed to take away from it (Hell, I won’t shut up about it!), it’s my belief that MAD needed to Change, far more than it actually has, to survive.

However, in the interests of fairness and equal time (not to mention mock humility), I have to admit it’s entirely possible that I and everyone else who feels the same are full of shit; that making dramatic and wholesale changes to MAD could’ve driven it faster and deeper into the Magazine Death Pool than it’s already headed.

What brought this up again to me was the story of the recent re-branding of Tropicana Orange Juice. See, late last year, executives there decided it was time for change, specifically, a total package re-design. So, they went to the (formerly) most respected design firm in New York, threw millions of dollars at them, and got an entirely new package…which then proceeded to lose them 20% of their sales in less than 2 months! Think about that: a 20% drop in under 2 months! Usually all it takes is a single-digit YEARLY sales decline to put a company into panic mode!

Why did 20% of presumably satisfied Tropicana customers suddenly stop buying the exact same orange juice in a different package (at right in photo)? No one’s exactly sure, but the theories run from absence of the familiar Tropicana “straw-in-the-orange” on the label…to the new package looking like a generic or house-brand orange juice. Whatever the reasons, it’s clear that this well-intentioned move to modernize and “refresh” the branding backfired on Tropicana, big time. (If you’re interested, read about it in this article; it also links to a longer original article in Advertising Age – which is behind a Registration wall, sorry!)

What does this have to do with MAD? Hold your horses, I’m getting to it: About 3 or 4 years ago, I had a conversation with one of the MAD editors right after I’d read a startling newspaper report that fully 1/3 of all U.S. households have NEVER owned a computer (!!!) and therefore were extremely unlikely to be regular Internet users, or even that familiar with the Internet at all. I asked the editor if maybe the universe of Remaining MAD Readers included a disproportionately large number of this non-Internet-using demographic. He said they had no idea. Seriously.

The $64,000 Questions: What if it does turn out that, say, 50%, 60%, 70% of MAD Readers are NON-internet users? If you suddenly change MAD to appeal more to Internet users, you could be screwing yourself royally. Or, worse, what if MAD had successfully transitioned to a full Web presence (not the POS bare-bones site they have now!)? That 50%, 60%, 70% would never even be in a position to find it!

Once you commit to Change, you never know for sure how it’ll turn out. (No doubt that uncertainty has fed the inertia in the editorial offices!) But – when you’re talking about a magazine that’s plummeted from a peak circulation of 2.1 million all the way down to 170,000 now…if it were me, I still think I would’ve taken the gamble on Change rather than Standing Pat.

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized by Mike_Snider
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Sure, I’m an old crank and a cynic…but I’m not completely immune to sentimentality. I just got my hands on MAD Classics #25, containing 3 pieces I wrote for MAD years ago, and I suddenly realized: this is almost certainly the FINAL appearance of my byline in anything-”MAD” on the newsstands after 30 years (since both MAD Classics and MAD Kids are now ceasing publication, and the last new writing I did for MAD or MAD Kids was the end of 2006). So, hoist up whatever beverage you have handy right now, and join me in a toast to the Official Death of the “Writer: Mike Snider” MAD-Byline! Ziggy-ziggy, ziggy-ziggy, oy, oy, oy! (Urp!)

Now, as far as the active part of my MAD-writing career (as opposed to the “Reprint part”), it had no such neat & tidy “end-point.” It was just an uneventful, slow-motion petering-out. No, I take that back: there was ONE “event” – the most bizarre phone call I’ve ever been subjected to in my life! – that, while it didn’t directly lead to the end of my writing for MAD, did sort of “upset the apple cart” of an otherwise smooth 2-decade-long working relationship I had with the Editor who placed the “offending” phone call (about which: the less said, the better!). So, for anyone curious about why I stopped writing for MAD:

See, early in this decade, my ‘acceptance percentage’ [the % of submitted-premises that are ultimately bought & published] dropped from the 20-30% range to around 10%. For whatever reason, my writing wasn’t “connecting” with the MAD Editors as frequently as before. (Which I don’t “blame” anyone for; MAD has no obligation to any of its freelance contributors, we all know that. And, “what’s funny” is one of the most subjective things in life — its all personal opinion.)

But, anyway, the drop to around 10% wasn’t, by itself, too alarming – you could live with it, just means cranking out more premises. Except for two things that were happening around this time, one affecting every MAD Writer, and the other, probably (I hope!) just me: First, the Editorial response times to writers in general were getting longer and longer (which I attribute to all the extra workload DC Comics started piling on to them: going from 8 to 12 issues a year; adding more Specials & books; starting MAD Kids; color; advertising; etc.). But the second thing — the bizarre 2002 phone call about which the less I say, the better — was apparently so difficult for the “offending” Editor to reconcile having made to me, that he just DIDN’T. His “solution” to his self-created professional speed-bump was…to totally move me over to being handled by a different Editor, and to avoid talking to me altogether (except briefly in passing at a MAD Xmas party).

This second Editor I was passed along to – he’s a good guy, but he had “his own” stable of freelancers he was already too busy with and, well…I guess I just fell between the cracks. What had become simply “bad” response times for everyone else (I’m assuming), became “glacial” in my case. It was typical, from, say, 2002 onward for me to have to wait 6 months, a year, even 14 months to hear back from Editors on a single draft (I’ve got my meticulously kept Logbook to prove it). The previous norm had been 1 or 2 months, 3 at the absolute most! (And, as I keep pointing out to no avail, there are two pieces from over 5 years ago that I STILL haven’t heard back about!)

Along about 2003/2004, it became apparent to me that, even if I were able to get my ‘acceptance percentage’ back up to where it was (OR crank out a lot more premises)…I would probably never return to the MAD-income I’d enjoyed in the 80s & 90s because of the RIDICULOUS length of time it was now taking to get ANYTHING of mine through the editorial process (much less to the check-writing phase)!

Therefore, I proceeded to do what 99.9% of freelance writers have to do (which I had been spared during the umpteen years I wrote for MAD and MAD alone): I found other work. In 2004, MAD accounted for just half of my total income; for the next couple years, it was 10% or less; by the end of 2006, my attitude (and theirs?) was “eh, why bother?”

So, there’s the story.“Sour grapes?” Decide for yourself. (I’d say more like “Petrified raisins,” the length of time they left me to stew on the back burner.)

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized by Mike_Snider
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