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Magazines... and more magazines

"Good will, good sales, and good works may fit together perfectly in education marketing."--Mark Evans, senior vice president of Scholastic, Inc., in Advertising Age, 1988.

"I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."--Adam Smith (1723-90)

Though Zillions may not make its way into schools, rest assured other magazines do. Scholastic, Inc., now makes no less than 50 magazines--with a combined circulation of 11 million--for kids in grades one through twelve. A short list of their business partners reads like a Who's Who of blue chip companies: AT&T, American Express, Apple Computer, Coca-Cola Foods, Discover Card, Fox Children's Network, Frito-Lay, Hershey, IBM, M&M/Mars, Milton Bradley, NBC, Nabisco, NYNEX, OXY 10, Pepsi-Cola, Pizza Hut, Proctor and Gamble, Taco Bell, Warner Brothers, Warner Lambert, among countless others.

In its promotional materials, Scholastic claims to be "the only publishing pipeline covering the entire pre-K to 12 grade marketplace. . . . The classroom offers marketers a virtually noncompetitive advertising arena."

And in his Ad Age editorial, Scholastic's Mark Evans asks the business audience: "Can you devise promotions that take students from the aisles in school rooms to the aisles in supermarkets?"

In 1988 there were 81 magazines directed at kids; five years later, there were about twice that number: over 150. Weekly Reader, which is now owned by K-III (the same company that owns Channel One and Lifetime Learning Systems) is read by 8 million children, from preschool to sixth grade. And new magazines for kids continue to sprout up all the time. Some are offshoots of existing publications: Time for Kids, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Popular Science for Kids, etc. Some are offshoots of other branded goods, a sort of print equivalent of infomercials: Nickelodeon, Crayola Kids. -- CM