It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Or Was.

I dug Mad Magazine. My brain is wired to mock.

— Lalo Alcaraz

Sometimes Congressional investigations prompt criminal charges; sometimes, new laws; and sometimes, public outcries for justice and reform.

But a 1954 Congressional investigation prompted a new magazine.

Mad was the result of a bipartisan investigation of the comic book industry by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

Comic books—filled in the day with murder, mayhem and sex—were on the hot seat because experts had claimed that they corrupted young readers.

And Congress agreed: its investigation of the industry reached the conclusion that comic book publishers were de facto smut merchants who needed to be censored.

A "comics code" was written and a watchdog group set up.

One publisher, however, was of no mind to comply.

Entertaining Comics skirted Congress' directive by upping the trim size of its comic book Mad to that of a magazine and renaming the product Mad Magazine.

Magazines had no code or watchdog.

Free from censorship, Mad in its heyday entertained well over a million Baby Boomers a month, providing a steady stream of puerile parodies, cornball sendups, and idiotic satire.

Most of all, Mad represented relief from the stifling conformism and earnestness of the 1950s and '60s.

"Mad's consciousness of itself as trash, as enemy of parents and teachers, even as money-making enterprise, thrilled kids," The New York Times said on the occasion of magazine's 25th anniversary. 

"It was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren't alone, that there were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles."

My favorite feature in every Mad was the TV show parody. I still remember some of the nutty titles the magazine gave to these spoofs:

• Walt Dizzy Presents
• The Rifle, Man!
• The Phewgitive
• Voyage to See What's on the Bottom
• 12 O'Crocked High
• Mission: Ridiculous
• The Flying Nut
• Kojerk
• Makeus Sickby
• The Straights of San Francisco
• Kung Fool
• The Dopes of Haphazzard

When they worked—which was often—Mad's spoofs excelled in their ability to transport you to a cartoon world where vile windbags and moronic stumblebums reigned—a grotesque and absurd world not unlike your parents' and teachers'. The characters were all gangly, their noses bulbous, their limbs marionettish, their clothes ill-fitting. When they spoke, they spoke in elaborate paragraphs that were studded with bombast and Yiddish slang which, unless you lived in a Jewish household, you only encountered in the pages of Mad.

Mad lasted on newsstands 67 years—much longer than anyone would have predicted. But, with the appearance of rivals Zap Comics and National Lampoon, Mad's best days were over by the 1970s.

According to The New Yorker, Mad "subverted the comic form into a mainstream ideological weapon aimed at icons of the left and the right—attacking both McCarthyism and the Beat Generation, Nixon and Kennedy, Hollywood and Madison Avenue."

I can’t remember the day when I fell in love with Mad. It was too long ago. But it was an inextricable rite of passage for every kid in the '50s and '60s at least to sample the zany sarcasm Mad dished out every month and to spend a few moments in a world where both the emperors and adults had no clothes.

Now on Vitalcy

I'm pleased to announce that Goodly posts will now appear each week on Vitalcy, an online magazine that targets "peak stage" adults.

A gutsy new alternative to AARP, Vitalcy is "your hub to discover what’s next and navigate through and expand the potential of this stage of life," the publisher says.

Goodly posts will also be syndicated beginning 2022.

You can become a member of Vitalcy at no cost here.

HAT TIP: My thanks go to Dan Cole for introducing me to the publisher. Thanks, Dan!

Tradeshow Organizers Must Diversify. Here's How.

The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines.

— Peter Drucker

If I'm bearish on tradeshows, I have cause.

Lulled by easy money, show organizers seem allergic to innovation; a condition that makes them ripe for disruption.

The best defense against disruption lies in product diversification—a sound strategy in good times, an essential one in hard.

That should be obvious.

And it should be obvious that, because they're selling audiences to advertisers, tradeshow organizers need look no farther for diversification tactics than to magazine publishers—the poster children for disruption.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Internet eviscerated magazine publishers' century-old business model. In a painful "print apocalypse," more than 10,000 magazines disappeared from inboxes.

Savvy magazine publishers responded by diversifying their product lines, pushing their number from one, two, or three to more than a dozen.

Those include:

Content. Aiming at readers, the publisher sells subscriptions or raises revenue through crowdfunding.

Branded content. Aiming at advertisers, the publisher functions as a traditional creative agency.

Events. Aiming at both readers and advertisers, the publisher organizes live, virtual, and hybrid tradeshows and conferences, selling registrations, booths and sponsorships.

Ads. The publisher acts as a traditional one, selling ads and advertising programs that can be targeted to reader-segments.

Awards. The publisher operates an industry awards program, collecting entry fees and selling tickets to celebratory events.

Merchandise. The publisher acts as the operator of a "discount club," selling memberships to readers who want to avail themselves of a portfolio of discounted products and services.

Data. Aiming at advertisers, the publisher sells data that advertisers and third parties can use to target prospects and leverage adverting programs.

Leads. The publisher takes on the role of a lead-generation firm, using webinars and telemarketing to capture new leads for advertisers.

Consulting. The publisher acts as a marketing, sales or business consultant, providing advertisers and peers expertise.

Software. The publisher licenses proprietary software and sells IT consulting and support to its peers.

Brand licenses. The publisher equips other marketers to leverage its brand, selling them the rights to use its "seal of quality."

Capital. The publisher acts as an investor and broker, launching specialized private equity funds within its industry.

Magazines against the Wall?

A near-impenetrable wall once separated editorial from advertising.

But with ad-income in decline—and without hope of turnaround—magazine publishers are capitalizing on their editorial prestige to create new revenue streams, says Ryan Derousseau in Folio:

• Readers of New York trust its writers' recommendations about what's worth buying. So the publisher has started to rake in dough from affiliates via outbound links in the articles on its website. Whenever readers click to a partner's website, money changes hands. The publisher's policy: to plug only products "the editors or writers stand behind.” Affiliate revenue is growing 40% a month, and has inspired the publisher to open pop-up shops at festivals.

• The Atlantic has become advertisers' digital agency, exploiting its advantage in measuring readers' clicks. Besides audits, the publisher creates and runs entire content-focused, multichannel campaigns for advertisers. The campaigns can include sponsored pieces of original journalism. The in-house agency is the fastest growing division of the company. It expects its revenue to rise 32% this year.

• Time is licensing its portfolio of brands to retail outlets. Readers can find kitchenware, bed linens, rugs and other merchandise in stores that are branded Real Simple, People, Food & Wine, and Southern Living. Licensed products sold in Dillard's have grown to 110 in two years.

Does monetizing readers' trust in these ways endanger that very thing?
Probably not.

Audiences are so used to paid sponsorships, they give them no thought.

Nobody turned off the last NCAA Tournament because every other player's jersey has a Nike swoosh. James Bond's Omega watch didn't prevent Skyfall from becoming a box-office smash. Mentions of the Peninsular and Oriental Company in Around the World in Eighty Days didn't stop Jules Verne's novel from becoming a classic. And Esquire readers ate up David Ogilvy's take on oysters for Guinness.

Virtual Fishwrap

Fishwrap, according to Urban Dictionary, refers to "any printed journalistic medium with such low credibility and standards in acceptable journalism that its only useful function is to wrap fresh fish in."

I earned my marketer's chops publishing a corporate magazine when those were all the rage. I won't claim it had high standards. But it wasn't fishwrap, either.

Corporate magazines can be powerful content marketing vehicles, particularly for B2B companies.

Speaking of vehicles, Content Marketing Institute credits John Deere with the invention of content marketing with its magazine The Furrow (CMI overlooks Poor Richard's Alamanack.)

A handful of corporate magazines still circulate today in print (CMI's Chief Content Officer is a laudable example); but most, if not folded, have gone digital (McKinsey Quarterly, for example).

Flip-book software may spawn a renaissance of the corporate magazine, but I have doubts.

Like sustained blogging, publishing a corporate magazine is a tough row to hoe (just ask John Deere). 

A luxury-grade magazine gobbles thousands of dollars in fees for freelance journalists, editors, photographers and graphic designers. But that's what you need to spend to hook readers. 

A flip-book, cobbled together on the cheap, won't make the grade.

At best, it's no more than virtual fishwrap.

Good Storytelling isn't Measured in Words

When it's concise, even long-form writing seems short.

Magazine writing proves the point.

Nonfiction writer Joan Didion mastered concision by writing for magazines like Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Life for decades, says Louis Menand in The New Yorker.

Didion, the "quintessential magazine writer," drew readers into her stories by leaving things out (the fiction writer's trick).

She developed "methods of economizing the exposition and managing the reader’s experience, ways of getting the reader to participate in the job of making sense of whatever it is that the writer is trying to think through," Menand says.

Didion mastered concision because she was forced to. When a writer works for a magazine, Menand says, her ability to write concisely gives her a Darwinian edge.

"The job of the magazine writer is never to give readers a reason to stop before they reach the end. The No. 1 sin in print journalism is repetition. Pages are money; editorial space is finite. Writers who waste it don’t last. Conditions demand a willingness to compress and a talent for concision."

Staying Abreast

New media lovers take notice.


Just when you thought old media was dead, it grabs headlines and attention everywhere.


I'm referring of course to the controversial cover of this week's edition of Time.


The magazine's editors found a bewitching way to draw readers into an otherwise ho-hum story about so-called "attachment parenting."


Sure, Facebook is engaging, amusing and clubby.


But traditional media, when it wants to, can still pack a wallop.