Page 48 - AVN February 2016

FEATURE
Holland told AVN much more about her
researches into Guccione’s life, but that will be
the basis of a separate article. In the meantime, as
Penthouse’s publisher, a fair amount of Holland’s
time is spent proving that, in fact, print magazines
aren’t dead, as some would have the public
believe—but it’s been a hell of a struggle.
“No, not going the way of the dodo bird,”
Holland declared. “If you have a relevant magazine
to the times, and I would point to a magazine like
Vice, then I think that it’s as relevant as ever and
you want that magazine. Even millennials want
that tactile experience. I’ll tell you something
about our magazine, since that’s been in question
with declining subscriptions and circulation, but
the costs are still significant to put out a magazine,
what with the paper and the ink and distribution:
How do you market to a new audience, the
millennials, who perhaps have never bought a
magazine? I was asked to oversee the magazine
and licensing about 18 months ago, so I had to
come into the magazine and ask: Is the printed
page obsolete and should we go to digital? Digital
is very fungible; it’s something that’s there and it’s
going to change in two hours when it gets updated,
and on and on and on. There is still an incredible
gravitas to the printed page, and if you understand,
I believe, humbly, where this brand needs to go,
then you say, how can I use the gravitas of the
printed page to move that narrative forward?
“I’ll give you an example: We know we need
to reach millennials; it’s a very tough generation.
That generation was born with a cellphone in each
hand; they came through the birth canal speed-
dialing things. They have such a high level of radar
for authenticity; they’re so savvy about brands—
they are their own brand, actually. You have to
approach them in a very different way. So the
question is, how do we go to millennials and make
a magazine relevant? What we thought was, ‘Look,
let’s use the magazine to align with the brands
that millennials feel are authentic. What does that
mean? You can’t go straight at a millennial and
say, ‘I’m going to market to you.’ They’re just too
sophisticated for that.”
Holland gave the example of the recent South
By Southwest (SXSW) music festival, which
millennials apparently abandoned in droves
after they balked at the fact that snack food
manufacturer Frito Lay tried to sign and brand
many of the bands that were scheduled to play.
“So how do you approach a millennial
who’s already got radar up on that?” she asked
rhetorically. “You find out what brands are
authentic to them, so we started looking, most
easily, at apparel brands; what apparel brands
are sort of embedded in the current millennial
thinking? And we found Huf; Clearweather, which
is a sneaker brand; Passarella Death Squad, a
fashion brand, a streetwear brand; and we went
to those people and we said, ‘Hey, we’ll give you
some free advertising in our magazine; we’ll give
you very inexpensive advertising, and we want to
do like a licensing partnership; we want to brand
some T-shirts, we want to brand some sneakers,
whatever.’ It’s this theory: If you want to go into
48 | AVN.com | 2.16
We know we need to reach millennials. ... They have
such a high level of radar for authenticity; they’re so
savvy about brands—they are their own brand.
the most exclusive party in Los Angeles on a Saturday
night but you don’t have an invitation, how do you get
in? You find out who does have an invitation, that you
know, and you go in with them.”
And now that Holland has put Penthouse magazine
back on its feet, she’s also trying to take it back to
some of its roots.
“Bob always had a commitment to veterans,” she
noted. “It was early on in the Vietnam War, and it
was a really sincere commitment to veterans affairs. I
think now even more than post-Vietnam, veterans are
a larger percentage of the population; I think that their
concerns are very profound. You’ve had, in this most
recent set of wars in the Middle East, more veterans
because of better care in the field, more veterans
surviving catastrophic injury and returning home, so
you have all sorts of healthcare issues. You still have
PTSD, you have reintegration into society, so Penthouse
made a commitment to go back to running a monthly
column called Warrior Wire, dealing with veterans’
issues.
“Then there’s a project in the magazine that’s very
near and dear to my heart, called Pop Shots. Pop Shots
is where we ask celebrities to come in and shoot a
layout and we give them full rein. We give them a
supporting crew, staff, and we don’t pay them any
extraordinary amount of money; we give them a budget
which is identical to any other photographer so they
don’t have an advantage on doing a more extraordinary
layout, but we say, ‘We want you to shoot a layout that
epitomizes for you what’s hot. Like, what’s hot about
women?’ ... There’s a fairly cookie-cutter image or
vision of what a centerfold looked like and what made
that woman attractive [10 or 20 or 30 years ago]. Now
you have a much broader and diverse definition of
what’s hot. You could have a Kelly Shibari, BBWs; you
could have Suicide Girls, tattooed from head to toe; you
could have American Apparel girls, flat-chested and
nubile; you could have the plastic pin-up girl. So I think
the definition of what’s hot is a very broad one, and
we’ve seen it taken up in popular culture with people
like Lena Dunham on her series Girls, and I thought
that Penthouse, of all the places and spaces in the world,
was the best town square, soap box in the town square
to stand on and have that conversation about what
makes women hot today.
“Nudes, we are that space; I don’t run from that
space at all,” she declared. “I’m not the president of
Penthouse; I’m the shepherdess of the sheep and I am
humbled to be its shepherdess, and it bears a great
responsibility, which is to understand the brand that
you have, to respect the brand you have. It doesn’t
mean the brand can’t change; it doesn’t mean the brand
can’t grow; it doesn’t mean the brand can’t expand, but
you’d better understand what the core DNA is.”
And speaking of “core DNA,” Holland shared a few
of her thoughts regarding Playboy’s announcement
that as of 2016, there would no longer be nudes in the
magazine.
“Scott Flanders is a brilliant CEO; he’s just made,
in my opinion, a colossally stupid decision, and this
way, disaster, right?” she summarized. “I’ve made
colossally stupid decisions. I think lots of people have;
all CEOs probably have, or presidents or managing
directors. I think, if you go back and examine why a
bad decision was made, it’s because you’re not making
it by analyzing the marketplace or understanding your
brand or doing the algorithms around your revenue.
You’re making a decision for the wrong reasons. …
The Playboy announcement comes out, CNN picks it
up, everybody talks about it, but that wasn’t the first
time that was announced. Scott Flanders actually
announced it five months earlier in a trade magazine
called Ad Age. He said the same thing; he was already
developing the rhetoric: Nudity is passé—that’s absurd.
Nudity is never passé; sex is one of the three biological
motivators for continuation of the species, and nudity
is core to what promotes that. So nudity is no longer
passé. ‘It’s no longer unique’—absurd. I don’t think
Michelangelo looked at a 17-foot high block of marble
and contemplated it and said, ‘I’m not gonna do that
nude guy David. The Greeks did that a thousand years
ago. It’s been so done.’ He didn’t say that. He did the
most extraordinary sculpture in history, and it was a
nude man and it was the David. So it’s not that it’s
unique/not unique; nudity is always unique if you
make it unique, frankly.
“So why was the decision made? The one line that
wasn’t in this current narrative but was in the Ad
Age article five months earlier was this one simple
sentence: Scott Flanders saying, ‘The worst deal I ever
did at Playboy was the partnership with MindGeek.’
Now, I don’t know what it takes to be a CEO and be in
an ongoing partnership—this is an ongoing partnership
he has—and to publicly come out and say that. That’s a
real violation of protocol. So for Scott Flanders, who’s
very professional, to come out and say that—and I’m
sure MindGeek feels the same thing: Both sides were
forced into an unholy alliance by the bankers that
financed the privatization of Playboy, and that unholy
alliance was, at its heart, a total disrespect of what
those two brands are. There’s no value judgment about
whether Playboy was the better brand or MindGeek was
the better brand; they were simply different brands
who should never have gotten married, ever. I don’t
live inside of Scott Flanders’ mind, but I have to look
at what he said and look at what he did and assume
that all of that forced relationship with MindGeek, and
free porn and gonzo porn and everything that he would
hate, forced him into this hair-on-fire, brain-exploding
situation where he just said, ‘I’m taking nudity out
of the brand; it’s irrelevant.’ And if you notice, his
reasoning behind taking the nudity out of the brand
was that there’s just too much free porn on the
internet—meaning ‘my partners that I hate.’ So when
you make decisions that aren’t based on a dispassionate
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