Radar runs ads promoting their online properties in Radar the magazine. House advertising, as it’s known, is often treated as an afterthought (not just by Radar but by magazines in general). Of course, one man’s afterthought is another’s missed opportunity. We set out to turn house ads into something that people would want to tear out rather than pass over. Message-wise, we needed to figure out a way to differentiate the online content, which was updated constantly, from the print content which featured longer, more journalistic fare. In the end we realized that when it comes to online coverage of celebrity and political scandals, every morning is like Christmas morning - it’s as if a mythical being had snuck onto your computer while you slept and filled it with mugshots, and salacious news. (more…)

In height of the primary season, Radar magazine ran a piece about the election, and wanted some fake campaign buttons to illustrate the article. We happily obliged.
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We helped come up with this cover for the September issue of Radar, and it got a heck of a lot of press. It was featured everywhere from Entertainment Tonight to the BBC News. The most high profile nod came from Windsor Castle itself, which publicly denounced the image. Somewhat frighteningly, this was the tamest one we presented (by far).

When you see a subscription ad in a magazine, it’s usually boring and ugly and forgettable. Why? Why can’t these ads be just as interesting as the rest of the magazine? They’re in there every week. For Radar’s subscription ads, we took a serial approach - put a new, topical ad in each issue, and readers will soon look upon them not as something ugly and annoying, but something to look forward to. (more…)

RADAR Magazine had shut its doors not once, but twice. The second time, subscribers, media planners and advertisers all got burned. In the Fall of 2006, RADAR was getting ready to come back again.

How do you possibly face all of these people, and ask them to put faith in you again? We recommended owning up to what happened. The first order of business was to do something about the radar homepage. Their website remained suspended in animation from the last day of Radar version 2.0’s existence (it still featured a story about Friends’ star Matthew Perry’s addiction to tranquilizers) Without alerting the media, we swapped the homepage image out for this:

A couple of weeks later, this was posted all over the major media hubs (NY, LA, Chicago):

When the website launched, it led with a fictitious editorial piece (created by us) titled “50 Years of Radar Covers.” When the magazine launched that winter, the covers graced the back page as well.

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