The internet is an utter mess. It’s butt-ugly and chaotic, repetitive and redundant, stupid and dumbed-down, and AI-ed to the Nth degree. Heck, the ugly picture above is how AI sees it – how in the heck are the rest of us supposed to navigate it?
It’s no surprise what you’ve gone looking for has ultimately lead you to a shopping cart on Temu or Bloomingdales, or to some genre-specific porn site – the onslaught of unwanted media is enough to drive anyone anywhere else.
Today, a browser is opened up by an online reader and they – you – are suddenly bombarded with crap that’s not wanted and certainly not needed. Okay, occasionally, we do get sucked into a really good online deal. But for the most part, there is no real demand and yet the supply just keeps getting shittier, courtesy of cheaper-ass manufacturing, hard-hitting shrinkflation, inane stupidity, and an algorithm that forgot to take into consideration all the million other thoughts that occured since the user last clicked on that energy drink widget.
Pardon our French, but the online world is in such a messy state – and your marketing budget all the messier for it – that Cream has decided to shut the shit down. We’ve gone back to being an enjoyable magazine that readers want to read. Perhaps even peruse for a couple of hours a week on average – like we used to read our magazines: leisurely.
We trust readers will find something funny they can tell their friends about over drinks on Friday night, or something appealing they'll want to buy because they chose to click on it, not because it was forced into their face via a relentless and annoying pop-up ad.
The magazine has taken on an even more irreverant tone since its halcyon days of the late 1990s – kind of like a Mad magazine for the post-pandemic age, with a decidedly Australian, upside-down American flavour.
Start with a couple of minutes on our site and you’ll fnd yourself going down a glorious rabbit-hole (try repeating those three words real fast), one that keeps you within its pages, each lovingly crafted and manually created, not left up to microchips and bits and bytes that bite the marketeer in the ass by the time the true click-through rates are tallied up (let alone give the potential consumer a migraine).
We’ve got mind-easing lifestyle articles and listicles and DIY hacks aplenty. We’ve got real music, movie and arts criticism and critique. We’ve got funny jokes about J-Lo’s desperate bid for relevance and Kim K’s sorry mission to be credible. Heck, we’ve even got comics scattered throughout our pages for a little light-hearted relief.
Genuine consideration of the reader’s enjoyment and sincere writing is what’s really been missing from online zines – pretty much since the inception of the internet. But we’re now injecting a lot more of it into Cream, even if it is with a limited budget (since we’re not greedy on the advertising front, and would never shun the reader with a paywall). We’re cleaner than the vom.coms. We’re cleverer with our design – pullquotes in bright colour; hyperlinks also suitably coordinated. Suggested links synced up nicely with the previous read post’s theme.
As legacy publishers fire one redundant department editor after the other, scrambling to make enough income from advertising to cover their own inflated salaries, let alone pay for some half-arsed hack who is demanding six-figures after he’s gobbled a six-course degustation at the latest ‘in’ restaurant that the majority of the mag’s readers couldn’t afford an entree at, we’re doing it one step at a time, but doing it conscientiously, doing it humorously, and doing it properly.
We’re finished with the boring bullcrap. The legacy media has had its day, and as for influencers… ooof. Some of the independents are thankfully still at it, and while the post-postmodern media isn’t so much ‘grey’ any more – rather a ghastly kaleidoscopic cross/mess somewhere between wannabe TMZ and a paled-by-the-sun copy of People magazine – there is one publication that is reverting to the aesthetic and content that classic magazines once offered.
Cream has had a revamp. Our anti-establishment ethos is still intact (gosh, who’d want to be stuck under all that rubble?) but our overall look has been refreshed, our intrasite articles intricately linked, and our main messages far from censored like the rest of them, in fact decidedly more fractured than they ever were.
Remember, we were the ones who were inclusive and diverse and different and queer right from the start – from 1997 onward. You want to talk progressive? But once we realised that the icons we’d initially championed had subsequently inspired a mainstream of fake causes and made-up traumas, we decided to grab that pendulum and pull it back a bit. Go progressive-retrospective, if you can wrap your forward-thinking mind around that.
The pandemic, the global recession (verging on a depression in some quarters), Donald Trump’s American-Is-All-The-World-Wants-To-Buy hype and subsequent backlash, and the ever-interruptive, annoying-as-all-hell algorithm – not to mention a handicapped AI that is proving more artificial and less intelligent by the day, have all contributed to the deflated state of online media at large. But cheer up. The bad might be folding, but the good is about to get gooder. Heck, we’re even loving poking fun at AI as much as we’re embracing it for all the inane humour it has to offer. One thing we won’t do is let it take over our typewriters.
When I started out as editor of Cream magazine, and used to go out with a head honcho from Optus’ e-commerce department (later e-leader for Dell, AMP Banking, and then Macquarie), said actuary would often repeat this one mantra: Content is King. And so that’s what we’re packing our pages with from now on: good, bold, memorable content. We’re going to continue enjoying watching the other publications desperately fill their columns with pseudo-important-but-not-very-effective, bot-churned bulldust while we make our humble platform more credible, more appealing, and certainly more enjoyable for the reader and for you, our industry peers.
The discerning online user has had enough – about a million clicks over a decade that has lead to an RSI of sorts has forced them to give up on ‘liking’ or ‘hearting’ or whatever patronising emoji happens to be ‘trending’ that month.
The reader is also fully aware that it’s not some sole Big Brother who is watching their every finger move, but major conglomerates like Big Government, Big Tech and Big Pharma, the former insisting on making the reader paranoid about last year’s tax returns, the latter doing everything in its power to mess up their minds so that they’re scrambling for a few Neurofen, and the middle guys playing devil’s advocate while they hog most of the takings.
All that time-consuming number-crunching and the little result that came from it: no rush to the stores to buy the latest incarnation of Coke, rows and rows of Kenji stock still not selling at Myer – not even at half the initial ticketed price, less bums on seats at the cinemas, folks switching off their stream-TV subscriptions, op-shopping on the rise again, even fast fashion being frowned upon. The consumer still has a conscious, and is smart enough to know when to pull the proverbial plug.
That’s why we’ve bitten the bullet and made content important again. Said goodbye to tabloid-type guff, done away with sorting through celebrity trainwrecks, stopped trying to keep up with the Joneses or with what’s happening on this week’s MasterChef. Heck, half those TV viewers have never made a three-course meal in their life, let alone are they genuinely keen to buy the advertised brand of mustard.
And here’s another first that Cream is proud to present – we’re quite possibly the world’s first publication that has not only kept with the times but grown with its audience. Our 18-24 and 25-34 one-time “optimistic and socially aware” readers might now be 35-44 and 45-64 respectively but they still have an appetite for a brighter future, concerned with what kind of a world they’ll be leaving their now grown-up kids and grandkids with. They’re also far from worried about that old ’empty nest’ chestnut. Remember, this was the generation that grew up on MTV and rave parties, saw everything as postmodern, and ushered in a certain multiculturalism; that would try anything once, and adopt it for regular use if it was actually good.
Even our new online slogan ‘The New. Retro. Modern.’ manages to bridge the gap between the progressive and the retrospective, making our content options and audience potential double in size.
And the 35-64 combined segment is nothing to sniff at. They want, need and continue to buy smartphones, tablets and eReaders, PCs, new software and home security devices, international vacations, weekend staycations, that car they’ve always wanted, cruise ship holidays and bucket-list adventures, album anniversary reissues, film reboots, Blu-ray boxsets, celebrity biographies, travel books and coffee table tomes, special edition boardgames and upcycled giftware and classically-inspired brand new furniture, airpods and revamped video games, famous name fragrance brands, skin serums, collagen supplements, vitamins and rejuvenation treatments, good wines and craft beers, cookware and cookbooks, practical homewares, pets and pet foods and pet accessories, pop culture collectibles and much, much more. Now, that’s some shopping list!
You could say the current economic climate, only just climbing out of the post-Covid ashes, is ripe for Generation X – many of whom are waving goodbye to their now-married kids from the shelter of their front porch, aching to jump into the SUV so as to take off and taste the truly best things in life.
So, keep us in the loop with all you’ve got to sell. We’ll help you do it in a more subtle style than the other publications can – certainly more enjoyably.
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