Be The Power
by Shelton bumgarner
@bumgarls
I wonder what would happen if someone from a major media organization asked Cooper Hefner what Playboy Enterprises knew about the FOTUS Affair theory. Would he stonewall or would he fold like France in 1940. That’s a very interesting question.
My gut tells me he’d fold.
He has every reason to help someone from another media company find out the truth of the matter. In this video I talk at great length about all of this. It’s pretty good.
by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
While he wasn’t perfect, Hugh Hefner was a personal hero of mine and influenced me in ways large and small. My personal politics are pretty much the editorial page of Playboy in about 1976. Anyway, with his death, Playboy is at a crossroads. I have a little time on my hands and so I’m going idly muse on my personal vision for the great publication that he founded. I have written about most, if not all, of this before but I feel like talking about it again now that Hefner is dead.
If I had any control over Playboy, I would try to bring back its coolness factor from the ’50 and ’60s. I would bring back the old Playboy TV show, maybe in partnership with YouTube or NetFlix and restore the brand to its glory days. I think there is a huge market for that old school cool and if they did a regular show that featured cool people talking about cool stuff and great bands, then people would respond.
Additionally, I would re-imagine the Playboy ideal. As it stands, for decades, the Playboy man has supposed to covet the attention of the “girl next door” who was hot and surprisingly easy given her ostensible persona. I would do something cool like obsess over Ilana Glazer and make her the “mascot” of the publication. She’s not your traditional beauty, but she’s very sex-positive and she would fit perfectly with the modern concept of the type of woman the Playboy man is supposed to lust after.
All of this would be in the context of trying to turn Playboy.com into the second coming of Gawker.com. If Playboy wants to be relevant again, it needs to flip the script, shake things up a little bit — or maybe a lot — and get people talking about it again. And the best way to do that would be to hire a lot of former Gawker writers and get them to rile up the elites with thought provoking commentary. That’s the thing about Playboy right now — it just doesn’t really generate all that much buzz like it used to. It’s a “legacy brand” as they say, and as such it’s more something a middle-aged man like me likes as opposed to the 20 somethings whose attention advertisers long for.
I would also suggest that — in conjunction with Ilana Glazer — the publication go into video in a big way by maybe having Glazer be a roving reporter for them in little shorts. She’s probably really busy right now and it might cost a bit more than expected to get her to do it, but the cost would be worth it. She would bring instant buzz and street cred back to Playboy in a big way. I know I talk a lot about Glazer sometimes, but she’s a personal favorite and I enjoy thinking up new and different ways to exploit her great personality.
Anyway, thanks for the memories, Hef.
By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Teen Vogue has won itself all kinds of accolades and buzz for becoming “woke” in the face of Trumplandia. People have given what could otherwise be sort of a teeny-bopper version of the adult Vogue some real respect for its willingness to get political in an unexpected manner.
I have suggested on more than on occasion that Playboy Magazine should follow a similar path. Now, I know Playboy is doing something akin to what I suggest already. It’s always had progressive leanings. And it’s different for a traditional men’s magazine to bask in the buzz of being woke than it is a young women’s fashion magazine.
But I guess why I keep talking about this is it seems of all the legacy publications with legacy brands that could benefit from being woke, Playboy seems the most in dire need of it. Yet it wouldn’t be easy. It would really have to shake things up for my proposal to be effective. They would need to poach the best writers from, say, Jezebel to really get the buzz machine going.
The only reason why I even mention any of this is that now that Gawker.com no longer exists, I really don’t have a brand that I have a personal affinity for other than Playboy. I really like how cool Playboy once was, way back in the 50s and 60s before it lost its way in later years. So, I want Playboy to thrive and prosper and it seems as though it being exceptionally woke would do the trick.
If Playboy.com became the personal one-stop-shop for woke news on the Trumplandia experience, then it would be serving both an audience and a marketplace that is woefully under served right now. People like me are so desperate for what I’m talking about, that we feel forced to do it ourselves with blog sites like this one.
Regardless, it’s fun to think about. I doubt seriously that Playboy will ever know of my suggestions, but it would be so cool if I woke up and the media world was buzzing about a new, woke vision for Playboy. If Playboy was able to start to be relevant again, I think it would reap some great rewards and it wouldn’t risk simply drifting off into the sunset, never to be seen again.
All of this, of course would depend on how much power and vision young Cooper Hefner has. Cooper Hefner apparently has gotten more power of late and he seems like just the young, brash fellow who might follow the vision I have articulated. But anyway. No one is listening to me and all of this is little more than mental masturbation at this point.
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