Early in 2004 two weekly mens magazines were launched in the UK ‘Nuts’ and ‘Zoo’ are quite
similar and have the same young male target readership. ‘Nuts’ has a stable content and makes relatively easy assumptions about what its readers will like. So there are girls, cars, girls, football,
girls who support
football teams, comedy, girls whose partners play football, bizarre injuries or
photographs and girls.
With respect to the girls the photographs are not nude but tend to be posed lingerie style or bikinis. There are regular photos of Jennifer Ellison, Nikki Sanderson etc but nothing that you could consider offensive and similar to those seen in the Daily Star. As a weekly
magazine though it does stay faithful to a limited number of models and all the pictures are of similar style. This is
good because there is no temptation towards stronger material but does get repetitive.
The car features are little more that photographs of sports
cars like Ferraris, Audis and whatever else might be considered cool. There is little in the way of a detailed writing or reviews of the cars. In common with much of the magazine the car section is aimed at those with a limited or non-existent attention span. Extending the technical theme a little takes us to the ‘computer games’ section where new games are reviewed in brief. The comedy stories also tend to be about those who would be heroes to the under 25 generation so there have been a number of articles in recent weeks about Ricky Gervais, Johnny Vegas and the Little Britain team.
There is a page of jokes which I will not repeat here. Some are in my opinion in bad taste and include inevitably jokes about current news stories so Michael Jackson features prominently at the moment. There is a standard letters section and ‘Ask The Secretary’ where questions about sex in general are answered. There is also a couple of pages given to odd photos and jpegs sent in by readers. A list of different Top 10s is published each week Like Peter Kays Top 10 characters or Top 10 computer web sites.
Nuts costs ¢1.20 per week though occasionally it is offered for less. It is not really a magazine you could settle down to read with no article needing more than a rudimentary glance to fully understand what it is about. For the market it addresses I would believe it does a good job. It is smutty rather than outrageously rude and will raise a smile and provide talking points through some of its lurid and sensational stories.
Ultimately Nuts is harmless fun but not a magazine for those who care about life’s pressing issues. However for its target young male audience its about as good as it can get.
More reviews about the MENS WEEKLY magazines!