Rolling Stones: The Funky Little Football Phone That Sold A Million Magazines

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In the summer of 1986, Martin Shampaine found himself on a lunch break, wandering somewhat aimlessly around Times Square, in search of a really good idea.
He worked a few blocks over at the Time-Life Building, where, as a marketing manager for Sports Illustrated, he oversaw all direct-mail marketing. That is, his entire job was to dream up ways to convince people they should subscribe to SI based on an offer sent to their mailbox. In the mid-1980s, people could be enticed to say yes based solely on the "premium" – what magazine folks call the freebie you got for signing up. It could be something as practical as a clock radio or a pair of cheap binoculars; the gift could also be something that was pure fun, like a VHS tape of wacky bloopers. Back then, there was no shortage of ways to sell someone a magazine.
However, the last couple of promotional campaigns had, in Shampaine's words, "hiccups." That means his department wasn't persuading enough people to subscribe, which is basically the worst news any magazine can get. Maybe they were 10 percent below expectations. That's not a spreadsheet result that makes the upper floors tickled. So he needed something new, something fresh that people had never seen before, a Cool Thing that would appeal equally to folks in Seattle and Santa Fe and Scranton.
Shampaine walked midtown Manhattan and scoured the electronics shop windows that dotted the street, keeping an eye out for something interesting – but also cheap. If it cost too much to market and ship, that cuts into your profits. Ideally, you wanted something that costs less than $10 to make and ship. But it also had to be memorable enough for people to want to plunk down $55 a year to get it. As Shampaine swirled these thoughts around in his skull, he came upon a little phone that resembled a frog sitting up on its hind legs. His first thought was how bizarre it looked.
His second thought was that it…kind of…looked like a football?
Shampaine raced back to the office and found an in-house designer named John Plunkett. He asked if it might be possible for Plunkett to sketch out a little football sitting on a tee, split it lengthwise and give it a hinge so it could open it like a phone. After several revisions, Plunkett took his drawings to a model-maker he knew in lower Manhattan and had him create a prototype that had no electronic guts inside. Using that unit and a hand model, Shampaine was able to put together a direct-mail test that was sent to 35,000 random people identified as potential SI subscribers. Their response was overwhelming: Americans wanted the football phone and they wanted it now, more than any other premium SI was offering.
Of course, now Time Inc. actually had to create several hundred thousand of them – without knowing if a phone inside of a football would even work.
Nearly 30 years after Shampaine's lunchtime walk, the SI football phone is recognized as unlike anything that came before. It proved to be one of the most successful marketing campaigns ever executed in American media. The purpose was to sell magazines, but the football phone also arrived at a time when the entire industry was experiencing a radical change. Cable was relatively new, so there was cheap commercial space to buy up. VHS decks had become popular enough that the idea of owning your own videotapes had become possible. And by the late '80s, consumers were tired of the same old offerings. You couldn't buy the football phone in a store or get it from any other magazine, and that exclusivity helped pull SI out of its doldrums. Along with a line of popular VHS tapes, as well as the sneaker phone that followed its football-shaped predecessor, the magazine sold around 1.6 million new subscriptions between 1986 and 1991, thanks in large part to the football phone. Time Inc. would routinely order hundreds of thousands at a time just to keep up with demand.
"Everybody had one. All of our relatives had one," remembers Michael Loeb, SI's circulation director at the time. "I just wish I'd kept a garage full of them. I'd be selling them on eBay."
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