Word: successful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mind-bendingly complicated and openly mocked, Phase IV, a product of necessity, was born last week. Even its authors have reservations about its chances for success. The latest wage-price control program in the Nixon Administration's 23-month alternately hot and cold war against high living costs is a temporary holding action. It is designed to stem the spread of food shortages while partially holding off the pent-up forces of inflation until they are weakened by waning demand (see box next page...
...desire to chuck them by year's end. But to make Phase IV succeed, the Administration must show a genuine determination to enforce the new regulations. Thus the instant emphasis on granting price exceptions and removing controls as soon as possible bodes ill for the program's success. With the Administration showing so little faith in Phase IV, it can hardly expect the rest of the nation to have confidence that it will work...
...rivalry between the empires of hedonism is intense, and not just in print. A part of Playboy's success is due to Publisher-Editor Hugh Hefner's carefully publicized regal lifestyle, which might be described as Middle-American-Sybaritic. Penthouse's Bob Guccione is the first imitator in a long line who has effectively challenged Hef on that front as well as on the newsstands...
Worrisome though it is, the court decision may be a less critical problem for the skin magazines than their own proliferation. Success has spawned successors at a rate now heading toward the suicidal. The great majority of imitators are blatant strip-offs of Playboy's successful format. Guccione, a painter and photographer who has succeeded largely on a genius for promotion, led the drive on Hefner's long monopoly in 1969-and already sells some 3.4 million copies of Penthouse each month (v. Playboy sales of 6.7 million). Playboy maintained a haughty indifference to Penthouse for three years...
...there a ceiling to the market? Wall Street publishing analysts point out that the skin magazines appeal to the same basic audience; more than 60% of Penthouse readers, for example, also read Playboy. In the view of Playboy executives, the success of its imitators owes to the fact that readers have a growing appetite for this kind of magazine-but at some point, obviously, that appetite will be sated...