"Great Scott! It's stepping on my house! Ad."*
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"Stick in a cover scan and 'Out now,' will you?"
A house ad is an advertisement for a magazine printed in another magazine from the same publishing company. By matching house ads to likely "crossover" mags (for example, surveys showed 16% of AP readers had a console, so we were obliged to carry house ads for console magazines, except not Super Play, which was the only decent one. Although we did have a SP ad in AP58, but that was because a page fell through at the last possible moment and we figured that if we had to put in an unplanned ad, it'd be for a mag we actually read and liked) the company boosts interest in both - and all for free!
(Except house ads were still paid for by the magazines involved, though at half the usual cost. And in that special pretend money used only for internal charges like late-page fines. In fact, as it was all entirely meaningless, it would have been clever and funny to submit invoices for millions of pounds or a new currency based on carpets. But no.)
House ads were generally this: rubbish. Hacked up in an hour or so by already feverishly-overworked staff as the Prod Ed of the target magazine pointed out the ad was needed instantly, they usually had a big picture of the cover and an on-sale date, with enticing coverline language printed hugely at diagonals obliteratingly. The magazine a house ad appeared in would not see the page until the issue came back. A lovely surprise. Not as much as finding "From the makers of AMIGA POWER" on the ad, however, which implied an endorsement, instead of, for example, the accident of the same publisher.
Few magazines took the trouble to be different, and bless those who did. Naturally, we regarded house ads as extensions of AMIGA POWER, consequently spending perhaps an entire day constructing OJ Guilt-o-Meters, Origami Spinning Fortune Tops, technicolour roadshow posters, film quarter-sheets, (frequently proposed, but sadly never executed) ads that looked exactly like pages from the magazine they were to appear in, or fake questionnaires, even though few people would even notice them. (Although the only people guaranteed never to see them at all were you, our readers.)
AP's biggest house advertiser was Amiga Format, and it embarrassed us from beginning to end with the world's weakest series of self-promotional ideas. Knowing of our frequently-tannoyed loathing of anything to do with computers other than games and you, our readers', enjoyment of foolishness, AF nevertheless considered filling a double-page spread of our mag with a large photograph of an external hard drive absolute jam to potential buyers.*
For some reason (possibly not unconnected with a senior publisher's having started on Amiga Format), in return for surrendering a valuable spread, we were permitted but a single page in AF. And, while it would have been easy to retaliate against a peculiar and ill-considered series of attacks upon our person in AF's ads, we were restricted from doing so by edict. Later AF Eds were far more amenable than the rather head-cluttered individual responsible, and we were able to privately strike a deal whereby Amiga Format's grotesquely un-good ads were limited to a page and actually mentioned games. This period of detente lasted well into the AP50s, whereupon the puzzling attacks started again, but AF's hardly unique nice graphics = 90%+ mark review of Breathless demonstrated the speciousness of the approach.
As advertisers fled AMIGA POWER but death was not forthcoming, the prime inside front cover spot was given to Amiga Format, who at least had the sense to stick to mentioning games.
And AP65's "Hello, I'm Amiga Format" ad was actually clever and funny. But then it was written by Steve Faragher. Arf!
Late in AP's life, a new style of house ad appeared: the Inconveniently-Sized Blap. Instead of being handed pages of film to slip into our printer's pouch, we were sent Quark documents for the Art Ed to "blap" on to our pages as they were designed. It was, in fact, a far superior method - the mag placing the ad incurred no pretend lino charges, and we no longer had to wait for (inevitably late) pieces of film. The only problem was that everyone wanted to be trendy, so the ads were inconveniently sized at quarter-page blocks or half-page verticals. (It was a while before Eds realised two to four house ads now efficiently fitted together on one easy-to-avoid page.)
A house ad's being pasted in on-screen also meant we could do something about HOUSE ADS THAT WENT BAD. Or add things for a joke.
We invite you, our readers, therefore, to closely examine house ads appearing in AMIGA POWER from AP45 onwards. If you can't be bothered, we Ed Commented a vulgar Total Football ad in AP52, slipped Roger Whittaker into AP50's SFX teaser one at exactly the right point and fearlessly revealed The Truth in AP53 with an addendum to the same magazine's Batman Forever issue. ("But Is This The Best Batman Or The Worst? (It's the worst. - Ed)") This last actually caused SFX to turn up in our office one morning en masse to "sort us out." But we hadn't come in yet, so they went home.
AMIGA POWER: Being Funny Even When We're Not Being There.
