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May 16, 2008

Ekeing out the last knockings at The Daily Sport — with humour, at least

By Peter Kirwan MM blog

This one has the fingerprints of James Brown, the founder and former editor of Loaded, all over it.

These days, Brown is to be found helping out as “consultant editor-in-chief” at the Daily Sport. Barry McIlheney, formerly managing editor of EMAP Metro, is editor-in-chief.

You might find the Sport‘s effort to reincarnate itself as a lads mag on newsprint either desperate or imaginative.

But you can’t deny the chutzpah that Brown and McIlheney have brought to the business of eking out The Sport‘s last bit of post-David Sullivan revenue potential. (Circulation, by the way, is reputedly down to less than 100,000: McIlheney has taken to describing the paper as “like The Independent — with tits”.)

The Sport has just released something called The Real Bloke Report, which insists that almost half of “working class men” have between £200 and £500 of disposable income to spend every month.

We’re told that only 30% of upper- and upper-middle class men enjoy similar leeway.

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This is one of the first pieces of credit crunch marketing I’ve seen. Stand by for much more in a similar vein, mostly without the humour of this effort.

It also points to a truth that’s instinctively understood but rarely articulated about cash-poor middle class males who cannot escape the tyranny of their own aspirations. (By contrast, Rosie Millard at The Sunday Times — and many others — routinely give us the female side of this equation.)

A few more of these, and the Sport‘s agency sales team (if it has one) might even be allowed to buy beers fora few of those cash-poor middle class ad planners who live and work in the Big Smoke. . .

(Does The Sport have a web site? I can’t find one. But Brand Republic does carry a story on The Real Bloke Report here — registration reqd.)

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