Adweek named David Zinczenko of Men's Health the Editor of the Year and asked me to profile him for the magazine's Hot List annual report, which was published March 2008.

David Zinczenko is wearing makeup. When Adweek visits the SVP/editor in chief of Men’s Health earlier this month at his Midtown office, he is fresh off an appearance on the Today show, where he was promoting his latest book, Eat This, Not That (Rodale Press), and apparently, even if you’ve been named one of People’s 50 Most Eligible Bachelors, as Zinczenko was in 2003, there’s still more you must do if you want put your best face forward. So on occasions like this one, this king of all media—besides being the co-author of books on fitness, nutrition, and relationships, Zinczenko is also the editorial director of Men’s Health spinoff Best Life and a frequent talk-show guest to promote all of the above—must trade his throne at Rodale for the makeup artist’s chair backstage at NBC.

    At least he has a sense of humor about it. “I still have my war paint on,” he says, gesturing somewhat self-consciously to his smoothly pancaked face.

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If this is war, then it’s hard to imagine whom Zinczenko could possibly be battling; he’s left most of his opponents in the dust. Since being named editor in chief in 2000, at the age of 30, Zinczenko has shaped Men’s Health into the best-selling men’s magazine brand on the newsstand. At a time when even well-established books are struggling on the newsstand, Men’s Health is accelerating its pace—2007, in fact, was its highest-performing year in its two-decade history.

    Single-copy sales were up 4 percent, compared with a year earlier. Ad pages spiked 11.8 percent overall in 2007 versus 2006, according to PIB, and revenue was up 19.4. Circ is strong, too; Capell’s Circulation Report named the fitness-and-lifestyle publication “Top Circulation Performer of the Decade.” (Though total circulation was flat at 1.8 million in the second half of last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.) Meanwhile, the magazine raised its rate base for the fifth straight year—and boosted it once more in 2008, from 1,750,000 in January/February 2007 to 1,775,000 with the January/February 08 issue.

    Men’s Health has established itself as a powerhouse online, too. In 2007, Rodale integrated its magazines’ editorial staffs with their respective websites, giving creative control to the people who know their brands best. That shift sparked dramatic growth at menshealth.com, which now features more than 500 video clips and a daily Men’s Health minute, in addition to tips on practical topics like how to make a killer omelet or the best weekend workout. The number of the site’s unique users is up by a hefty 75 percent, and online ad revenue has tripled.

    Indeed men, that most reticent of demographics, just can’t seem to get enough of the magazine, which backs up its straight-talking tagline (“Tons of useful stuff”) by packing its pages full of quick hits of info—on fitness, health, weight loss, nutrition, sex, and style. The magazine is now published in 40 international editions, in countries ranging from Italy, India, and Greece to the Philippines, South Korea, and Kazakhstan. More recently, Zinczenko has added investigative journalism, with reports from Darfur, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among other embattled regions, resulting in an edit mix that is both brainy and brawny.         

“He learned the formula, and since Dave took over, he’s really taken it to a whole other level,” says Jeff Morgan, president of product licensing at Polo Ralph Lauren and the publisher of Men’s Health when Zinczenko came on board in March 1993. Zinczenko credits Morgan, whom he calls “a big thinker,” with the push to expand Men’s Health into other countries. As a young associate editor under Morgan, Zinczenko helped establish Men’s Health editions in countries such as Mexico and Germany. “It was a great experience for him because he got to relaunch the magazine multiple times and, in so doing, really understand what was driving them, what the readers really wanted.”

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But the success of Men’s Health was only a warm-up for the restless Zinczenko. Over the past four years, he has launched two spinoffs: Best Life, which debuted in 2004, targets men in the next stage of life after younger-skewing Men’s Health, with coverage of careers, personal finance, fatherhood, and marriage, as well as fashion and luxury; and Women’s Health, which bowed in 2005. The latter is a response to the female fans of Men’s Health, who wanted a magazine of their own with the same kind of highly distilled, briskly packaged information. “We’ve always had about a 16 to 20 percent female readership,” notes Zinczenko. Both titles have become the fastest-growing magazines in the country.

    Men’s Health and its spinoffs form the foundation of what is quickly coalescing into a media empire. There are Zinczenko’s numerous books, including his best-selling Abs Diet series and last fall’s nutrition guide, Eat This, Not That. There’s the Men’s Health Urbanathlon & Festival, a multidiscipline race with a concrete-jungle focus, which is now in its third year. And then there’s the FitSchools Foundation, whose mission is to fight childhood obesity and reform physical education. In 2007, its inaugural year, the foundation supplied fresh equipment and a refurbished running track to a school in Easley, South Carolina. The principal had nominated his humble institution of higher learning because not only was the track being used as a turnaround for buses but his students were dangerously off course in other ways. He had, for example, a 300-pound fifth-grader who was so heavy, he fell through the floor of a makeshift classroom trailer.

    “That was part of a resolution that I made last year,” says Zinczenko. “Let’s go help a school and spread the message of health and wellness to kids. Nearly half of American kids today are overweight or obese.” He has already received hundreds of applications for this year’s FitSchools program and hopes to work with five schools by the end of 2008.

    The numbers suggest that the demand for more product is there, but does Zinczenko ever worry about offering too much of a good thing? “No. Because our readers are telling us that they trust us to give them this information,” he says firmly, presenting Best Life as an example. He started the magazine with Stephen Perrine, who was the editorial creative director at Men’s Health and is now editor in chief at Best Life. “We saw a hole in the market that you could drive a truck through,” says Zinczenko. “A lot of the traditional men’s magazines, to them, you don’t have career, you don’t really have a family, you’re not married.” Thus a spinoff was born. “Men’s Health is about getting your kite into the air,” he says, “and Best Life is about keeping it there.”

    If Zinczenko is indeed at war, then the battle is between him and his most formidable competitor of all: himself. A 2002 profile of him in Moravian College Magazine (Zinczenko was a double major, in journalism and political science, at the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, school) touches on his mother’s struggles to raise him and his brother, Eric (now group publisher at Field & Stream), on her own after his father left the family. The elder Zinczenko died in 1999 at age 52 from complications associated with obesity.  

    “In some ways, he’s a mystery,” Jeff Morgan, who served as publisher of Men’s Health when Zinczenko joined the magazine in 1993, observes of his former colleague. “He can be very intense, very serious. He’s always working. I think Dave’s life in some ways responds to his upbringing. He’s just driven. Self-driven.”  

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Men’s Health—the specificity of its title is deceptive. Industry analysts and Zinczenko himself will tell you that the magazine is actually a lifestyle book, and it’s true that expanding beyond the realm of smoothies and smooth abs has given Men’s Health some serious traction beyond its core readership, not to mention with nonendemic advertisers. Along with characteristic fitness-magazine advertisers like vitamin and supplement purveyors, the pages of Men’s Health boast an enviable mix of fashion, luxury, and automobile companies, including Lacoste, Calvin Klein, Prada, Oris, Bulova, Nissan. The March 2008 issue features an ad for BMW’s new 3 series, marking the carmaker’s first Men’s Health media buy in several years.

    “It’s a little bit clichéd at this point, but it’s this work-hard, play-hard psychographic along with the affluence that definitely reads magazines like Best life and Men’s Health,” says Ken Bracht, media communications manager at BMW USA. “That’s ultimately what attracted us to Men’s Health.”  

    But even the term lifestyle doesn’t tell the whole story of the Men’s Health juggernaut. This is a magazine—a brand—about problem solving. If gender stereotypes are to be believed (and a mass-market magazine like Men’s Health is built on these stereotypes), men are solution-oriented; they don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about why something is a problem or what it feels like to have the problem. They want to fix the problem. Men’s Health tells them how. It cuts through the clutter not just on the newsstand but also in a society teeming with advice-givers. The magazine, explains Zinczenko, is about “turning the issues we all face as men into solutions.”

    “Unlike the other magazines, we provide information that you can act on immediately,” he says. “Not pat advice. We’re not gonna say, ‘Oh, you’re having relationship problems. Communicate.’ We’re gonna say the exact way to communicate.”

    For years, Men’s Health had resisted the idea of putting celebrities on the cover. But now, marquee names from the worlds of sports and entertainment anchor each issue. The celebs serve two purposes: They’re another way to provide information to readers, offering their fashion, relationship, and success secrets. And the well-known faces save Men’s Health from being lumped in with the cut-and-jacked models posing on other fitness mags. This year’s cover men will include Mark Wahlberg, Lost’s Matthew Fox, and David Beckham, who will appear on the front of the September issue as well as the back, where the magazine will present a flipside special section on fashion.

    “[Putting celebrities on the cover] humanizes the magazine in a way that the models can’t,” notes Zinczenko. “It also says this is a very contemporary magazine. In the past, you could take a few issues of Men’s Health and mix them together, and it’s like you weren’t really sure what year they were from. That’s not the case now.”

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Other editors often ask Zinczenko how he stays motivated. We think it’s a fair question, considering he’s been doing this for 15 years and there is presumably only so much enthusiasm a guy can muster for writing coverlines about six-pack abs. So we asked him: How do you stay motivated?

    We’d barely finished asking the question when he got out of his chair, walked to a stack of Men’s Health magazines, and placed on the desk in front of us the September 2006 issue, featuring a portrait of the Rock (wearing a button-down and an almost shy expression) and cover lines like “The Hero Doctors of Darfur” and “Men and Ambition,” along with “Build a Linebacker Body.”

    “First of all,” Zinczenko explains, “the cover of the magazine, the newsstand cover, is a sales tool. We know the hot buttons. We know what guys respond to. So we’re able to go to the newsstands and deliver the things that work for them. But we also split our covers. We have a subscriber cover too. If you look at the breadth of the magazine, you have three amazing pieces…”

    There’s a pause while he peels back the cover and the many subsequent ad pages on his way to the edit well. “It was a really good year,” he says with a smile, still turning pages. “Takes a while.”

    Eventually, he arrives at a feature on emotional stress, which leads into a piece on the NFL’s secret training camp. “And then there’s a great story—I mean, Richard Conniff is a great writer—where he’s talking about Darwin and science [in “Survival of the Hottest”]. Then, boom, you are in Darfur and [contributing editor] Bob Drury is looking at the death and disease and what is going on, and spending months reporting this story. Several years ago, we wouldn’t have committed to this kind of endeavor.

    “This is what keeps me motivated.”

    It’s also what keeps him from distracted by snipes from media-industry naysayers. He got flak, for example, for dubbing the 2007 American Magazine Conference, which he chaired, the “MagaBrand Revolution.” In a post on Foliomag.com, Dylan Stableford called the tagline “unfortunate.”

    “It’s a conference title,” says Zinczenko. “It’s like, we were never expecting people to go back and start using it every day. It was something catchy—it was something that absolutely worked a conference title. It told you what the goal of the conference was.”

    And that’s the thing about Zinczenko: He’s very clear about what he does and why does it. One gets the sense he doesn’t like to make mistakes, and that if someone suggests he made a bad choice, he’ll methodically break it down to determine whether the decision really was flawed. He’s too competitive to approach his work, and his life, with anything less than complete rigor.

    “I just really enjoy challenges. And I am especially competitive here because,” he laughs, “the men’s market is really competitive. It’s brutal. And what winning means is that we’re helping improve lives.”

    Zinczenko’s personal life has also come under scrutiny, with reports on who he’s canoodling with popping up on gossip sites and in Page Six. But he shrugs off any suggestion that it might bother him. “There’s too many other things going on,” he says. “The criticism that I do dwell on is the criticisms that are about the magazine or about what we’re doing editorially.”  

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While 2007 was a banner year for his magabrand, Zinczenko promises that there is more to come. Much more. Men’s Health will continue its international expansion. “There are a lot of countries left on the map. Cosmo’s probably in 90 or 100, so we could be in all of those,” he says. He’s planning double the number of special sections for 2008, including a green guide and a “Heroes of Health & Fitness” to coincide with the 20th anniversary issue in September. He envisions Men’s Health venturing into film, though he declined to reveal how on record.

    And he sees franchise potential in his book Eat This, Not That, which was based on a column in Men’s Health. An edition aimed at kids is already set to hit shelves later this year. “Wear This, Not That. Say This, Not That. Earn This, Not That. Buy This, Not That. Eat This, Not That for diabetics. There are so many things that we can do there,” says Zinczenko, who likens the concept’s potential to the Dummies series.

    “There is no ceiling. The magazine isn’t even breathing hard.”  

A brief video interview I did with David Z.: http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1416062012/bctid1475165608