FIPP 09: 'Winners are very often believers in dreams,' Felix Dennis tells world congress delegates

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'Winners are very often believers in dreams', Felix Dennis, Chairman of Dennis Publishing, said in a speech today, arguing that publishers should use the current economic climate as an opportunity to push their print and online products forward.

Dennis told delegates at the 37th FIPP World Magazine Congress that he believes in the online future of Maxim magazine, and said that the brand was still growing in certain parts of the world.

Using his own experience of launching Maxim in the US - a title which he sold in 2007 - during a 'mini-crash' in 1997, he said that he ignored advice that the US version would be 'likely to fail'.

Dennis said that he did not pay attention to the warning, from an influential figure he did not wish to name, that he would be 'slaughtered on the newsstands of America'.

The US Maxim started, he said, with 200,000 copies sold at $2.99. Within three years it was selling five times that, and within six years, ten times, he said.

It was a 'relentless rise,' he said. Maxim rose to 2.5 million copies a month in the US. Dennis claimed that worldwide the magazine had 'generated over three billion US dollars in profits,' to date.

When the company 'finally managed' to get advertising buyers, 'the ad dollars rolled in and we were off to the races," he added.

'Young men and women began to flock online', during this period, he said. "It was almost as if Maxim had been built for the web," he said. The UK Maxim, which is still owned by Dennis Publishing, went online-only in April 2009. Paid subscriptions for the US publication were pouring in by the end of the 1990s by the thousands, he added. Spin-off products and self-promotion - through novelty press releases and 'legendary' parties - were key to its success, Dennis told delegates.

While he was annoyed that rival brands in the US market took his staff, he was not worried about replication. "They could copy our front covers, but they couldn't copy our attitude," he said.

Of course we weren't as good as we thought we were," he said. "We were just the first beer truck to turn up (...) Mind you, we served damned good beer."

"In many countries, Maxim is still growing and not just online," he said. "I especially believe that Maxim's future is online," he said.

"Magazines are going through a very rough patch, but we're not done yet," he said. He urged magazines to change and to grow 'by buying distressed assets'.