OK! Magazine is going through a big overhaul in which they fired a bunch of people including their editor earlier this month and are trying to become more lifestyle focused in order to stand out from competing celebrity glossies like Us Weekly and People. They’ve hired consultants and marketing experts in an attempt to crack the market. Publisher Lori Burgess said they’re “working hard to enhance our offering to both the consumer and entertainment community – further delineating our brand from the competition.” In an internal e-mail published by Gawker, a consultant asked OK! staffers to “pitch one non-news celebrity lifestyle cover package” in three sentences.

The result seems to reveal how OK! is grasping at straws and bad ideas while trying to redefine their brand. They’ve run covers this month featuring Twilight, The Biggest Loser and The Hills. Their latest cover highlights lesser-known High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale as if her lifestyle is something to aspire to. It looks more like Seventeen than OK!

On the opposite end of the spectrum is OK! magazine, and their baffling choice of Ashley Tisdale for the cover. It’s great that Tisdale has a “hot boyfriend, new album, and rockin’ body,” but she’s not relevant enough to be a newsstand success. Moreover, she looks vaguely like Ashlee Simpson in the photo, and Simpson happens to be in a cover chip — the net result is just confusing.

OK!’s sales are down considerably; several sources say the struggling weekly sold only 310,000 copies last week (it was selling in the 500,000 range this time last year). Tisdale is not going to help boost the mag’s profile, especially during this transition period in design and staffing. There’s been a rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic feel to the magazine in recent weeks. I’m pretty sure the sound I just heard was the captain calling for the lifeboats.

[From MSNBC’s The Scoop]

I like OK! and hope they hang in there, but I have to admit that I only get three tabloids a week and OK! is not among them. The few times I’ve read it there weren’t many quotable stories I could use. It doesn’t seem like Ashley Tisdale has enough fans to help OK! move copies, but maybe they worked out a deal with her for the coverage. Cover Awards says this issue will be a disaster for OK! and that they should never run a cover in which the celebrity is so unknown that you have to print her name big like that for the readers. They were probably better off with the Brangelina covers. As much as people protest that they’re sick of the BS triangle stories there’s a very good reason that the tabloids continue to run them. We know who they are and many of us have strong feelings about them.