Special Operations Report

We get a fair amount of mail from people looking for our advertising dollars. Of course we hear from all the game mags and some comics-oriented publication. This week though we got a media kit from a magazine called Special Operations Report—Inside the World of Police and Military Tactical Units. According to the promo material that came with the sample issue (#1) this is the “first magazine to reach professionals in the covert world of global conflict.” It is described as being “written and photographed from the front lines by world-renown writers and journalists who join police and military special operations units in action, in harm’s way, behind enemy lines, with unparalleled access to the world’s true elite SWAT, commando, and covert forces—from the alleyways of Gaza to the jungle of Columbia.”

And this was sent to RPG publisher Green Ronin why exactly? The only reason I can think we got this is that we did publish a book called Ultramodern Firearms. Now granted it was a game book, but doing a 160 book about guns was perhaps enough to land us on the right mailing lists. I somehow don’t see us advertising in this magazine (“You’ve done it for real, now try pretending!”), but even if we wanted to their rates are clearly aimed at organizations with a lot more discretionary marketing money than ours. One full page ad is $7,745. That’s a whole print run of gaming books for us!

The sample issue was actually fairly interesting though. There was an informative article about the history of Hezbollah, for instance. Another profiled Hamburg’s Mobiles Einsatzkommando, a special operations police group formed after the Munich Olympic massacre in 1971. I was a bit surprised at the use of the word Einsatzkommando. I would have figured it went out of style after WW2, since it was the name of the extermination squads that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Those were the units that murdered people the old fashioned way (with bullets in mass graves) before the invention of the gas chamber.

The whole magazine is very slick. Full color, lots of photos of guys festooned with weapons looking all badass. Although supposedly aimed at professionals, the mag sure tries to make this stuff look sexy. This surely is an industry for the 21st century.

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