By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2012
A small FishbowlLA visual catch from April 2012: the same Lifetime ad campaign appeared in two magazines — and the two versions were not quite the same.
Then
The post set up a side-by-side. The back cover of The Hollywood Reporter and a comparable spot in Entertainment Weekly both carried advertising for Lifetime’s series The Client List, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt — but the imagery differed.
FishbowlLA’s reading was that Lifetime and A&E Networks had supplied more than one version of the ad so individual magazines could choose the image best suited to their audited readership. The blog speculated that Entertainment Weekly, with a broader national circulation, had opted for a more modest display.
The item flagged that it had contacted both Lifetime and EW for confirmation. An update noted Hewitt herself addressing it on the Kevin & Bean radio show, saying she had been just as surprised by the toned-down EW version — and that altered promotional images of a star usually require that star’s approval.
Now
The mechanics the post stumbled onto — advertisers tailoring the same campaign to different outlets’ audiences — were standard practice, but the print context that made it visible has largely vanished. Comparing a back cover to a back cover only works when both magazines still have meaningful print editions; the audience-targeting now happens invisibly inside digital ad systems.
The Client List ran on Lifetime for two seasons before its 2013 cancellation. Jennifer Love Hewitt went on to a long run on the Fox and ABC procedural 9-1-1, a far more durable credit than the show the 2012 ads were selling.
The post is minor by design — the kind of observational catch that filled a media blog between bigger stories — but it preserves a real artifact of how magazine advertising worked in its last fully analog years.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.