By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, April 2012
In early April 2012, FishbowlLA noticed something about the back-cover ads for Lifetime’s new series The Client List: the same campaign, placed in two different magazines, appeared to have been retouched differently. The original framing was a light catch about how advertisers tailor — and digitally alter — the same artwork for different publications.
Then
Lifetime ran promotional art for The Client List, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, on the back covers of both The Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Weekly. FishbowlLA’s item flagged that the two placements were not identical: the Entertainment Weekly version appeared to have been digitally slimmed down relative to the Hollywood Reporter version.
The blog read it as a small window into advertising practice — that a network’s PR operation makes multiple versions of the same campaign art available so individual publications can choose the image best suited to their audience, and that retouching is a routine, audience-calibrated part of that process. Hewitt herself, asked about it on a radio show shortly afterward, said she had been as surprised as anyone by the altered Entertainment Weekly display, and noted that altered photos of a star usually require that star’s approval.
It was a characteristically light FishbowlLA item — a sharp-eyed catch about the mechanics of magazine advertising, told with a wink.
Now
Digital retouching in advertising became a substantially larger cultural and regulatory issue across the following decade. Several countries introduced rules requiring that retouched or body-altered images in advertising be labeled — France’s 2017 law on commercial photographs being a prominent example — and a number of major brands and publications shifted, at least rhetorically, toward less aggressive retouching and more transparency about image alteration.
The Client List ran two seasons on Lifetime before its 2013 cancellation. The small 2012 catch reads now as an early, low-stakes example of exactly the kind of scrutiny — who altered this image, who approved it, and why — that would become a sustained media and policy conversation about retouching and advertising standards.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.