Month: June 2007

How is this for a bit of nostalgia? John Klemm from Mildura send me this magazine header which he has had in his newsagency for around twelve years. At Tower Systems we started creating these personalised magazine headers 15 years ago as a serving to our software customers. They were the first of their kind, long before the marketing groups and MPA got into the space. We created these headers for around 150 newsagents.

The idea behind the headers was to help customers differentiate between the sea of titles in newsagencies. From a software perspective we used the provision of the headers to drive better category management and title placement in Tower newsagencies. We saw this as an appropriate way for us to engage with our customers and demonstrate how point of sale software can be more than a glorified cash register.

The header for Small Business which John sent me last week has held up well compared to some of the headers I see in newsagencies today. It certainly says something about the quality of the computer printer and ink we were using at the time.

As the stats in the graphic show, Glam.com is hot. According to commentators, Glam is not the #1 internet site./network visited by US women. Venture Beat has a full story about Glam and its success.

One must ask if Glam is the women’s magazine of the future? Is this what will replace Madison, Cleo, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire? While just about everyone reading this will say no, the visitor stats to the Glam website speak for themselves. 17 million in a month is amazing readership.

The key to the success of Glam appears to be the 350 magazines, websites and blogs make up its content network. This provides content diversity.

Glam is demonstrating that here is an online audience and that advertisers want to connect with that audience. This will, naturally, see some advertising migrate from print media which targets the same audience, to online and, specifically, Glam.

Newsagents ought to take a look at Glam and compare it to magazines on their shelves. It is another reason newsagents need to be investing resources in navigating to the newsagency of the future.

ACP magazines make it easy to maintain a relevant slide show on our LCD display at the counter. We have had the LCD in place for close to two years and for most of that time we created our own display. It was time consuming. For the moment we have switched to the ACP slideshow and are enjoying the time saving.

What we – the newsagents now using LCD displays – need is an easier way of merging content from Pacific Magazines, ACP Magazines and other publishers we want to promote – and in a way which more easily allows our content.

Customers notice these displays and I am certain the products promoted will benefit.

Alpha magazine comes with a free Cadbury Boost bar this month. For a $2.50 magazine this is an excellent value giveaway – not that Alpha needs such a promotion to kick sales along. My only beef is the adhesive used to hold the Boost bar in place – they’re falling off.

The National Geographic sells itself with stunning covers, usually. Some bright spark has decided that the cover is not as important as a two for one deal with the current issue.

The latest National Geographic has been delivered to newsagents in a plastic bag with a white sheet. At a glance it looks like an adult title. The bag of shame is a shame and will affect sales for this issue of National Geographic.

We usually place National Geographic in a good position – displaying the full cover. Not this time.

Do the math with me. 10 copies of UFOlogist magazine. Cover price $7.95. My buy price $5.96. On-sale period – three months. My real-estate and labour costs per pocket per month are close to $4.00 meaning that I need to sell two copies a month to break even. I am luck to sell two copies in three months. UFOlogist does not work for my newsagency on these numbers. Indeed, I suspect it does not work for the vast majorities of newsagencies receiving the title. A fairer arrangement would be billing based on sales – the distributor has our sales data and could easily handle this. Alternatively an agreed performance threshold of a 50% sell-through under which I am paid regardless.

These are the matters on which magazine distributors agree in their discussions with the Magazine Publishers of Australia in determining KPIs for magazines. In the meantime we will fight title by title for fair treatment including fair scale out based on sales data and not the cash requirements of the distributor.

NDD demonstrates their magazine distribution prowess again today sending just 15 copies of Delicious magazine. As I blogged here last month, this is a 50% cut and we will, again sell out. What demonstrates the genius of the folks at NDD is that the extra copies of the June issue which we asked for a while back arrived today – the same day the new issue arrived.

NDD likes to have it both ways. They grossly oversupply with low volume titles and undersupply a successful title like Delicious. If they want to kill the sale of Delicious in my newsagency then they are going about it the right way. I will contact the publisher and ask what they think.