Author: Mark Fletcher

With the Australian Open just around the corner we are promoting Australian Tennis magazine with this display at the counter.  The counter position is next to where we sell tickets so we’re expecting to leverage that traffic for some good impulse purchases.

Australian Tennis is one of those titles which gets little time in the spotlight.  It’s a good title for newsagents as it reflects well on the range of titles available in our retail network.

I think it’s good that we make these decisions on which titles to feature at the counter ourselves, playing to local interests and events.

We made Burke’s Backyard the feature of our garden magazine section with this simple display last week.  While sales of garden magazines are up in our newsagency, they are not up as much as the department overall so we are focussing attention to lift their performance.  We are doing this by expanding the range slightly (this is not an invitation for distributors to send us more titles) and running a regular feature of titles in the location for Garden related magazines.

TheSpyReport reports on the change of name for News Magazines to NewsLifeMedia.  Here’s the reason for the change…

News Magazines chief executive, Sandra Hook, said: “This name change recognises the work we have done over the last few years to strategically reimagine our business. We are elevating our digital focus, creating new products and services, developing our presence in women, lifestyle and life stage, while building on the strength of our phenomenal print brands.”

“NewsLifeMedia’s print and digital assets reach an unduplicated audience of around 8.5 million Australians, and we are number one in the majority of lifestyle verticals we participate in. We are number one in food, fashion, health, parenting and weekends, and continue to grow our home vertical. With our magazines and websites working together, NewsLifeMedia will invest to accelerate the growth and commercialisation of our specialist verticals.

“In repositioning as NewsLifeMedia, we are harnessing the authority of our print brands and the power of our digital platforms, with an unwavering focus on audience and advertiser engagement.

News Magazines has certainly made some, hmm, interesting moves.  Killing Notebook magazine when the title could have recovered from the sales slump by going back to its roots and then this year mucking around with MasterChef magazine, driving a dramatic fall in sales.

Hopefully, the name change results in more success with print titles.  Not so sure that is the goal though.

We are promoting the Christmas edition of The Australian Women’s Weekly in one of my newsagencies with this terrific display on a column adjacent to the main counter.

The value of this placement is enhanced as it is next to a major Christmas gift display.  We also have AWW in its usual location as well as in an impulse unit in  high traffic location.

Sales in the first five days of on-sale have been terrific.  We will continue to support AWW with feature location displays at least thoruhg the second week of on-sale.

With the current issue of Feast magazine being promoted on SBS and commercial TV and with newsagents being tagged as where the title can be purchased, we have made sure that Feast is in two good locations and is easily seen.  The TVC shows off the cover, making displaying the full cover very important.  I’d encourage newsagents to check out where they have Feast positioned and whether they are showing the full cover.

It’s terrific that Pacific Magazines continues to promote newsagents as a destination for magazines in TV commercials promoting their titles.

If you have missed it, here is the Feast TVC.

We are promoting the heck out of the latest issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.  Besides this display with our daily newspapers, we have a waterfall in the usual location, placement in our ACP impulse stand and an impulse purchase unit in a second location in our busiest magazine aisle – away from the main display of the title.  This first week of the on-sale is key … hence all of our activity.

On the magazine itself, the Sarah Murdoch cover continues the focus on a younger reader for the title.  It is a pity that the full cover is covered by a cookbook stuck on the bottom half – the impact of the cover shot is lost in my view.

We are promoting the latest issue of Street Machine with this display on an aisle end in the reading area of our newsagency.  It faces into all the men’s magazines area.  This is where guys congregate and where they are most likely to notice what we promote.  As I have mentioned previously, guys tens to talk in blind to anything until they get to their destination in-store.  Our car magazine sales are performing significantly better than the industry average so we must be doing something right.

Food magazines account for 5.5% of all magazines we sell in one of my newsagencies.  Our food magazine sales are up 81% year on year.  We are chasing more sales by carefully expanding the range.  We have allocated another 14 pockets to the segment.  This is allowing us to better display existing top selling titles and titles carry some selected additional titles.

Magazine distributors need to make it easier for smart newsagents to expand their range.  Their website and other processes act as a barrier to newsagents working on expanding their range based on local knowledge.