Trulymadlydating.com is a dating website launched by magazine publisher Condé Nast to connect boys reading GQ magazine and girls reading Glamour magazine. Vogue has the report. Condé Nast shut a bunch of magazines last week.
Magazine publishers across the world are busy launching websites, under brands other than their titles, to better connect with their target demographic.
Following my post last week about the NDD Quick Range Review service, a good number of newsagents have taken up the offer to have NDD review the supply range and make adjustments accordingly.
NDD assess title performance and recommends changes. Newsagents can have the recommendations implemented or adjust these further. The recommendations are provided with a sell-through graph showing performance trends for the store.
If you would like an NDD Quick range Review, please email quickrangereview@ndd.com.au with your newsagency details. They will do the analysis and email the report and recommendations to you.
The result is a better balanced portfolio of titles from NDD. The report helps drive better business decisions in that it alerts you to titles which are selling well – these are the titles you could push even further.
This is the window of a newsagency doing what is asked of them by some publishers. I took the photo a couple of weeks ago. I say some publishers because not all ask for window space to be covered with posters. Papering the street front of a newsagency with magazine posters blocks the full story of the business being revealed.
Blocking the window in this way is not best practice and does not serve the newsagency, or the magazines promoted, well.
Our businesses are retail businesses, not glorified billboards. It would be interesting to run for a couple of months without any magazine posters on windows and measure the impact on sales. I suspect that there would be none on magazines and an increase in other departments – if the unblocked window reveals a appealing shop.
In addition to selling Halloween costumes and party items, we put out our range of Halloween candy last weekend. The chocolate is popular as singles and also when sold in small pumpkin buckets holding ten chocolates.
I like the approach taken by our team at Forest Hill because it connects with the Halloween tradition of trick or treat when kids visit neighbours looking for candy. Having the chocolates provides more of a context in the overall Halloween pitch.
We are promoting Zoo magazine in our men’s aisle with the collateral placed at the aisle end and acting as a beacon for those looking down the aisle. Zoo is a title which can cause customer complaints if we promote this in the higher traffic area of the shop. We have found this aisle end works for us. We can respond to any complaints appropriately. It’s good use of poster display real-estate close to the title being promoted.
Newsagents need to remember that capital purchases between now and December 31, 2009 qualify for the 50% tax bonus if the newsagency turns over $2 million a year or less. Lottery commission counts toward the $2 million commission but not overall ticket prices – the same as for other agency business like bus tickets, western union phonecards and prepaid visa.
The Woman’s Day and New Idea brands will be tested this week with both titles promoting what appears to be the same Greg Norman related cover story. It is not often that you get both weeklies with the same cover story. It will be an interesting test of brand power.
We are promoting Women’s Health next to our main newspaper stand this week. As the photo shows, we created the slim display by using the side of another display unit. It presents the title well.
We are short of display space elsewhere in the newsagency so we figured it would be worth promoting next to the newspaper honey-pot.
We also have Women’s Health located in our women’s aisle with health magazines as well as with Cleo and marie claire.
We are promoting Home Beautiful magazine on our lease line at the front of the newsagency this week. The collateral package was excellent and make the display easy to create.
While not a huge title for us, this collateral should help gain additional sales. The display will remain up until later this week.
Check out LMK.com from magazine and newspaper publisher Hearst Corp. LMK, Let Me Know, pulls content from media outlets through to Twitter posts on people, events and topics and collates them in an easy to navigate form. It feels like an online version of The Week. It’s an interesting online platform through which to catch up on news and events or to research a person through a trusted source. PaidContent has more on this.
The date is covered on The Age newspaper masthead today by an ad for Lite n Easy. The ad also covers most of the crest of the newspaper. The is the same and and placement from October 5. If the crest, company motto and date are not that important, why not incorporate a permanent ad block in the masthead? These ads disrespect the medium and the brand.
Newspaper publishers are missing opportunities to grow their businesses by not directly engaging with retail newsagents. They will engage directly with supermarkets on promotions as well as convenience stores, petrol outlets and coffee shops. But not retail only newsagents.
While I understand the challenge they face navigating the distribution newsagent relationship, by standing behind this wall, as it is in some cases I hear about, they miss sales growth opportunities.
There are plenty of proactive retail only newsagents keen to work with publishers on growing sales. I know because of the direct feedback I had to my post here past week on this topic.
The next step is up to the publishers. Do they want to grow sales in the retail newsagent channel? If so, engage!
The photo shows a newspaper home delivery run list on an Apple iPhone. This is one of several forms a newspaper delivery run list can take on an iPhone. The feed comes from the newsagency home delivery software. Sexy huh?!
Newsagent software from my company, Tower Systems, has been interfacing to portable in-car devices since the early 1990s. The iPhone interface has been available since before the iPhone was officially released here in Australia. We like it because it is slim and can be easily stuck to the dashboard.
The benefits of all these portable in-car devices are a significant reduction in the use of paper and an equally significant saving of time – thereby enabling changes to be handled closer to the actual delivery.
While I do question the long term viability of newspaper home delivery – given a publisher controlled model which does not permit newsagents to act as independent business people – many of us continue to be involved in helping newsagents drive efficiency.
The iPhone interface is one of a range of time and money saving management tools available to distribution newsagents directly from the Tower Systems home delivery software.
The Amazon Kindle reader will be available for Australian a week from tomorrow. Which Australian newspaper and which Australian magazine will be first to offer a Kindle subscription through Amazon?
Rupert delivered a major speech at the World Media Summit in China late last week. Click here for a full copy While focused on China, it would make interesting reading to any newsagent. Here is a small quote:
The challenge of fusing past and present is real for media companies, and for China. Our aim must be to enhance the lives of our customers and citizens, and yet we find ourselves in the midst of an information revolution that is both exciting and unsettling. It is a digital revolution turning traditional business models upside down … traversing geographic, industrial, and media boundaries … and creating a new source of wealth, material and social, around the world.
He also addresses the issue of paying for content. A case he has to make for the future viability of News Corp. and other media companies.
Too often the conventional media response to the internet has been inchoate. A medium once thought too powerful has often seemed impotent in the past few years. Of course there should be a price paid for quality content, and yet large media organizations have been submissive in the face of the flat-earthers who insisted that all content should be free all the time. The sun does not orbit the earth, and yet this was precisely the premise that the press passively accepted, even though there have been obvious signs that readers recognize the reality that they should pay a price.
Read what some others say about the speech: Newsweek, Jeff Jarvis, Danny Sullivan and the Village Voice.
Marge Simpson a Playboy cover girl? Who’d have thought? She features on the cover of the November edition of the US Playboy – out this week. Do we respond by giving this issue a more public location? I suspect not. I do wonder, however, what it will do for sales. Simpson collectors are sure to want a copy. Reuters has more on this move.
The display of green magazines which we started in May continues to work for us. It expands as necessary with new titles and special issues. As the photo shows, we have it between gardening and home and living titles. Shoppers leaving our women’s aisle get to see this selection. We also have some of the titles in the more traditional location, our science and environment section – but that is in a less busy aisle.
We use beacon branding principles to promote these titles. This means using defining mastheads in a blocked way to draw attention to a section. For example, this section will always be headed with at least two, maybe more, pockets with the word green on the masthead.
I’ve seen shopper research indicating that beacon branding is key to driving sales is departments with considerable stock – such as the magazine department.
I was surprised to learn that NANA (NSW newsagent association) is promoting (but not endorsing – according to them) The Stench in this Parliament by Ruth Richmond. Check out the flyer here. That it has been sent seems like an endorsemeent. If NANA is receiving a fee for access to the newsagency channel it needs to disclose this – not the quantum of the fee but that a fee has been paid.
If NANA is not receiving a fee, I’d ask why they have become involved?
AAP is reporting that USA Today, the #1 selling newspaper in the US, is set to announce a 17% decline in circulation. While the decline will be blamed on the economy, there must be an acceptance, behind closed doors, that it is in part due to disruption caused by new channels. USA Today is one of many newspapers available in electronic form on the Amazon Kindle e-reader. It is ranked third in the newspaper segment of the Kindle store.
Four days ago I posted here my thoughts about driving over the counter sales of newspapers in the Australian newsagency channel. Smart publishers would be proactive and engage with us as business partners on a shared challenge. Instead, many remain disconnected and focus on gimmicks to drive short term circulation spurts to deliver better numbers.
Our team at Forest Hill accepted the offer of this free stand for promoting Vogue, Vogue Living and GQ. I like the small footprint, that it is easily moved and the professional corporate branding. I also like that it is promoting titles which do not often, in our store at least, get prime promotional space. This stand makes it easier for us and should drive sales.
I know we can be overloaded sometimes with stands. The key is to manage floor time. That’s what we will do with this Vogue stand. We will rest it in a couple of weeks and then bring it back.
I like that we had the option on taking this stand. By agreeing, we are committed to using it for the long term. Regulars here would see how we reuse stands, even cardboard units.
Our music magazine section covers 54 pockets and carries 40 different titles. Based on data I see from many newsagencies, this is a challenged segment of the magazine department. While there are die hard fans of the magazine medium, collectors and the like, sales are not what they used to be. The best illustration of this is browser traffic on busy trading days.
Eliot Van Buskirk, writing at Wired makes sense when commenting on the future of music journalism:
Music journalism should live on the same devices where we listen to our music — be that a computer, cellphone, MP3 player, tablet or home entertainment center. In other words, perhaps the same technologists who are making the reviews section in music magazines obsolete are capable of saving music journalism.
As Eliot says,a techncology base for music journalism offers many opportunities:
In addition to reviews, recommendations could become part of this system. If you give the thumbs-up to what a particular writer said about a particular album, the app could recommend more stuff you should listen to.
Check out morning paper, an old blog from 2003 showing images of the morning paper as received by the blogger. A nice is somewhat melancholy catalogue, especially if you like newspapers.
It was interesting hearing the imminent arrival of the Kindle on our shores covered on the 3AW breakfast program this morning. They had fun talking about the technology and then turned to the gloomy future of print media. It sounded inevitable.
It is this type of discussion which adds to the inevitability of some consumers transitioning from print to digital.
As Australians, high profile and not, start to talk about the Kindle it will gain the traction which some commentators are in denial about today.
We have the Bathurst program on display with our newspapers in a last ditch chance to get sales – even though the event is under way. Sales for this title are usually soft for us so it’s a long shot at this late stage. In fact, car sales are overall soft at the moment for us – not sure why.
I am shocked to see some retailers, including newsagents, are discounting calendars. This does not make sense so early in the season. Trawl back through blog posts here over the last five years and you’ll see that I have learned my lesson on calendar discounting – leave it until after January 1.
While discounts of 25% and 50% – yes I have seen this already this year – may drive calendar sales, this gives up margin unnecessarily in my view.
The key to maintaining maximum margin with calendars is range. What the team at Forest Hill is achieving this year is proof of that. Sales are up 14% on last year. What makes this even more special is that our store manager controls the range. He has backed himself and it is resulting in excellent dividends.
By holding the line on price, based on an excellent range and brilliant customer service, we are banking good results. It is not too late for all newsagents to take this approach.