I am hearing about delays in magazines reaching some locations in NSW today. the enwsagents affected say it’s not a good sign on the the move from First Fleet to Toll. Newsagents need magazines on time – for most this is before 5am. Late delivery means lost sales.
We are promoting New Idea and the free CSIRO wellbeing plan for kids which comes with the magazine this week. The display is between our two busiest registers. It’s a good promotion since we are just out of school holidays.
The Women’s Health Diary did not work so well in this counter location. Last year it sold well on our Diary table so it goes back there.
The second issue of Prevention from Pacific Magazines went on sale today. We are repeating the promotion strategies which worked for us last month including this display with our main newspaper stand. We sold three times the initial allocation of the launch issue.
In addition to the display in the photo, we have the new issue of Prevention on display with our weekly magazines (Woman’s Day and New Idea)and in our health section.
It is good to see allocations have been increased based on sales of the first issue.
I have high hopes for Prevention because of the sales last month and the considerable marketing bidget which should drive traffic.
Check out the front page of The Age today. Across the newspaper masthead, the crest and today’s date, they have stuck an advertisement for Lite n Easy.
Advertising revenue is more important than their brand.
Click here for the free artwork for this poster promoting crosswords. The creative team at Tower Systems has put this together to help newsagents promote crosswords. It is a free service from the Tower AdvantageTM program and demonstrates the value added to the relationship with newsagents beyond newsagency management software.
I have visited four 7-Eleven stores in Melbourne over the last two days and three of them were advertising the wrong jackpot amounts for Powerball and OzLotto. One of them had the wrong jackpot amount for the Monday / Wednesday game. While I am certain that there are newsagencies demonstrating basic lack of compliance around the correct collateral, it is a surprise to see this in the usually well disciplined 7-Eleven group.
Comics are not performing well. Not just in my newsagencies but in many for which I get to see data.
Overall, comic sales are down. Unfortunately, supply for some comics is not falling in line with the sales decline. This suggests that these suppliers are not respectful of the newsagency channel.
A consistent sell through of less than 60% means that I am losing money. Hence the decision to review supply in my own newsagencies. This means cutting some titles and resetting base supply figures for others. Based on stock I pulled off the shelf yesterday, I expect to save in the order of $500 in cash-flow.
I suspect that print comics will be an early casualty to digital platforms, certainly with the consumer (as opposed to collector) audience. iPhone apps, see here, here and here, make them readily available.
The review in our own shops will focus on selecting a range for the smaller amount of space allocated to the segment and ensuring that we are not supplied beyond this.
The saved space will be used to expand other magazine segments.
Our team at Forest Hill has created a terrific display in the window to promote our extensive Halloween range. Using some of the products we sell and collateral from newsXpress, the display draws excellent attention and, most important, sells product.
This first photo shows the display from inside the window looking out into the mall. This shows just over half the Halloween stock we have available for the season. Click on the image to see a larger version. It is a shopper-friendly display, easy to navigate.
This photo shows the Halloween window display looking from the mall into the newsagency. The reflection from the glass hides how good this really looks. It certainly draws passers-by in to see what we have on offer.
newsXpress has been promoting Halloween in newsagencies since 2005. It is good to see others getting in on this fun and retail friendly season. I know of newsagents who will sell in excess of $10,000 of Halloween product – at excellent margins.
Newsagents can own Halloween. While the majors play, we can do better thanks to easy access to suppliers with good product and our ability to embrace the season in a more practical way than you will see in a Coles or Big W. I have seen newsagency staff and customers dress up. It’s about fun after all. The newsXpress posters make that point: Scary can be fun.
Halloween is a good break in the lead up to the craziness of Christmas.
The Melbourne Cup Carnival magazine has never worked for us at Forest Hill. This year we are trying something different, we have moved it from our small racing section and placed the magazine in our women’s weeklies magazine section. This should drive impulse purchases whereas leaving it in the racing section only serves the destination purchase which history shows is small for us.
The Financial Times and others report overnight that Time Inc is working with a group of magazine publishers in the US to create a digital store for magazines to avoid control over distribution as has happened with music through Apple’s iTunes.
The new service would serve as a digital shopfront for magazine content. Reports say it will be announced in a month. Given the growth in eReader devices, movement in the distribution of content was inevitable.
Matt Buchanan writing at Gizmodo thinks this plan by magazine publishers will fail.
Great, except that it’s not going to work. As Peter Kafka points out, they have to convince people to sign up for another service—not an easy feat if they’re already tangled up with a Kindle or Apple. Especially if this new service will be just magazines, and not include newspapers. And there’s no way Amazon or Apple will let the publishers tie a separate service into their devices, pissing in their pool.
Consumers have already gathered around iTunes, Amazon and others for digital content. Smart magazine publishers will use these established new media distribution channels rather than create something new with its own costs and marketing challenges and with a connection to old media distribution.
In this new world, as music publishers have found, content wants to be set free. Those who embrace the most flexible distribution models will prosper.
Unfortunately for newsagents, in the long term, this means we need to reinvent our businesses. And before people say I am in a gloomy mindset, no, I did say long term. Also, the change opportunities are excellent for us.
Time has published a report about proposals from technology companies to help save newspapers in the US. While technology will play a key role in news distribution in the long term, publishers today ought to focus on their readers.
Readers buy newspapers, not advertising consumers as some publishers (and advertisers) seem to think. One only has to see how much of the overweight Saturday or Sunday newspapers is shed to see what the majority of newspaper readers want.
After more than 180 years as a paid newspaper, the London Evening Standard will go free later this month. The Guardian has details. The newspaper’s current circulation is 250,000. They are chasing a circulation of 600,000 from the move. From what I understand, this is the first quality newspaper to adopt a free model – a significant shift in newspaper publishing and, I suspect, a seismic shift in newspaper distribution.
Linux magazine shows how to distribute CDs and DVDs with a magazine. Check out the latest issue. Inside the magazine you will find a CD. No plastic pack. No box glued to the front. The CD is in a slim pack in the magazine. The magazine remains browser friendly. This is a nice way for the publisher to distribute digital content and deliver a product which works for retailers and browsers. Now if only other publishers could follow this lead.
We are promoting the latest issue of The Monthly next to our newspaper stand from today and for the next few days. The Julia Gillard cover looks good and should appeal to people from both sides of politics.
This is one of those covers which needs to be seen in total – rather than just the masthead as would be the case in usual magazine fixturing.
The Monthly is also a title which works better for us in a impulse location than its traditional location with news and current affairs titles.
Overnight, a new trader classifieds service was launched in Victoria. The publisher of the Melbourne Observer launched Melbourne Trader on the 3AW Overnighters program. Reader ads have started to roll in. The newsagency distribution channel will be promoted in radio ads in the coming week. Click here for a listing of newsagents already selling the Melbourne Observer.
Given the announcement of the closure of the Trading Post, the Melbourne Trader provides Victorian newsagents with an excellent opportunity to retain and even grow classifieds business connected with the newsagency channel. I’d suggest placing the Melbourne Observer where the Trading Post usual goes as well as the existing position for the Observer.
We sell between 65 and 100 copies of the Melbourne Observer every week. It’s customers are loyal. As a publication, it supports newsagents by promoting our putaway service and through other promotions in the year. I’ll happily support Melbourne Trader.
Click here for a PDF version of the customer newsletter for our newsagency for October. This is available free to all customers from a stand at the front of our newsagency. We switched this more promotional style of newsletter in August. It works better promoting our offers than the more newsy style newsletter it replaced. We pitch price (ink, cards and magazines) range (cards) and being green (O’Bon pens and journals). We are pretty happy with the corporate image this presents for our business.
We didn’t have space for a new country title which arrived on Wednesday and had to make a decision as to which title to return early. Australian Country Collections was chosen because it took up more space than other titles as it was bagged with a giveaway. the title had been on sale for close to two months and we still had stock in three pockets. Had this issue not been bagged we could have kept ito one pocket and not returned the issue early.
September has been an interesting month for newsagents. I have seen stores with excellent growth and others with dreadful figures. From what I see, it continues the patchy economic condidions we find ourselves in.
In our own case, we had a good month overall: books – down 17% (due to differences in sales cycles over the two years); calendars – up 14%; cards – down 16% (due to run down to a complete card relay and 25% supplier replacement yesterday); confectionery – up 2%; Gifts – up 83%; magazines – down 7%; ink – up 25%; stationery – down 24% (fluctuation in some corporate business). Overall traffic is up 3% but average sale value is down 10%.
We are moving to higher margin product and this is creating a healthier business.
In magazine categories, partworks is the big drop – if we take these out of the figures, the magazine department is down around 3%; food – down 22%, sport – down 18%; women’s interests – down 12%; women’s weeklies – down 3%; computers – down 29%; craft – down 17%.
There has been plenty of noise online about the soon to launch Apple Mac Tablet including speculation of negotiations between magazine publishers and Apple about getting magazine content available through iTunes. PC World has a good summary of news.
Such a move is guaranteed to happen as I have noted here before. Once newspaper and magazine friendly devices appeal to consumers, publishers will embrace them. This happened with music. It makes sense.
Smart newsagents are building flexible businesses to cope with change while also working hard to make the most from print product in serving consumers who prefer this medium.
Strange Light is a one-shot 40 page magazine about the dust cloud which enveloped Sydney last week. The magazine was created in a day and a half using MagCloud from Hewlett Packard. The storm occurred on September 23 and the magazine was published and available for purchase on September 25. Amazing. Read the publishers blog post about the process here.
This is an excellent example of how MagCloud and similar technology could change special interest publishing, especially around an event or a single topic.
I am grateful to Andrew Batt of Bangkok Station tipping me off to Strange Light.
As if we do not have enough sudoku titles already. These five new titles arrived on Wednesday. We were not supposed to receive any. Ugh! I am kind of glad we did because I got to see this junk. These titles should never get access to the newsagency channel, not with the range of sudoku titles we have in our newsagencies already. This is why we need a magazine czar to grant access approval to our retail network. Someone controlling access to our network, based on range anf performance criteria, would have blocked these titles from getting through.
We started promoting The Australian Women’s Health Diary 2010 at the front counter of our newsagency from yesterday. This is the first time we have done such a display for this at the counter. While the diary usually sells very well, we wanted to see what we could achieve with a good display at our best impulse purchase location. Our goal is to sell 200 copies over the next few weeks. The sooner the better given space challenges of this time of the year.
I like the poster supplied to promote the diary – it appeals to the targer customer.
We are promoting the latest issue of Dolly magazine at the entrance to our women’s magazine aisle. It replaced Australian Women’s Weekly which had been up for a week.
What may not be obvious from first glance at the photo is that we sliced up three of the posters to create the strips in front of each shelf promoting the free Roxy duffle bag. This attention to detail is important since we have the magazine opened out showing the bag.
We put this display up yesterday and already it is generating good interest.
Here is an update on the status of yesterday’s update to XChangeIT Link:
We had a few issues with a couple of the distributor gateways during the night, and therefore files will be delayed in delivery to you. We will contact you with updates during the day via email. Gotch & NDC may also send their invoices via email, depending on the status later today.
I have heard from a number of newsagents that the link has loaded successfully overnight.
The move by magazine distributors NDD, Gotch and Network to Toll Holdings for freight looks set to significantly increase the cost of returning unsold magazines. One newsagent told me that their cost will go from $25.00 to $66.00. This is what they will have to pay for stock they did not order and which has failed to sell.
Newsagents are understandably angry at this cost increase imposed on their businesses. If distributors let newsagents return only then cover then the cost would be significantly less. NDD performs worst out of the three magazine distributors based on the data I see in terms of sell-through – meaning higher additional costs.
The magazine distribution model which makes newsagents liable for the cost of freighting titles which have not performed is flawed.