The supply quantity for Australian Sky and Telescope is another example of over supply by the magazine distributor and or publisher this month. I know I bang on aboutt the same stuff, over supply, often. Sometimes, publishers engage, make contact and engage more in the scale out of their product. Most who do this say they had no idea supply was so patchy.
The magazine distribution model is hard to fathom sometimes. While I am happy to receive more stock of what is selling, I am not happy to receive more of a title which does not sell in the quantities we already receive.
This is the case for Australian Woodsmith magazine – supply quantity increased this week for no apparent reason. I suspect we are not alone.
Some newsagents meet in an ANF organised meeting in Adelaide today to discuss plans by Advertiser Newspapers to take over collection of payment for all News Limited product home deliveries in South Australia – subscription as well as direct to newsagent accounts.
While the meeting appears set to attract between 60 and 80 newsagents, I am disappointed that the ANF did not open the meeting for all newsagents. Any association claiming to national suppliers and arms of the government to represent all newsagents cannot afford to turn its back on all newsagents.
The ANF has made mistakes in their handling of the Advertiser changes so far. They acted on poor advice from people who stood to gain from the changes. They had not done due diligence before indicating support for the plan.
The ANF can remedy the situation by listening to newsagents and representing all views. They can turn around their mistakes on this matter by serving newsagents ahead of worrying about how they may look. I don’t mind that they made a mistake – as long as they deal with this and fix the situation and stop trying to control what newsagents say.
Click here to see a copy of the submission made by the QNF to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission and lodged on behalf of Queensland Newsagents. The AIRC website lists all submissions received. The QNF is the only newsagent association listed as making a submission.
This is the kind of work newsagents want from their associations. Thorough, professional and transparent.
Here is the Dolly photo to which Renee mentioned in a comment yesterday. She created this display at our Watergardens store. The display faces into the mall. Eleven copies of Dolly magazine were sold in a few hours. This is an excellent result. The display attracted people walking past the shop. Some purchased other items with Dolly. Renee likes to create visually appealing displays which are not your typical magazine display. These displays are working a treat for us!
Our sell-through for Atomic computer and technology magazine was 28%. It is loss making for us. I checked out the magazine website and was surprised to find little connection to the magazine, nothing driving retail traffic or sales. Computer titles are challenged enough without publishers ignoring opportunities to drive retail traffic. Put us on the website, promote the magazine, run promoting to drive traffic to newsagencies. We give you space – returning the favour is the least you can do!
Our supply of Dogs Life magazine jumped by 50% this month. No explanation, no additional marketing collateral, just extra stock. We were surprised. Our sales of Dogs Life are okay but not at a level to support a 50% jump. This is the kind of increase which newsagents should be asked to approve before their cash is committed the magazine distributor an or publisher.
New Media Age reports that Borders in the UK is preparing to launch a digital newsagency – offering magazine downloads. While an interesting move, I don’t see this as a long term strategy. Magazines of the future will not be a digital version of the print product.
Poor advice has been provided by some parties to newsagents about the tax break. The ATO has confirmed that businesses turning over less than $2 million a year have until December 31, 2009 to purcahse eligible items. For more details on this and for the tax break for businesses turning over more than $2 million please click here.
The person at the ATO I spoke with said that they have heard of “manipulations” of invoices to maximise the tax break. One example was software being provided free which had a published price prior to the announcement of the tax break. Such manipulation to avoid tax may be reversed if discovered by the Tax Office.
Time is not running out for many.
UPDATE (11/06/09): The business which provided wrong advice has changed their blog following this post here.
We are promoting the latest issue of Weight Watchers magazine to the side of the counter – in a display seen by people walking our of our two main magazine aisles. I have included some other magazines to fill out the display: Women’s Health, AWW’s Low Fat cookbook, Natural Health and Vegetarian Life and Annette Sym’s Symply Too Good 5.
Weight Watchers is doing very well for us following the switch to a monthly. Last month’s issue achieved a sell through of 90% last month. In addition to this feature display, we also have a pocket in with our weeklies and two pockets in our health section.
As with all of our displays – customers can easily purchase right off the stand. This is very important.
We have the latest issue of Dolly magazine, which comes with a free nak hair straightener, on display at the entrance to our busiest magazine aisle. The hair straightener is a great gift and is sure to drive excellent sales – we want those early in the on-sale cycle.
We also have Dolly located in its usual place. The display boxes make merchandising on the flat easy, thankfully. My only complaint is – one poster!
I understand the importance of these gifts to support Dolly and those used to support Girlfriend – teen magazines are challenged and they need all the support they can get.
Our promotion of Woman’s Day versus New Idea delivered an excellent result on Monday and Tuesday with both titles experiencing a similar lift. We adjusted the display today to feature Take 5 and That’s Life while also supporting a selection of weeklies. Take 5 and That’s Life are important traffic generators for us, I expect them to deliver good results from a front of shop promotion.
The new Apple iPhone which was launched in San Francisco yesterday extends the disruption of print media with a host of new features. For a good summary in the context of print media and our newsagency businesses, check out these links: Editorsweblog, The Atlantic (asking if the new iPhone can save journalism), Editor and Publisher and ValleyWag. There are thousands of stories and blog posts on this already.
Disruption to the print model is the story of the year (and decade) for newsagents. It is the greatest opportunity we have had since we were created in the 1800s by a publisher to distribute their product.
The announcement last week of departures from ACP is part of a broader restructure occurring in magazine and newspaper publishing businesses. Just read about changes at Hearst Corp. and Hachette Filipacchi and News Magazines in the UK. The restructure here in Australia reaches beyond ACP to other publishers and deep into distribution and retail as we all deal with the current economic circumstances and the continued impact of the Internet and disruptive devices like the iPhone and Amazon Kindle on magazines and, to a lesser extent currently, newspapers.While it would be easy for newsagents to take some pleasure from the public pain being experienced by ACP, the reality is that we are all affected. It serves no purpose to take any joy from retrenchments.
Newsagents have an opportunity in this marketplace to strengthen our value to magazine and newspaper publishers. Smart publishers will work more closely with smart newsagents to grow sales. Today’s challenges mean they should be doing this with more care than in the past.
The posters we have placed in the malls, away from our shops at Frankston and Forest Hill are working for us. In both stores, customers have mentioned the posters when buying ink from us. We have posters on display around each centre – the centres provided the space without cost, we provided the posters themselves. The same collateral is also on display at the websites for each centre. Plus, we have flyers on display at customer service booths and material included in newsletters sent out by centre management to their database. We were careful to craft a compelling call-to-action message targeted at the shopper. As I noted, this campaign is working, customers are buying ink as a result!
Our team at Frankston cleverly put FHM magazine featuring Pink on the cover at the counter. With Pink’s Melbourne concerts selling out and new dates added her popularity is clearly strong in our marketplace. Opportunistic placement at the counter like this is all about driving impulse purchases.
Fox Business has published another video interview with Rupert Murdoch in which he talks about, among other things, newspapers. He makes interesting comments about migration online. Check it out:
Reuters has several quotes from Rupert Murdoch including this about newspapers:
“Communications are changing totally and we’re moving into the digital age and it’s going to change newspapers. But if you’ve got a newspaper with a great name and a great reputation and you trust it, the people in that community are going to need access to your source of news. What we call newspapers today, I call ‘news organizations,’ journalistic enterprises, if you will. They’re the source of news. And people will reach it if it’s done well, whether they do it on a Blackberry or Kindle or a PC.”
“I can see the day maybe 20 years away where you don’t actually have paper and ink and printing presses. I think it will take a long time and I think it’s a generational thing that is happening. But there’s no doubt that younger people are not picking up the traditional newspapers.”
Some in News Limited here in Australia could learn from Murdoch’s direct answers on newspapers.
Newsagents need to watch this interview, and the previous one, and take on board the comments in the context of shopfits and newsagency business planning. The fundamentals of our businesses are changing. We need to embrace this change as the opportunity it is.
This means flexible shop fits, new traffic-generating product categories and embracing entrepreneurial spirit.
South Australian newsagents concerned about the moves by Advertiser Newspapers to take over collection of payment for all home deliveries of News Ltd product need to organise themselves. With the ANF currently only focusing on its 100 or so SA members (down from 400+ in late 2004), many newsagents are unrepresented on this issue of vital importance to all newsagents nationally.
At risk here is the relationship between newsagents and their customers of long standing. This will impact traffic in retail newsagencies. It may significantly impact the cash-flow of distribution newsagencies if all opinions are not considered.
I had hoped that the ANF would open its meeting on Thursday this week to all newsagents. Failing that, I had hoped that some newsagents with political abilities in SA would organise their own meeting of newsagents. Unless either of these occurs, the currently weak leadership from the ANF on this issue is set to prevail. What they have said so far about this issues demonstrates ignorance of the risks. This can be remedied if they open the meeting and listen to all newsagents and stop their spin.
This takeover by News Ltd is bad for newsagents. If it proceeds, it will further destabilise the fine balance in retail newsagencies and dilute our relevance to consumers.
Here are some updates on some of our recent magazine initiatives.
The new food column we introduced in our women’s weeklies has worked well. Sales of food titles were up and several of the pockets emptied. We will keep this for the next few weeky – but change the titles up each week.
Australian Women’s Weekly performed very well at the counter and is tracking well for the issue.
Crosswords are doing well next to one of our lottery counters – we will leave them in place for another week.
We are enjoying excellent traffic from the latest HOT Ink! promotion. As we have found previously, Tuesdays are an especially successful day for us given that it us the quietest day of the week – over $600 in ink sales Tuesday last week. Every day since the latest catalogue promotion hit has delivered excellent business.
This is our eleventh ink promotion. Consistency around brands, promotion and competitive pricing has established us in our area and this brings repeat business after a catalogue ends.
Most days, we sell more from three metres of ink than we do from two aisles of stationery. While this could be a reflection on our stationery offer, I think it speaks to consistent external marketing of the ink offer.
Putting out the weeklies this morning I wondered whether the local Aussie girl (Lisa Curry-Kenny) can out perform the relationship challenged mega star (Jennifer Aniston). Maybe I had too much time on my hands to even think about this. But I read how a great cover can drive sales so I figured why not get the girls and their tragic tales to face off against each other. I put Woman’s Day and New Idea on a display right at the front of the shop – Curry-Kenny versus Aniston. I was going to place a header, explaining the competition I had in mind. I decided against it, preferring the covers to work for themselves.
Of course, my real interest is in driving sales of Woman’s Day and New Idea – two vitally important magazines to my newsagency and our channel as a whole.
Being a public holiday today, we will see plenty of shoppers we would not usually see on a Monday. This is both a challenge and an opportunity. Hopefully both Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Curry-Kenny will not let me down.
The free lipgloss and make-up bag and Madison magazine make a nice pacakge for our main counter magazine offer this week.I like the care taken with the packaging – showing off the gifts and their value without detracting from the cover of Madison itself. This is key to driving an impulse purchase at the counter.
Gordon Ramsay is in town and you can’t miss him – in the newspapers and on radio. I am disappointed that we don’t have magazines with Ramsay features to promote. A cover or two on the weeklies or on food titles would have worked a treat given his ability to grab headlines. Yep, a missed opportunity by editors. At least the editor of the Herald Sun understands the opportunity.
I am planning on creating a new poster (not me but the marketing and design team in my business) promoting a category of magazines and to make it available free for download here in A4 and A3 sizes. I have done this a couple of times already – most recently last Christmas. The idea is to create a poster which features several titles from a magazine catgeory – a poster which any newsagency could display regardless of the banner under which they trade.
I am thinking of selecting one from the following magazine categories: children’s, food, men’s lifestyle or special interest. I’d be interested suggestions.
The artwork will feature a range of titles and prmote the newsagency as having an excellent range of magazines.
Independent magazines must be of interest to one or two university lecturers based on questions I have received in the last couple of weeks. At least one business course appears to be using the challenge of the distribution of independent magazines as a case study. The questions from some of the students are excellent. A common question is – why not go direct to a newsagent, why would I use a magazine distributor? This is a question I have for independent publishers too.