A blog on issues affecting Australia's newsagents, media and small business generally. More ...

Sydney Morning Herald supply problems tomorrow

Several newsagents have contacted us saying that there will be supply problems with the Sydney Morning Herald in regional areas tomorrow as a result of industrial action at their Chullora plant. The timing would be unfortunate because of the launch of The Form tomorrow – the free racing newspaper with the SMH – it used to be part of the paper and is now separate.

UPDATE: There is a stop work tonight from 10pm and another planned for tomorrow afternoon – this could impact Saturday’s paper.

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Newspapers

Is the Dolly naked pic marketing?

The publicity given to the ‘production error’ on page 24 of Dolly and the subsequent cover up of the image on copies sold through major retailers (and not newsagents) should result in bumper sales. An anonymous correspondent has suggested to me that the ‘error’ was made in marketing. I have no idea if it’s true and don’t really care. However it happened, sales are strong and that’s good for magazines.

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magazines

ACP Mother’s Day offer trades off newsagents

ACP Magazines has a great Mother’s Day magazine subscription offer with a First Class trip to Ireland as the prize.

I discovered the offer by searching for newsagents magazines in Google. Check out the results. The link to the promotion is an ad ACP is running – they pay Google per click on the ad. It’s disappointing that someone searching for magazines in newsagents gets an offer for direct supply from ACP.

While I appreciate ACP needs to promote its magazines any way it can, I wish I could offer this prize to the many customers who sign up for ‘subscriptions’ in my store – putaways we call them. We have around 200 customers who commit to collecting every issue of magazine(s) they like and every time they pay full price. So, because they don’t take the discount and don’t have the magazine delivered to their home, they miss out.

I’d prefer to see ACP invest marketing dollars in newsagent putaways. Newsagents, in turn, could provide good in store support for this exclusive retail offering. This seems to me to be a win win for the taking.

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Newsagency challenges

Dolly magazine image cover up

Merchandisers are reportedly visiting major retailers to cover up some offending (explicit) images in the current issue of Dolly from ACP Magazines. Newsagents are not receiving the same service and when they contact the distributor (Network Services) wanting to early return the title because of they problem they are refused. I haven’t seen the images myself and cannot comment specifically. If the distributor is involved in cover up action then this ought to be in all retail outlets and at their cost.

UPDATE: (11:56am) I’ve now seen the image at the Newslink store at Brisbane airport. Hmmm … that’s some production error. Yes it needs to be covered or pulled from the shelves.

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magazines

Are we the first carbon neutral newsagency?

Since we made the commitment and purchased carbon credits a couple of weeks ago we have been trying to find out if we are first – not because we want kudos but because we want to connect with other newsagents who have taken this step. If your newsagency is carbon neutral please email me as I’d like to compare notes and see how we can encourage more newsagents to take this step.

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Social responsibility

Friday 13th follow up

Our instant scratch lottery ticket promotion last Friday increased sales by 80% on the day. It’s a sales kick benchmark we hope to pass next week when we run an over the counter promotion with an iPod as a prize.

Australians are not great at the over the counter upsell. In newsagencies this is, in part, due to how business the counter is. But it’s also because we’re not that pushy. While I don’t want to make my newsagency like those awful Coles and Woolworths / Safeway petrol outlets where you are virtually berated into purchasing junk candy, I do want us to interact more. Our iPod giveaway will focus on this.

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marketing

Who owns the newspaper customer?

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I met with a group of newsagents in Sydney yesterday and the issue of who owns the home delivery customer came up. It’s a question newsagents have had since newspaper distribution was deregulated in 1999.

Newsagents believe that a customer they convince to take on home delivery is theirs. Publishers believe that anyone receiving home delivery of their product is theirs – regardless of how the customer was acquired.

A lawyer friend told me today that in his view, the 1999 contracts are vague on this point.

It’s an issue right now because publishers want newsagents to pass on more data about home delivery customers. They want customer name, address and the days on which the customer gets their particular newspaper. In many cases this is data about customers the publishers have never heard of before, customers won by the newsagent’s own efforts.

My lawyer friend tells me that privacy laws come into play on this issue and that newsagents need to be very careful about what information they provide to publishers. He even suggested that newsagents need to write to their customers seeking permission before passing on any home delivery customer information.

All the legal mumbo jumbo aside, where else can a business acquire customers at their cost and then be required to provide sufficient details to their supplier (for no compensation) to enable the supplier to undertake direct contact and fulfillment if they wish.

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Newsagency challenges

Online classifieds failure

Jobs.com.au hit our TV screens a few months ago with a loud colourful ad promoting its new employment website. After spending what I suspect is a million or two on TV and outdoor media I read in today’s Australian Financial Review (p20) that administrators have been appointed. It was always going to be tough for jobs.com.au as they were playing in a crowded marketplace with some very successful operators, especially Seek. Jobs’ mistake was that they did not offer a point of difference, they brought online an expensive offline model.

What’s this got to do with newsagents? Our Find It online classifieds model is close to coming out of beta. Unlike Jobs, we’re horizontal, mainly free and providing a point of difference to traditional classifieds. Our retail partners are newsagents and here is the rub. Most newsagents are not engaging with us. Few have loaded their free business ad. Fewer have promoted the site. So, the T intersection I face requires a choice – to continue to develop Find It to provide, in part, a revenue stream for newsagents, or to ignore them and develop without them. Based on the 11,000 ads so far, newsagents are not crucial to the model. In the next two weeks I will decide which turn at the T intersection we will take.

That Find It has 11,000 ads and is growing pageviews daily is healthy for us.

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Online classifieds

Newspaper home delivery consolidation

Victoria is a hive of activity as newsagents sell, licence or lease off their newspaper home delivery territories. By my reckoning there have been more deals in the first three months of this year than all of last year and even that is probably understating the situation. Some of the deals are long term newsagencies getting out of home delivery.

There are three types of deals: outright sale of the territory (as I did in my newsagency); contracting another party to undertake the physical delivery while you maintain the accounts; contracting and or licensing the entire delivery business including accounting for a fixed term. There are other variations but these three are the most common.

The most common reason newsagents cite for getting out of home delivery is that the economics no longer work for the average size newsagency. Given that the net return from delivering a newspaper has not increased in more than fifteen years and given that newsagents have few options for reducing costs there is no choice for many but to quit. It is only when an operator manages 2,500+ home deliveries a day out of a warehouse that they can start to make progress on their net return.

I’d be surprised if the newspaper publishers – Fairfax and News – are not concerned about this trend. As these distribution businesses become bigger and stronger they will be more demanding of the publishers. The publishers must also be concerned about their fading connect with retail newsagents. In fact, the situation is so dynamic at present that I would suggest it is time for a forum where newsagents openly discuss the various models. One was held over a year ago – the world has changed considerably since then.

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Newspapers

Hot moves on the dance floor

Between our counter, our newspaper stand and our card display is what we call the dance floor. This is our highest traffic display area so we change the display regularly and actively promote categories which would otherwise be visited by destination shoppers.

The dance floor is great for displaying promotions such as the hot stationery deals promotion we have running at the moment. We pick up impulse sales and remind everyone that we have keen prices on stationery.

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When this campaign comes down in a week we will replace it with our Mother’s Day offering. While the weekly or fortnightly change is time consuming, it is the best way to demonstrate to our customers that our business is moving and that we have deals. Newsagents are thought to be expensive so anything we can do to counter that is a win for us.

Evey newsagency needs a dance floor and they need fancy footwork to make it work.

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marketing

Tattersalls and Golden Casket moves good for newsagents

The announcement today that they have purchased the Golden Casket lotteries business is significant for newsagents in Victoria, Tasmania, Northern Territory and Queensland.

The management of Tattersalls’ lottery business is to move to Queensland under the management of Bill Thorburn. Thorburn is well regarded in the retail network and, obviously, by Tattersalls. This is a difference in practical retailer support offered by Tattersalls compared to Golden Casket – if the Casket approach is adopted across the Tattersalls network. For example, the Golden Casket in store collateral supporting instant lottery ticket sales and superdraws is more plentiful and robust than that from Tattersalls. Don’t get me wrong – I’m happy with what Tattersalls provides but I know that in this case the grass is greener…

Golden Casket pays a trail commission to retail outlets from online sales. Tattersalls does not pay such a commission. This trail commission was well negotiated by the Casket Agents Association in Queensland. Hopefully their successful approach can influence the seemingly ineffective Victorian Lottery Agents Association.

Another difference is in the area of who sells the products. In Queensland, the Government has enshrined legislation that latter products can only be sold by small business – with a definition tied to number of employees. Elsewhere in Australia no such protection of small business exists. Through this transaction there is an opportunity to focus the attention of other state governments on the leadership position taken by the Queensland government.

Now all we in Victoria need is certainty that Tattersalls retains its current licences.

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Lotteries

Windows Vista magazine rip off

windows-vista-mag.JPGNDD has distributed the launch issue of this Windows Vista magazine. They probably already know the Network has distributed this same title – as Australian magazine. So, once again, we have two versions of the same magazine. It’s pretty much only the cover which is different.

I wish that the magazine distributors would stop abusing newsagents by distributing identical titles in this way.

Something else which irks me about the NDD title is that this first issue is 99 pence in the UK yet A$15.95 here. Someone along the way is making a ton of money. Not the newsagents. The yellow new launch issue sticker covers the 99p price promotion on the front cover. Astute Australian consumers know they are being ripped off.

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magazines

Mass media era ending?

“We’re in a transformative media age. We’re seeing the vanishing of mass media. Mass media is being replaced by customized, targeted media….The old adage ‘adapt or die’ has never been more pressing.”

That’s Jordan Levin speaking at the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills. Variety has the story. The newsagency channel was created by mass media companies.

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Newsagency challenges

UK magazines clogging Australian shelves

uk-mags.JPGDo we really need these UK weekly magazines taking up shelf space in newsagencies? With their low cover prices and single digit sales, the titles are break even at best. In many newsagencies they are loss making. This is not good economics for newsagents.

Being imported, the titles are always out of date. Valentine’s Day was two months ago yet here we have Pick Me Up with a Valentines promotion. Plus, their promotions don’t work here as we don’t get the give away items promoted.

Newsagents are being told to position some of these titles next to more popular titles like Take 5 or next to confectionery – both premium locations not justified by the low cover price and therefore low margin for newsagents.

If distributors want newsagents to act commercially with these titles they need to be commercial in providing financial incentive. Guarantee me a a minimum profitable return per pocket and I’ll promote any magazine anywhere.

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magazines

Mother’s Day 2007 greeting cards

In keeping with our strategy of starting early with seasons, we have the just half of our Mother’s Day card range up. It’s moving well and we are still a month away from the day. The Hallmark materials make the display.

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We use seasonal displays like this to underpin our relevance and our range for the seasons. It’s a way of demonstrating our point of difference over the majors.

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Greeting Cards

Simpsons polularity waning

The Bart Simpson and Lisa Simpson chocolate masks did not move this Easter. I’ve heard that Darrell Lea will not continue its Simpsons licence. It seems that Simpsons branding of products is not the goldmine it used to be.

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Uncategorized

Building better ‘newspapers’

I first heard Rob Curly speak last year at the Beyond The Printed Word conference in Vienna. Rob is a visionary in newspaper circles and a guru at harnessing new technologies in newspapers. On March 27 this year Rob Curly spoke as part of the Spring New Media Lecture Series at The University of California Berkley. His presentation It’s Not About the Device, It’s About The Information is excellent. If you want to hear first hand about the newspaper of the future, take the time to watch and listen to this presentation. Then, visit the Wasington Post On Being and see how Rob is reconnecting his newspaper with its community.

The connection for newsagents is that the challenges Rob talks about for newspapers relate to our newsagencies as well – relevance and connection. Do we get that as a channel? Only time will tell. Publishers understand and are embracing what Rob and his ilk have to say. Check out the Washington Post. It’s changing. Are we?

Kudos to US Berkeley for posting Rob’s presentation online and making it available free.

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Media disruption

In store magazine promotions

We have allocated and aisle end for ACP Connections promotions. It’s valuable space but well used thanks to the excellent materials the Connections team provide. It’s frustrating that at Easter and Christmas they take time off from promotions. We’ve created our own thing for Gardening Australia:

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The best way to keep the space allocated and the retail systems working like clockwork is for these promotions to not stop.

While the folks at ACP will not happy at my swipe here, I hope they understand where I am coming from. Newsagents work to processes and if you take a week off then it is easy for the process to be forgotten.

The folks at Pacific will be unhappy that such great display space is given to ACP. If they created a weekly promotional package like I get from ACP’s Connections program I’d find a good space for it.

I want my shop to look fresh and vibrant and weekly point of sale materials help achieve this.

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magazines

Friday 13th lottery promotion

We’ve papered our store with posters for our Friday 13th instant lottery promotion. The prize is a sexy HP printer.

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The promotion of the HP OfficeJet Pro printer gives us a chance to also promote our range of ink and toner.

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marketing

Hot stationery deals

We’re using the time between Easter and Mother’s Day to really push the newsXpress Hot Stationery Deals offer. This flyer has gone out with the local paper this week to houses around our centre.

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The promotion has hit at a good time because we have considerably overhauled our stationery range. We have the promotion product on display in a high traffic area in the shop and it’s moving. It’s also encouraging people brought in by the promotion shopping our stationery aisles.

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We’re expecting to run one of these promotions every eight weeks, in between ink and toner promotions.

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marketing

Chasing Asian consumers

Newsagents interested in connecting with Asian consumers ought to consider carrying Informed Investors in their shop. It’s a fringe Chinese language title – ideal for newsagents to demonstrate our point of difference. I’ve blogged about it before and push it again based on feedback from some in the target market.

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I have no commercial relationship with the publishers.

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magazines

High cost of free newspaper

Newsagents make around 87.5 cents for every copy of the Winning Post they sell. They will make between 10 cents and 15 cents for each copy of Fairfax’s son to launch free weekly sports newspaper The Form they give away. Why would they chase the smaller amount promoting a title which could reduce sales of the more lucrative title?

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Newspaper marketing
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