News Ltd has botched its support of the Wildlife Warriors charity established by the late Steve Irwin and his wife Terri. News is promoting the sale a green band for $1.00 to raise funds for the charity. Newsagents in NSW report being provided too little stock to satisfy demand. Several I spoke with sold out by noon. With newsagents the only outlet, they ought to have been supplied more than the number of newspapers they sell. Instead, they were supplied less. Significantly less. Making matters worse is a slow backup stock system which means newsagents won’t have bands until Tuesday. Too late.
It’s in South Australia that News Ltd really stuffed up. They ignored newsagents and appointed BP the exclusive distributor of the bands. This is nuts. I’d expect they would have sold more bands and raised more funds had they used newsagents. The takeaway for newsagents has to be that News considers them less relevant than BP.
In Victoria, a week ago, the bands were handled better by the Herald and Weekly Times folks.
Newsagents are being paid ten cents for every band sold – to cover their administration costs. Newsagents I have spoken with would have been happy to receive nothing as long as they were given sufficient stock to make the fund raiser work for the charity and as long as others in the supply chain worked for no margin as well.
If News was serious about raising the maximum amount of funds it would have run the campaign on one day nationally and leveraged better PR as a result. It would have used newsagents and, indeed, all newspaper outlets. It would have ensured sufficient stock and a good backup plan. That’s if it wanted to raise the maximum funds for the charity possible. (I appreciate that marketing plans are set months in advance and not all states could agree on the one date – but this campaign was unexpected and important to Australians.)
Turning this fund raiser into a commercial strategy and cutting out your core distribution channel as happened in South Australia is poor form. I reckon Steve Irwin would have something to say about it.
Photo from Sunday Telegraph website.
You must be really naive if you think News gives a rats about Steve Irwin, his charity or anyone else unless it can be leveraged into extra sales for News.
Why anybody buying these sorts of cheap geegaws on this occasion (or any of the countless other times the News rags have attempted to arbitrage people’s emotions to foist their imported rubbish on to them) would have any real impact on the preblems the Irwins were trying to solve is quite beyond me.
The “Is that the truth or did you read it in the Telegraph?” bumper stickers which are increasingly being seen around Sydney aren’t there becasue people love the Tele.