Did Are Media director of sales Andrew Cook just throw newsagents under the bus?

Quoted in the nationally distributed mediaweek email and online Monday, Andrew Cook is quoted speaking about our channel:

“A lot of people who are under 30 don’t often walk into a newsagent; they often don’t buy a tangible printed product”

I wrote to senior contacts at Are Media Monday within minutes of the email being circulated:

Maybe Andrew Cook should find out who actually shops in newsagencies.

Young people are buying cards, journals and social stationery in numbers not seen in decades. They are also consumers of pop culture, which newsagents dominate.

It is disappointing to see Are Media’s Director of Sales throw our channel under the bus.

I’ve not received a response.

I’d love to see the data on which Cook based his comments. Newsagents I have spoken with over the last couple of days disagree with his assessment.

Maybe it’s the magazines that Are Media publishers that inform Cook’s view because, for sure, folks under 30 are not likely to buy Who, New Idea, Woman’s Day, AWW, Take 5, That’s Life and others in their stable.

Some card companies started focussing more on younger card shoppers years ago. We see under 30s buying cards in our shops. Some stationery manufacturers have created products for this younger age once they realised that journaling is more popular than ever.

Then, there is pop culture. That space is huge and plenty of us do well in it. And, when I talk about pop culture, there is the usual licensed products you could think of, and then there are subsets, like Japanese stationery, which is huge in parts of Australia.

The newsagency shingle is meaningless today because of the extent of diversity of businesses in our channel.

Sure there are some newsagency businesses living in the past and relying on lottery products and an old looking shop for daily trade. There are many more, however, that have transitioned into vibrant fun retail experiences, shops having terrific success at attracting younger shoppers.

But let’s get back to Are Media director of sales Andrew Cook. What was he thinking? Why did he make a point of singling out the Aussie newsagency channel for the negative focus of what he said? Has he done this to create distance between the Are Media business and the newsagency channel?

I expect at some point some people from Are Media will tell newsagents how important they are, how much they appreciate them and to not dwell on Andrew Cook’s comments. Maybe they will say he was taken out of context. 48 hours later is a bit late to walk back what was so widely circulated.

Maybe Are Media does feel disconnected from the newsagency channel. I suspect they have less space in newsagencies with their magazines than they had a few years ago. Newsagents continue to reduce space allocated to magazines. It happens when you have a low margin product sent through an archaic magazine distribution system that rarely listens to retailers as to what could work in their businesses.

One of my shops does well over $400,000 a year in magazines. The category is important to us. Our magazine sales continue to increase. August 2023 was up 9% on August 2022. And, yes, we have user 30s buying some magazines, like skateboard titles, surfer titles, mountain biking titles and on-trend fashion titles.

Maybe I am making more of Cook’s comment than it deserves. To be honest though, I am tired of ignorant comments about our channel. We had a good Covid. Newsagencies are selling easily, because they are seen as good businesses. And, as I noted earlier, many of us have evolved to make our businesses appealing to demographics outside what was traditional for our channel years ago.

See for yourself Cook’s quote featured prominently in the email circulated to thousands of media professionals and on the mediaweek website.

Rant over, I’m going back to running my businesses. People in supplier big businesses come and go while many of us who own businesses are the ones doing the real long-term work in our channel.