Author: Mark Fletcher

I was at my local BP petrol outlet last night and noticed a promotion for Women’s Health, the new magazine from Pacific Magazines which launches today. The deal was a free sampler of a couple of articles from the magazine if I buy a bottle of water.

The lack of knowledge by the employee behind the counter about the new magazine and the co-promotion with water meant the campaign was a dud where I live. I was surprised to see the new title being promoted in the BP outlet given their poor commitment to magazines.

I am not aware of the sampler offer being put through newsagents. If it ran in petrol outlets I’d be most disappointed. Newsagents are well placed to talk up magazine launches. We are the ones who will invest plenty of real-estate promoting the title today and for this week.

Publishers suck up to newsagents telling them how great they are and that Australia needs the magazine specialist retailers. Sometimes, their marketing decisions tell us otherwise.

Here is an example of where rules can work against newsagents.

The excellent Good Health is a feature magazine in the ACP magazines Connections program. This means we are to do an aisle end display. If we do that we will not have enough stock for the co-location strategy which works well for this title.

So, we have decided to not do the Connections display. Instead, we have Good Health in three locations including between Australian Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day. We have sold six copies in four and a half days – that’s 37.5% of supplied stock. I’d expect to have sold 60% by Sunday – demonstrating that our strategy is appropriate for the 16 copies we have received.

I understand that the Connections display is also about promoting the brand. The reality is that I need a better return than I can get from 16 copies if I am to provide an a valuable aisle end for as display.

Maybe I am too precious about mastheads. Take a look at this masthead from the latest issue of The Horse Magazine where they obscure a chunk of the title:

example from

Then there is Asian Geographic – obscuring the title.

While this may not matter to people who know the titles well, to new staff and new customers it is a problem.

The packaging and distribution of this compact Cricket magazine from the ABC has been handled well. I opened the box and there it was, all setup and ready to go on display. This is how feature or promotional product ought to come – saving labour on a busy morning.

As the display unit will not fit in our sports section, we have placed this at the counter.

Here is another example of what can make newsagents grumpy – more titles which we are to have on the shelves for five months. This on sale period is ridiculous in a newsasgency where shelf space is short and where we often pay for titles, not always but most, a few weeks after receiving the stock. I would prefer either two drops of such a long shelf life title or billing on the basis of sales data. The current arrangement is unfair to newsagents and is another reason newsagents get grumpy. It’s our money being shelled our to support the long shelf life titles. As with my previous post, a magazine czar who controls access to our real-estate would stop this.

Newsagent suppliers often complain about the grumpiness of newsagents. Maybe if these suppliers had their own money at stake in a newsagency they would begin to understand how a good day can turn bad and a good mood can become grumpy.

Take this magazine, Holden in Australia, from Universal magazines. It is to be on sale for five months. Based on sales of similar categories I know I am likely to sell one or two copies. This means, if I do what Universal wants, that will have a pocket allocated to the title for five months.That will cost $17.50. Even if I sell all four copies I received, my GP will be $8.95. See my point?

Labeling magazines in the morning is like writing a cheque for the privilege of gifting real-estate and labour to companies like Universal who love long shelf life product – no wonder newsagents get grumpy. Until the publishers own and operate a newsagency I do not expect them to understand the damage they are doing.

This is why we need a magazine czar.

Youplay.com is being advertised heavily on radio 3AW Melbourne and, I suspect, elsewhere around Australia. It’s a partnership between Lovatts and Southern Cross Broadcasting.

The website is easy to use and designed to suit its target visitor. I reckon it will be a huge success. The partnership with Southern Cross is excellent given their reach and the demographic of their radio stations.

While access to YouPlay is free, the good stuff it will cost punters $4.99 a month.

Newsagents are actively promoting YouPlay on every Lovatts magazine in store. That’s fair I guess – Lovatts are welcome to promote whatever they want on their product. However, it contradicts their view that YouPlay will attract an entirely different customer to the purchaser of Lovatts crossword and Sudoku magazines from newsagencies.

If sales in my newsagency are anything to go off, a Princess Mary cover has to be worth at least a 10% sales kick – more it it has been a while since Mary has been on a cover.

My 10% claim is based on sales yesterday in one newsagency – we sold 10% more than usual without doing anything different.

We picked up this payslip for W. Davis yesterday off the floor of our newsagency and put it aside to forward. They we picked up another and another. How many payslips has this person lost?

Hang on, they are all for the same date, this is a fake.

After a bit of investigation we discovered it is an ad for the MyCareer employment site – inserted in this week’s NW magazine.

From the trash we have collected I’d say more than 50% of the MyCareer ads will be trashed. They fall out because of the other, bigger, insert in this week’s issue of NW. Had the MyCareer ad been inserted alone, not as many would fall out.

The mechanics aside, I am surprise of the choice of NW for a MyCareer promotion.

I am proud to carry Australian Wood Review, Fine Woodworking, Woodcraft Magazine and Woodsmith in my newsagency. They represent the point of difference between a run of the mill magazine retailer and a magazine specialist. Maybe not these specific titles, but special interest titles like them.

We have between eight and twelve woodwork related titles at any one time. It is a segment well browsed and while sales are not stellar, having the category is important to our credentials. The challenge is to balance the offer and ensure that we achieve a commercial return from the space allocated to the segment. This is very hard when we have three distributors of magazines and they do not have visibility of sales. It is good to see one distributor working on this.