Author: Mark Fletcher

Newslink in the Virgin Blue terminal at melbourne airport has given over one aisle end to a line of cosmetics with a promotional tag of: as seen in In-Style. While I do not expect traditional newsagencies to make such a move, this is an interesting expansion of the usual Newslink offering.

MediaWeek reports that the team behind Men’s Journal has launched Tradie, a magazine aimed at tradesmen who work on building sites on the east coast of Australia. The print run is over 50,000 with copies being distributed through Mitre-10 stores and direct to building sites. From what I can find out online – through MySpace entries and other forums – Tradie is in the same genre as Zoo Weekly, Picture and People but from a tradesman’s perspective.

The photo shows the front and back to Dynamic Business. The challenge is which side do you give the facing to? Given how is arrived in the bundle our team thought it was an export title and considered it to be of little interest to our demographic. Flip it over and there is the better known masthead. While the label generated by the point of sale software provides the details.

Sometimes, on a busy magazine day, there is little time to read the detail of the labels. We sorted it out and now display Dynamic Business as opposed to some obscure export title – I wonder if others had the same experience. This is not the only title to have a dual cover. When publishers do that it would be good for newsagents to be provided a heads up which includes the reasoning behind the decision and suggested action.

As the Bakery Australia website says, The National Bread Day has been conceived to popularise the consumption of bread across the country by creating awareness of its dietary and nutritional values. Brilliant.

As I blogged here a month ago, in the UK they have Magazine Week for similar reasons – to popularise magazines. Indeed, at their website they say: We started Magazine Week because we wanted everyone to know just how big and diverse the UK magazine industry is, with a magazine for every available lifestyle, hobby or interest. Brilliant again!

Newsagents could launch magazine week and own the concept in consumer’s minds. If we got the pitch right we should see a sales kick and greater loyalty to our channel compared to the other channels selling magazines. Key to such a week or a day is to have the pitch right and consistent across the channel and to support this with a giveaway – like the Bakers Delight booklet given free to every customer today (see photo). Brilliant.

If we are the magazine specialists we need to find a way to own that concept. A Magazine Week or a Magazine Day could do the trick. If publishers, the MPA or associations get behind this, I’d love to be involved.

We capped our magazine area with over thirty metres of light boxes for magazine posters when we moved to our current location five years ago. While I’d prefer to have LCD screens capping magazines, these light boxes still work well. They look especially good when publishers make sure we have sufficient poster material to boldly promote a title. The issue of Australian Womens Weekly out today is a good example.

As is the current issue of Better Homes and Gardens.

This is bold in-store support above and beyond the aisle end displays, co-location and front of house posters demonstrate the difference between a newsagency and, say, a supermarket or convenience outlet selling magazines.

Publishers need to keep good quantities of these materials flowing for without them newsagents cannot create good display and fill their light boxes.

Eleven years ago when I bought my newsagency we had one and a half metres of adult magazines. Today, we barely have one column – not counting the column with Zoo Weekly, Ralph and FHM.

The photo shows the new adult section as I see it in an average newsagency.

While different demographics will require a different range, sales data I see from other newsagencies suggests that a column or less is all that is needed to service the adult category. The Internet and the establishment of petrol outlets as a viable magazine channel mean that adult is not the category it was for newsagents eleven years ago.

It is disappointing that some distributors continue to overload some newsagents in the adult category by supplying more product than can be justified by the sales data. Often, when this is brought to their attention, they fix the problem. This should not have to happen, distributors ought to scale back based on the sales data and not a complaint from a noisy bugger like me.

Boys of all ages love to browse Mad magazine (yours truly included) so imagine the shock to find this issue wrapped in plastic. No, it not is full of adult images, they have sent two free issues with this current issue.

While the freebies are a nice gesture, the plastic bagging will hurt sales, or lead to trash, since Mad is highly browsed.

The best alternative I can think of would be to have the giveaway product at the counter and a sticker on the cover promoting this. At least browsers would be satisfied.

On the weekend I blogged welcoming the price increase for the Sunday Herald Sun. While newspaper publishers continue to be shy at adjusting cover prices even to keep up with CPI, magazine publishers are not. Auto Action, Picture Premium and Rugby League Week all have cover prices coming. Keeping up with CPI helps newsagents keep up with rent and wage rises. If only the newspaper publishers understood that.

How is this for a bit of nostalgia? John Klemm from Mildura send me this magazine header which he has had in his newsagency for around twelve years. At Tower Systems we started creating these personalised magazine headers 15 years ago as a serving to our software customers. They were the first of their kind, long before the marketing groups and MPA got into the space. We created these headers for around 150 newsagents.

The idea behind the headers was to help customers differentiate between the sea of titles in newsagencies. From a software perspective we used the provision of the headers to drive better category management and title placement in Tower newsagencies. We saw this as an appropriate way for us to engage with our customers and demonstrate how point of sale software can be more than a glorified cash register.

The header for Small Business which John sent me last week has held up well compared to some of the headers I see in newsagencies today. It certainly says something about the quality of the computer printer and ink we were using at the time.

As the stats in the graphic show, Glam.com is hot. According to commentators, Glam is not the #1 internet site./network visited by US women. Venture Beat has a full story about Glam and its success.

One must ask if Glam is the women’s magazine of the future? Is this what will replace Madison, Cleo, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire? While just about everyone reading this will say no, the visitor stats to the Glam website speak for themselves. 17 million in a month is amazing readership.

The key to the success of Glam appears to be the 350 magazines, websites and blogs make up its content network. This provides content diversity.

Glam is demonstrating that here is an online audience and that advertisers want to connect with that audience. This will, naturally, see some advertising migrate from print media which targets the same audience, to online and, specifically, Glam.

Newsagents ought to take a look at Glam and compare it to magazines on their shelves. It is another reason newsagents need to be investing resources in navigating to the newsagency of the future.