This is an extract from a speech Ellis Watson gave last week, opening the annual conference of the Scots division of PPA: Magfest…
THE digital revolution is at the heart of much of what we debate in the magazines sector, alongside a renewed need to innovate. For a decade now, digital has been discussed, it’s been revered and it’s often been misunderstood at these PPA forums. It is quite clear to us all that the threats of digital are now more understood, as many of us start to grapple with the opportunities.
To better understand the way magazines can embrace the opportunities of tomorrow, I’ve been asked to share my perspective on how other parts of the media, that I’ve been part of, can act as a shipwreck to warn those who work in magazines, away from the digital rocks that nearly sunk newspapers, TV and the recorded music industry.
So here we are then, a bunch of gorgeous magazine publishers looking at innovation in what feels like an uncertain time for us.
We’re looking neither as suicidal as newspapers nor as arrogant as the music business. We find ourselves paddling through our own ‘brown stuff’ and facing volume declines across the weekly market which is currently 10.5 per cent down, year-on-year, and the monthly market that is down ten per cent. It is, of course, critical to remain positive and not talk the industry down.
I can’t use blind optimism alone to delude the facts, because we are at a critical time in our business model’s evolution. Hope is not a strategy.
In 2007, just seven years ago, 1.21 billion copies of magazines were sold in the UK. Just three years later, in 2010, it went below a billion copies for the first time in two decades. Last year, it went down to 781 million copies bought in the UK.
I appreciate that this isn’t the precise cheery-up, motivating message we want to start with at this conference that’s designed to instill positive innovation in our industry. However, it is important that we don’t sit here and delude ourselves to pretend that things are fine. Because they are not.
So, let’s stop and think what we need to do to have someone more aerodynamic than me stand on this stage in a few years’ time projecting those same ingrained declines if the next three years continue like the last six as we slip, by 2017, below half a billion copies… because this will definitely happen, unless we fundamentally change things.
It’s really that attitude I’d like to address in the coming minutes.
Whilst digital channels are delivering some modest success, the average from all of the publishers who report to the PPA is £1 of new digital income to every £13.50 of old-world print. So, prospect with zeal but don’t believe all the digital voodoo futurologists that say that digital is the imminent saviour of our industry.
It’s an exciting complement to our business model but it’s neither the replacement of our lost profits nor the bullet that kills it. These detractors are telling us that the magazine industry is on the same slippery slope that newspapers were ten years ago, or the recorded music industry only six years ago.
The internet has given us some beautiful tools and toys to help find our audience, but to my mind it hasn’t yet replaced the authority and dedication of what only we can deliver. We don’t just comment on the news and lifestyles – we get it out there in the first place.
Our job is not to duck behind our desks to avoid the redundancy-rifle, or to timidly avoid confrontation and wait for a pay off; it’s to get off our pessimistic arses and get back to knocking on doors, befriending new contacts and unearthing fact, funnies, features and bugger-me stories that make a difference.
Watching a farting cat on YouTube, throwing an angry bird at a laughing green pig or watching yet another post-middle aged, portly friend thinking themselves cool by having a bucket of iced water over themselves may well generate a gazillion impressions in a nanosecond. However, the story about what’s really going off in Holyrood, reading a car review that makes your spine tingle, or the sort of passion that can be conveyed to a reader by a gifted magazine journalist, can deliver a reaction that will explode across platforms, harness social networks and grab the psyche of a nation.
It’s the job of anyone privileged enough to be called a journalist or a publisher to get back to informing, unearthing, amazing and delighting – we’re not selling Betamax video recorders, for the love of God.
This isn’t a ‘willy-wave’ boast. If my Scottish magazine team can take an almost 200 year-old magazine brand like The People’s Friend and turn an average annual decline of seven per cent, in the last decade, into one of just a handful of titles across the country that was actually up in sales, year-on-year (as well as ramping the cover price further from its less successful opposition than ever before), then anything is possible.
Innovation comes in so many forms. For many, it’s focused on the new, and I sincerely hope that publishers can start to un-batten the hatches and get back to more launches.
There’s opportunity out there in cross-over sectors, as long as you don’t bet the farm on a new launch. It’s not easy – our first IP launch in 20 years was last year with, Ruby Loves. The title lasted for just seven months before we closed it; but with the learning from that we’re launching our next in three weeks. Innovation also comes in the way you run your business model.
Innovation in magazines, above all else, needs to exist in the heart of how an organisation works. The people in this room are the management catalyst for getting teams to be brave, honest and excited about how they can prospect.
One of the guests here today is an amazing example of how an organisation can reinvent itself. Under different ownership, Time Out has transformed its working model, delivering a remarkable digital complement to a rejuvenated printed product.
The title has brought existing readers with them as well as creating millions of new disciples around the world.
Working in silos and being protectionist when times are tough may be a natural reaction of those under the cosh, but defensiveness and safety will only serve to shrink us faster.
Ellis Watson is CEO of DC Thomson.
