For years I have been on a mission to persuade the trade press to do its job and support the industry instead of squabbling among themselves for an ever decreasing supply of crumbs. Printers talk to each other about business. Suppliers talk to each other about business. Both are increasingly sophisticated about their messaging and are open about making a profit in the 21st century from all the avenues available. Each has its own trade bodies where members speak freely and share advice.
Then there are the press and PRs who are stretching out the increasingly unsustainable pre-internet model of the ‘church’ of press releases without the ‘state’ of magazine advertising. Some agencies and in-house marketers talk of a responsibility to support the press, which has an air of providing charity to an endangered species when in fact the media plays a vital role in messaging.
The amount of print companies has shrunk by at least half since we took on ownership of Print Business in 2010, yet there are more magazines. Marketing budgets are also shrinking, postage goes up by a ridiculous amount every January and it is not possible to publish a free magazine and make money from it. Each publisher has its own balancing act of revenue streams and the magazines are our respective shopfronts, regardless of the increasing magazine fatigue of which printers complain (“I get too many. I never take them out of the polywrap”). But they still prefer to complain to their customers about favouritism instead of recognising changing requirements and adapting their offering.
Our USP is our editor, Gareth Ward, and everyone in the industry knows it. We make our modest profit from charging for his knowledge, expertise and (less so in the pandemic) presence from a select few suppliers with deep pockets. And an ad-free website full of independent editorial and very high engagement which Google’s algorithm rates ridiculously highly. This is why we howl with anguish internally when we are handicapped in the few marketing channels available to us shout about ourselves, because of the high dudgeon of the other publishers. So many plaudits come to us yet they languish in our inbox where no one else can see them as those that praise us fear retribution.
The printing industry trade press is a small community, and because of press trips we have to be a community, we have to get on, sharing travel and eating arrangements, sitting alongside each other at press conferences (happy days, they may return). Most of us have known the others for years, decades. It is time we all recognised that each of us brings something different to the marketing mix. Print Business occasionally gets calls about recruitment ads. We tell them they would be better of with Print Week. As we send the magazine out ‘naked’, when asked to quote on an insert we recommend the most appropriate polybagged title. When we’re in discussions with suppliers with regard to their annual budget and they say that they ‘have to support all the titles’, we wouldn’t dream of telling them that they don’t, that they should do what gets the best return for them. We just agree. They are the customer. And we certainly wouldn’t dream of contacting them to ask why we don’t have an ad that is running elsewhere.
Because of the proliferation of magazines, it may be that we all get taken for granted, that we will always be there. But as the whole printing industry knows, putting print into the hands of the end user is pricy, but worth it. Nothing beats print. I think that’s one thing we can all agree on.
