ANPL Decline distribution increase

Its public now to all SA ANF members so I can now let everyone else know.

In short ANPL has said it will not consider any distribution increase at all until the end of the financial year 08/09. From Adam Everett:

In light of the recent economic downturn and the negative impact this is
already having on reader and consumer discretionary spend and newspaper
sales it is our view that the market cannot currently sustain any further
increase to the cost of newspaper subscriptions without significant loss of
business.

National Enquiries Business Directory

Agents may have received a fax recently asking for details for the National Enquiries Business Directory. Above the area to fill in your details it says the only charge for the listing is the cost of returning the fax. When I went to actually fill it out I looked a little closer, the fax number is a 1900 number and faxing the form will actually cost $19.95.

Just a warning.

ANF: Nominations For Position of Director

Nominations are now called for the position of Director in Western Australia, New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory for a term of 2 years.

Nominations shall be closed by COB 13 October 2008.

There has been a lot of criticism this year about the ANF. The Bill Express debacle, The McAskill 'resignation' and percieved inaction and irrelevance have lead to dropping membership numbers and much anger and complaining.

Here is now the chance for all the people that have been vocal to step up and make a difference. The ANF can only be as good as its members. Nominate yourself and put your proposals up to the Newsagents in your state and let everyone decide what new vision (if any) they want in their federal representation.

Do not let apathy or resignation keep things in their current state. As long as people only sling comments from the sidelines Newsagents nationally will lack the representation and strength we deserve, and suffer for it. Newsagents will need unity and strong bargaining powers to face increasing challenges in the future with changes in the traditional distribution of media.

Once nominations are finalised, votes will need to be cast before the ANF AGM on Friday, November 28, 2008.

Reconciliations

In a stop press posted on connect today we are informed by The Advertiser that the deadline for all subscription customer reconciliations asked for back in December 2007 will need to be finalised by the end of October. Agents failing to submit the report will not be able to claim credits for errors past one month.

The point of the reconciliation was to credit agents for errors carried over from the disastrous NSS software upgrade in March 07. Agents at the time for a period where told even to ignore off notices. ANPL stood to owe Agents thousands for papers thrown away for up to nine months which we received no payment for, as the off notice either came through at a time when we told to ignore them, or the off notice did not come at all.

That we where unable to perform our own regular reconciles for many months exasperated the problem.

Most of us know the results. Credits where calculated then a whole heap of 'payments' discovered that where made to Agents for subscription customers who where off, which cancelled the credits out leaving many Agents with a supposed debt. The debt was magnanimously waived by ANPL.

As there are no actual credits to recoup I doubt that any Agent that hasn't submitted their reconcile by now is too worried about all the credits they may stand to lose.

Reminder: Daylight Savings

A stop press posted on connect today reminds everyone that daylight savings starts this Sunday (5/10) to put forward all clocks one hour at 2am. Press times will not be altered.

As such all Agents will have to make up that lost hour themselves.

Go You Reds reminder

For all Agents with BP On the Runs remember to look out for the charging of the Go You Reds T-shirts on this weeks Advertiser accounts.

We had one site that sold out based on the supply allocations given to us in the stop press. The other three sites where lucky to sell 60% it looks like with one being under 50%.

Again I was disappointed by the way the promotion was handled. I know better results could have been achieved with Agent participation.

Delivering the Ideal Solution

In The SA Business Journal section of Tuesday's Advertiser (page 44 23/9/2008) this week there is an article profiling Somerton Park Newsagency. Its not on Adelaidenow that I could find so I can't link to the article.

The brief article seems to paint a pretty positive picture of a Distribution Newsagency, especially as it seems to be saying they only work three and a half hours a day. To me it grossly simplifies the duties of a Distribution Newsagency, I guess this gives us a pretty good picture of what ANPL thinks an Agency does and what they are worth.

There are three more profiles to come in following weeks in the SA Business Journal. This is something ANPL has offered to do to help raise the profile of Newsagencies, especially Distribution Newsagencies as they are proving hard to sell at the moment. To come will be a profile on a multi-round Agency, a third generation Newsagent and one more. This was discussed at the MEPC Distribution meeting in August.

It is a good plan, and something positive on offer from ANPL. The article though is quite light, and misleading.

'GO YOU REDS' info better late than never?

Information is finally up on connect about the 'GO YOU REDS' BP On The Run promotion. They had a front page article on Wednesdays paper about it before they let the newsagents know.

I guess they think we don't need to know anything as the poor beleaguered area reps are dropping off all the stock, and picking up returns as well. The only thing we get lumbered with is the billing. As we aren't handling the stock at all we can't bill until the final figures appear on our account, so thats great for the cash flow.

Going to Adelaidenow there is nothing on the home page, sports page or soccer page about this promotion that I could see. There is a very poor advertisement at the bottom of page 3 in Friday's Advertiser that gives no information at all about where you can get the t-shirt. The promised list of all participating sites that was supposed to appear in Friday's paper hasn't.

This is the sort of promotion I would have featured on our website if we had had any forewarning.

WHO magazine supply

Big thanks to Gotch for failing to allocate us any supply of Who magazine. It's an auspicious start to the changeover. Extra points for not having any stock available to fix the error as well.

Undercut on Good Food magazine

After coming back fresh from the ACP Connections conference and being told how important the Newsagency channel is to them, its disappointing to see magshop being able to sell a 12 month subscription of the new BBC Good Food magazine for just $39.95 with an additional free apron.

As somehow the 12 month subscription is only for 11 issues that makes it in total 89 cents under cost price(11x$4.95 being $54.45 and 75% of that being $40.84). I can't believe that they can be doing this without additional discounting from ACP.

How important are we meant to feel now?

Connections conference

I have just made it through most of the ACP connections conference held today in Melbourne and it has been pretty interesting.

The focus though of course is on retail agents. So how much benefit is there for a distribution agency?

If you are asking yourself that question then ask yourself these questions. What makes my sub-agents different to a retail newsagency and am I utilising my sub-agents as effectively as I can?

Our sub-agents in general offer popular impulse titles. The ability to purchase magazines with their lunch or snacks or shopping is a convenience, and a way for our sub-agents to increase their customers basket size. The convenience and additional service is what keeps their regulars coming back.

So though we don't have direct control over the display space, or a market for a broader range of niche titles if you have developed good relationships with your sub-agents then developing good promotional plans together of value to both sides should be achievable. The display set-ups and other tactics used by a retail newsagencys should be very helpful in creating attractive profitable displays in even the smallest deli's and snack bars. Its a must if you want to grow.

Missed Opportunity - Spore creature creator promotion

This last weekend two News Limited Newspapers had a promotion giving away for free the 'Spore Creature Creator' This program allows people to participate in advance to the very hyped game coming out in early September called Spore.

This is a great promotion. The creature creator was released worldwide in early June(except for Australia) for anywhere between $10 and $15 roughly depending on currency conversion rates for digital download. It generated huge buzz for the game, and the online network that allowed people to upload their own creations to date has almost 2.5 million creatures uploaded with over 800k users.

Details of the promotion can be read here

This is the sort of promotion that would actually generate the sort of buzz and increase in sales to warrant it, as opposed to the normal TV show promotional stuff we get in a free giveaway.

I don't know whether The Advertiser simply wasn't interested, got neglected or there wasn't enough stock or other drama, but it does seem pretty bad to me to get overlooked like this and miss what would have been a great promotion.

Overdue customers - update

When submitting your list make sure you add in phone numbers to get your overdue customers removed from the telemarketing list. I only sent address and name and apparantly that is not enough info.

I've also been told we can expect further clarification to come regarding just how The Advertiser uses our data, what customers are eligible for subscription offers and what customers we need to inform them to remove from their lists.

Overdue agent collect customers and subscription offers

Everyone (in South Australia) should have seen the notice by now on Connect regarding agent collect customers directly being targeted by telemarketers. That in itself is a problem but additionally in the past it was enough for an agent to tell the Advertiser, once we received the on notice, that no this person has an overdue acount and should not receive the special. The main basis being that someone already late in their payments are even less likely to pay us once they start their account with another source.

The Advertiser has now determined that Agents need to advise them in advance of customers that are ineligible. Should agents fail to do so they will be obligated to deliver the subscription order. The deadline for the first lot of notifications is Friday August 1st.

Obviously only submitting one list is not the end of it on the agents side. This weeks good customer could be a bad one a few months down the track.

In order to save some telemarketing resources The Advertiser are again lumbering the agent with further administrative costs to secure basic control of our business.

Agents will now have to plan a schedule to keep The Advertiser up to date on overdue customers, simply so we can rule them out for subscription deals which undercut our prices and shrink our margins.

For NBS users whilst in the Home Delivery browser, going to task>customer reminders you can then produce a report based on your own parameters, either a set outstanding dollar value or days since last payment. This report should be good enough to give The Advertiser data this week before the deadline. On-going reporting is probably best done at account printing time, when in the summary report everyone with a brought forward balance should be deemed 'overdue'.

Online listings for Newsagencies

To date business listing web sites in my opinion have had little usefulness for distribution newsagents. I have made profiles in several of the free Australian ones available but haven't encountered any customer contact resulting from them.

Three are a number of reasons, primarily I think the dominance of Google limits the traffic of these sites. I also think to most people the product is primary in their mind over the business, so that when they want to purchase a certain title or organise home delivery they are more likely to search online via the title. Finally these sites cater more to fixed location businesses rather than area based services.

The information fields many of these sites have also make it hard to accurately portray your business. Some of them I have found hard to even find a listing for 'Newsagent' let alone a distribution agency. Entering the data for your free listing can be a frustrating affair. You can also expect to be contacted from some of them wanting to sell you a premium listing.

If you do have some time to kill though here is a list of the sites that I am aware of and have myself used to make a free listing.

Hotfrog

Aussie Web

zpages

street-directory.com.au

truelocal

bigroo

Price change reminder-Sat Herald Sun

Just a reminder to everyone that from 26/7/2008 the price of the Saturday Herald Sun is going up 10c to be $1.90 inclusive of freight. Details are on connect.

Advertiser supply

It seems The Advertiser is getting tighter on changing supply figures and applying a different rule to how they will alter your supply figures week to week.

My understanding is that formerly the 'acceptable' returns rate for The Advertiser was 6% of your sub-agent sales. Now in recent discussions it has been told to me that in general a flat 3% rate will be used on the rounds total supply. On the surface this seems to favour home delivery heavy rounds and make things hard for Sub-Agent heavy ones.

The other point is that they review week to week based only on last weeks sales figures. I don't think I need to explain how short-sighted these sort of reactionary changes can be. One bad day and we are going to be forced to scrape and beg for a decent supply the next week, or rely more heavily on the top-up service.

It should be pretty obvious that Agents have all the incentive in the world to minimalise the amount of returns we handle, and are the ones with the best knowledge of our territories and all its peculiar needs. Its another case of The Advertiser not wanting to trust Agents, or accept that certain area's have external factors that can lead to some significant variance in sales.

We supply some markets that can sell an extra 200+ Sunday Mails when the weather is good, but when it rains we get high returns. left unchecked I know that one wet week is going to ruin the next weeks fair weather, and not only in lost sales but in our sub-agents confidence in us that we are capable agents.

Everyone that has a BP in their territory will also know that there seems to be no shortage of supply for them, and in general I have noticed are consistantly among the highest returners among all our sub-agents. The Advertiser is able to keep supply bumped up to suit their 'prefered' partners it seems.

We get told high returns are a cost issue, and so their answer is simple. Burden the Agent with more administrative costs having to double check and fix supply alterations applied with a formula rather than our own expert knowledge.

As far as I am aware most area managers will look at supply figures on Thursdays. Agents wanting to be proactive will need to set time aside this day to check for any changes and be prepared to contact their area manager to make any alterations.

Welcome

Welcome to the Distribution Newsagency blog. The intention of this blog is to give out news, information and opinion specifically related to Newsagents that focus on Home Delivery and supply to Sub-Agents.

We have our own concerns seperate from retail newsagents, many of which are now off loading their home delivery obligations. We are much more reliant on the small commissions and fee's we can charge than outlets with other revenue streams, and more susceptible to the OH&S compliance and inflationary pressures on delivery costs.

The two initial contributers to this blog are Don Lewis and Ian Wright. Don Lewis is the Director of Newspaper Delivery Solutions which is cuurently operating seven distribution newsagencies, and a board member of the SA branch of the ANF. Ian Wright is a manager at Newspaper Delivery Solutions and has over 12 years experience in the industry.

Together we can all help to maintain legitimacy and sustainability in an industry going through major revision and marginalisation.