Less Often with Fewer Staff. The Brave New World.
Centaur announced a couple of weeks back the move of Precision Marketing from fortnightly to monthly "to concentrate on features." This is beginning to look like a familiar strategy. Huge cost savings, (fire some journalists - in this case the Editor himself is leaving - , piggy back the circ with another title -this really works in a postal price system that is size not weight dependent and reduce print costs.)
It used to be true that the most profitable magazines were those that pubished most frequently. It is increasingly obvious that few of the weekly titles will survive the current gloom. Depressing that, whilst no doubt necessary, none of this is about growth. Even the claim that there will more focus on the web is disingenuous when all these strategies involve producing copy with fewer journalists.
No wonder the City has turned against the business media sector. We look bereft of ideas. Lets make a pact to do better.
Labels: centaur media, precision marketing
posted by Businessmediablogger @ 6:31 pm
1 Comments:
To be fair, Precision Marketing has been an 'also-ran' title in the marketing spectrum for quite some time. In its heyday it was necessary as the only weekly mag talking about what at the time was a developing business sector.
Now, direct marketing forms the centrepeice of almost all marketing campaigns and so the subject is being covered more than adequately by the bigger generalist mags.
Add to that the collapse in classified revenues including recruitment, a much more high profile and widely circulated monthly competitor and Centaur's own leviathan, Marketing Week, taking chunks out of its baby sister and the writing was on the wall for PM a while back.
I would like to think that this was simply a result of the latest down turn but I feel that PM's (eventual) demise will be down to the changes in the marketing landscape more than advertiser/reader desertion to the web.
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