The Magazine Week conference, organised by trade association Publishers Australia, is taking place today and tomorrow at The Hilton in Sydney, with delegates from consumer, B2B and specialist publishers joined by some of the country’s largest print groups, including Offset Alpine, Webstar, Geon and Hannanprint.
Matthew Stanton, chief executive of the Bauer Media, the new name for ACP Magazines, gave this morning’s keynote address, in which he touched on magazines’ “glorious past, tough present and encouraging future”.
He said that in their glory days, “magazines were a must-have part of the media mix.”
[Analysis: Bauer buyout of ACP adds some gloss to sector]
Stanton conceded that there were cyclical challenges posed by the downbeat economy, as well as the rise of online advertising spend spread more thinly than ever across magazines, TV and radio.
“I don’t subscribe to the ‘death of magazines’ but there is a lot of talk in the industry, in the marketing community and at the advertising agencies about it. Digital has taken a slice off all channels,” said Stanton.
However, he pointed out that unlike most other communications mediums, “one of the unique things we have is people pay for content”.
Stanton urged magazine publishers to get away from the conversation about print versus digital, and embrace the “print plus digital” future, saying the combination of magazines and online was a better mix than TV and online, or radio and online.
“Print is in very good shape – you get the right product and the right team and you get very good results.”
He was then joined in a panel discussion by Nick Chan, chief executive of Pacific Magazines, Zelda Tupicoff, chief executive of Great Southern Press, and Jeremy Vaughan, managing director of Haymarket Media Australia, the owner of ProPrint.
Chan said publishers were partly to blame for the doom and gloom around print magazines. “We do talk down our achievements.”
He said that when the next circulation figures come out, he expected there to be more attention on the rise in tablet subscriptions for a title like Australian Women’s Weekly than the fact it still had more than 400,000 print subscribers.
“The commentators need to talk about what magazines deliver right here, right now in 2012,” added Chan.
Vaughan said magazine producers were experimenting to find the right mix of mediums, including print, websites and mobile.
“Publishers haven’t found our version of Angry Birds. It is the Wild West out there. We are all shooting and trying to hit the right target. We are stress testing all of these things.”
The magazine sector has had a shot in the arm recently with the renewal of trade association Magazine Publishers of Australia (MPA), which combines the three largest publishers: Bauer, Pacific and NewsLifeMedia.
Stanton expected the MPA to galvanise print publishers. “[Magazines] have fallen from an 8% to a 4% share of advertising. We still fight over that 4%; we need to fight against the 96%.”
Magazine Week concludes on Friday night with the Publishers Australia Excellence Awards.
[Related: Geon and Offset Alpine get behind excellence in print]
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