Mike Ashley: retailer, football baron…publisher

Following last week’s consumer magazine ABC results, Dominic Mills wonders how one title is doing so well amid a sea of sales declines.

That renegade, rogue-ish entrepreneur Mike Ashley seems to be able to spin gold out of most things he touches, apart from Newcastle United, and his latest wheeze is magazine publishing.

Surprised? All the sophistry in the world (see below) can’t disguise the fact that, as a whole, the magazine sector is in a mess, as last week’s ABC figures show.

Among the sea of minus signs, one of the few pluses was Forever Sports, which recorded an ABC of just over 90,000, a 45 per cent increase in the six months between July and end-December. Considering Forever Sports only launched in March last year, that is turbo-charged progress.

Here’s the oddity. Forever Sports is actually ‘fronted up’ (i.e. edited and published) by my old mates at Haymarket Network on behalf of Ashley and his Sports Direct retailing empire.

Yes, it’s a bit of content marketing for Ashley and the many retail brands he owns, and is aimed at the 18-30 young males demographic. But the difference, unlike other content marketing or publishing which is free, is that the punters actually pay £2 a pop for the magazine.

It’s this that enables Haymarket to claim that Forever Sports is now the second-biggest title, as measured by active purchases, in the men/sports sectors.

Hmm, you wonder, how does Ashley get away with that? Two reasons: one, the content is good – and the team clearly ‘gets’ its audience; two, there’s no hard sell, very little overt branding of Sports Direct or any of its operating entities.

I imagine one or two brands piling into content marketing could learn a lot from this approach.

Of course, Sports Direct is not the only retailer to dive head first into paid-for magazine publishing as a part of its marketing effort. You’ll remember Net a Porter’s Porter magazine, which launched in February last year but with a thumping cover price of £5.

I wish I could tell you with absolute certainty how it is doing. But it has chosen to ‘self-report’ a circulation of 152,500 – what an amazing round number – for its first six issues. I’m always unhappy when publishers circumvent accepted industry measuring bodies. What’s wrong with ABC?

How to read a publisher ABC press release

It’s been hugely entertaining to see the various tricks – which mostly seem to involve dancing on the head of a pin – employed by the magazine publishers to explain away a grim picture.

Let’s start with PPA boss Barry McIlheney, who falls back on that old sports cliché about ‘form is temporary and class is permanent‘ to explain away a collective slide of 8.5 per cent in circulation.

You’ve got to give Barry full marks for trying, but the implication of his analogy is that a bounceback is just around the corner, and the next ABCs – or the one after, or the one after that- will see sales soaring.

I don’t think so. The best publishers can hope for is managed decline.

Here are some of the other code words used by publishers, and what they really mean:
‘Stable’ – ‘down a bit, but we’re hanging on grimly’
‘Year on Year’ – ‘ok, the last period was terrible, but hey, look at it over the longer term’
‘Title X’ maintains market share – ‘the whole sector is buggered and we’re all in it together’
‘Title Y’ increases market share’ – ‘the whole sector is buggered, but at least the others are doing worse than we are’
‘Increased our brand footprint/reach’ – ‘we’re giving loads of digital stuff away for free’.

Creativity and context

Last week I sat through a Thinkbox-organised discussion about the Lego Movie ad break, featuring the client (Warner Brothers), the agency (PHD) and the relevant media owner (ITV).

You can watch the whole event here, and the relevant section is about 25 minutes in.

What I had not appreciated was the role ITV played – not just facilitative, but equal parts creative and catalyst – in making the whole thing happen.

In the endless search for creative ideas or expressions thereof, it’s easy to forget that it helps if you can get the media owner/s, not just onside, but actually ‘invested’ – emotionally, rather than financially – in the idea.

Once that happens, chances of success are much higher. In the Lego case, ITV was on board at least six months ahead of the film release. Throughout, it was flexible about things like exactly when the break would run and for how long. As the concept see-sawed between failure and success, its support was crucial.

The point about Lego, of course, is the link between creative and context, and the added value the audience gets when the two work in sync together.

As the machines take over the buying process, it’s easy to see how context, which can add so much to a media plan, gets lost. The algorithms do price efficiency and audience targeting (or at least they claim to); they don’t do context and media owners who understand its importance.

For that you need humans. At different ends of the scale, we’ve seen a few examples of this recently.

Last night’s launch of the new C4 blockbuster Indian Summers (actually filmed in Penang, Malaysia, but we’ll let that pass), saw the first break bookended by Bombay Sapphire and Cobra. Truth be told, it wasn’t exactly stand-out (and nor was the programme). But let’s give them credit for trying.

A few weeks ago, Sky launched Fortitude with an ice-themed ad break featuring ads from Jagermeister, Peugeot, Ariel and Sony Bravia.

But perhaps my favourite example was the decision by both C4 and the advertiser, News UK, to run a commercial for the Times in the middle of a break in the last series of Homeland.

The film, from the Times’s Unquiet Film series, featured the story of reporter Anthony Loyd, kidnapped and held for ransom in northern Syria by terrorists, an echo of one of Homeland’s plotlines.

To me, this was not just creative, but brave. There was a danger some viewers might have thought the Times was exploiting a controversial story line. If anything, however, it was more powerful than than anything rendered by the programme.

Talking of context and creativity, I saw this ad for the Samaritans on the platform of my train station. I wish the guy who’d jumped two weeks before had seen it; he might be alive.