Will Corke's digital gallimaufry

News from Marketing magazine today that UK retail giant ASDA has opened a digital download magazine store, powered by John Menzies Digital.

Sounds interesting, so what’s going on in the digital magazine distribution space?

A bit of a dig around yields some slightly surprising (to me) observations…

1. Digital versions of magazines are sold for the same price as they are off the news-stand. You would have thought this would severely limit the market potential for the digital distribution channel. Clearly some people will enjoy the freedom of being able to access their favourite mag’s content from the comfort of their laptop, but most consumers will surely expect publishers to pass on savings in print and distribution costs.
2. The Asda site is as basic a re-skin of the John Menzies site as you could possibly get. In what way does this add value to Asda’s proposition?  Why bother?

There’s a press release dated June ‘08 from John Menzies and WHSmith on the e-consultancy site, which says a similar partnership is in place betweeen JM and WHS as the Asda deal, but the WHS emagazines site referred to in the press release doesn’t seem to be live…

All in all, I’d say that while it’s great to see traditional businesses trying to get to grips with the digital re-engineering of their markets, they should be a bit braver in their attempts to grasp the future.  Protecting the cover price of the print magazine is understandable, but is not the way to create new revenue streams or markets; or (in all probability) to protect existing ones.

There are plenty of examples of how to transition magazine publishing business models more or less successfully (from the likes of NME / Smash Hits etc.), but while publishers have been forced to get to grips with shifting revenue models, it seems that retail/distribution businesses have not yet felt the full force of digital pain.

With thanks to the splendidly easy to use Wordle application.

These visualisation techniques seem to develop at dizzying speed. Will the recession throttle investment in innovations of this kind? A lot of the significant stuff that’s changed the digital landscape over the past 3-4 years was born in the dot-com crash aftermath, so perhaps not.

Common sense and my marketing training both encourage my natural instinct to Zag while others Zig; so having failed to get blogging for the past several years, it’s fitting that this first posting from me should follow a piece on Wired trumpeting the death of blogging. Let’s hope I can squeeze through the door of the bloggatorium without being crushed by the crowds rushing for the exit.

And then just as I was chewing over my content for this piece, Mark Adams from the Conversation Group was kind enough to contribute a splendid piece of copy, to help me on my way. Over to Mark:

“Hello World, this is my first blog…I’m having a coffee at Starbricks and wondering how amazing the world is today from my perspective and thinking you’ll be really interested in it, ho my word, the waiter’s got a lovely hat on, and Obama should be outlawing them v McCain and the credit crunch end of the world coffee amazing Huffington Robert Peston nicky nack noo Facebook flickr” repeat 365 times at 9am each day and you’re a blogger!!!! Easy”

I suppose as a Twitter user who’s not blogged before, I’m coming at the longer form from a bit of a digital native viewpoint, which could help. I’ll just need to expand and expound.

But why take the blog step? A couple of reasons:

1. My job is to understand the digital media landscape for clients, and I do believe you ‘get’ how things work better for having got your hands properly dirty.

2. As a marketing agency, we’re advising clients to open up their organisations and teams to connect with their customers and other audiences; so this is a simple practise what you preach thing.

Reservations? A couple of fairly major ones: I’m not a journalist or professional writer, so why bother to ventilate to the world when others, and so many of them, can do a better job of it; and also, will anyone bother to read my stuff even supposing it is any good.