Upskirts and adult ads off the front and back pages as Sport Newspapers gear up for growth - North West Media News

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Upskirts and adult ads off the front and back pages as Sport Newspapers gear up for growth

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Friday, 16 November 2007

Sport Newspapers, now the largest constituent of AIM-listed Sport Media Group (market cap £85m), is introducing a number of sweeping changes at the titles as the management seeks to radically refresh the title and take advantage of what it sees as an opportunity to expand as the ‘red tops’ move more mid-market.

Andrew Fickling, MD of Sport Newspapers (SNL), also sits on the plc board. The company raised £60m when Interactive World reversed into Sport Newspapers in September.

Fickling

A good chunk of that went the way of founder David Sullivan as he pocketed circa £14.5m but the float also significantly widened the company’s shareholder base and offered the merged company a substantial sum to invest in operations: both in mobile telephony and in the papers themselves.

Fickling and his colleagues felt the daily and Sunday papers needed some TLC and investment. “Basically we had a powerful brand” he said. “Bombers on the moon and double decker buses in the Antarctic may have been 15 years ago but you tell me which other tabloid covers you can remember over that period excluding perhaps ‘Gotcha’ (the Sun when Port Stanley was retaken).

“But as with all brands, it needed refreshing. And what had been seen as fun had become too salacious. In response to falling sales over the past few years, we arguably misinterpreted the situation and over compensated with yet more upskirts and placed them on the covers, rather than on the inside pages as we used to.

“So retailers were becoming increasingly reluctant to stock the product.”

Before

The company had also simply got too used to enjoying fat profit margins - £3m net from adult services ads. The perceived need for investment in the operation had dwindled away.

The sales operation was in Leicester and there were no staff employed in circulation, marketing or research.

Hand in hand with any relaunch felt Fickling, was the need to invest. So new staff have come on board across the company and the sales operation has been relocated to the Manchester base.

Adult ads have been taken off the back pages and it is now page 13 before the unsuspecting reader will find one. And on Saturdays, when sales had really fallen off the cliff, from 105,000 Monday to Friday, to 65, 000, all the adult ads have been pulled together in one handy pull-out section (Ed - careful). This was done because the paper’s typical ‘White Van Man’ reader couldn’t give a flying **** of others’ views at the workplace, but on a Saturday in a ‘different environment’, the paper and its ads had become too intrusive.

Sales, claims Fickling, are now showing the first signs of growth in many years
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Over 700 new retailers have opted back into stocking the papers in the past few weeks including the supermarket chain Somerfield.

Former Loaded editor James Brown, has much to do with this repositioning. He was recruited by Fickling in August as a ‘creative consultant’ and is now aiding the search for a new editor-in-chief for the two titles. The ad appeared in the Guardian this week. The two current editors, Nick Appleyard (Saturday/Sunday) and Dave Beevers (Mon-Fri) will report to the new person in due course.

“Brown” said Fickling “is introducing a tighter editorial structure and is bringing on board good contacts and creativity.”

Brown is doing two days a week at the papers: one in London and one in Manchester. Elsewhere staff numbers have increased and now 105 people are employed full time in Manchester.

The changes have enabled the company to start selling display ads for the first time in many years.

Eighteen months ago said Fickling, the papers sold perhaps £20,000 of display ads (army recruitment) out of a total of £14m in ad revenue – adult ads providing the entire balance. This year he is looking for around £1.5m from display ads and claims to be on course. New advertisers include Dial-a-Phone, Setanta and mortgage and loan companies: response ads – a natural home for the paper Fickling happily admits.

Promotions are now also being undertaken and Paddy Power has just returned for seconds he said, so pleased were they were with the response they got to their initial promotion.

After

To ensure the paper capitalises on the growing opportunity, SNL is interviewing three London sales representation houses and is hoping to appoint one shortly. “It’s a fact” said Fickling. “The bulk of our display revenue will come from agencies and we need sales presence in London.”

With all these changes and new writers signed up including Ricky Hatton, Peter Reid and two columnists from TalkSport, the paper is about to embark on a more aggressive promotional campaign.

SNL has negotiated directly with ITV and will be trialling a Granada only TV campaign starting in January backed up by radio ads across Granada land. Depending on results, the campaign is planned to go national on a region by region basis concentrating on the papers’ key sales areas: the North West, Glasgow, Birmingham and London.

Fickling, Brown and the team are currently talking to agencies in London and Manchester about the creative approach but admitted the task was proving more of a challenge than he’d envisaged.

Sales are rising and Fickling believes the papers can and will show an increase of circa 10% over the coming year and should rise to circa 140,000 sales a day over the next two to three years. As every increase of 10,000 adds £2m to the bottom line, the upside is substantial. And together with efficiency improvements in hand with the wholesalers and the expected £1.5m of new display ads, the papers could be generating towards £10m of profit if the plans come off. Which combined with the circa £4m of current profits from the company’s mobile services Net Collex, could result in a hefty increase in the company’s share price.

Fickling is confident it can happen. He points out the numbers he’s describing are not huge.

“The Sun has 3m plus purchasers – over 7m readers. But it’s now chasing women readers. I believe they are even hankering after some of the Mail’s features and traits. And the Star is also feminising its product. Such developments are creating a vacuum for our ‘White Van Man’ readers. Your average brickie doesn’t want eight pages of Big Brother.”

The web is currently less of a concern for him. “Our readers are not typically sitting in front of PCs, they’re on building sites or are mobile in their work. And mobile telephony is presently a much more effective and profitable way of communicating than the web which virtually every newspaper publisher is struggling to monetise.”

But that’s not to say the web isn’t on his agenda. Next year, one of his main tasks will be to appoint a digital agency to help the company develop its web strategy. The agency’s qualities will be creative rather than technical he insists. And just as he says the company now requires an additional London sales presence, he also believes a digital agency based in the region is the likeliest option.

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