Fundamental Flaw?

One of CRICKET’s favourite magazines The Word, announced this morning that next month will be its 114^th and final issue.

It’s tough in the publishing world at the moment – in truth it’s been especially tough for the last decade – but we wondered why this magazine couldn’t make when it seemed to get so many things right…

The magazine covers contemporary music, books, film, DVD and popular culture and is primarily targeted at 35+ AB males – a lucrative and traditionally difficult audience to reach and one that is attractive to advertisers.

It has a strong subscription base with big incentives for subscribers.

Every edition came with a free CD of new music.

The publisher and editorial director is a big blogger and tweeter and leads a relatively large and active Twitter community.

There is an engaging weekly podcast – a free 15 minute podcast sampler is available for free on iTunes. If you wanted the full, unexpurgated, album-length deal you have to subscribe to the magazine.

There is an excellent website, effectively an open blog, which is to the readers their on-line community. A ridiculously vibrant and active group of regular and ad hoc contributors on all things music and popular arts associated.

The Word hosted music events on a pretty regular basis in a London music pub and held reader events every few months in venues both in London and well beyond the M25.

It has been the media sponsor of the Latitude Festival, one of the major UK music and arts festivals, for the past few years.

The Word was well regarded in the publishing industry - voted UK 'Music Magazine Of The Year' in 2007 and 2008 and Mark Ellen, the magazine’s editor was this year voted Editors' Editor of the Year by the BSME.

So with lots of things right, what went wrong?

The publisher cites “dramatic changes in the media and the music business…plus the general economic climate…that have made it more difficult for a small independent magazine to survive and provide its staff with a living".

The most recent ABC figures for The Word, covering the last six months of 2010, showed that the magazine's circulation dropped 5.7% year on year to 25,048.

So perhaps it was a more fundamental issue – there may have been a gap in the market but there was not a big enough market in that gap.

Sad news for an intelligent, well crafted magazine who understood and catered for its target audience.

Listen up

Is listening becoming a lost art? Do we need to sit back, speak less and listen more? ‘It doesn’t cost anything to listen,’ says Richard Branson, suggesting executives get out there and really listen to what customers have to say. As billions of conversations take place across social networks, how can businesses and brands visually listen to the important ones – and filter out the noise?

In the latest edition of CRICKET Commentator, we’ve been looking at Active Listening – why it’s important for the individual and how it enables brands to build belonging and create advantage.

If you'd like to receive the latest CRICKET Commentator, drop a line to louise@cricket-ltd.com or click here. 



Huff and Puff

The new Guardian long form TV commercial
"Three Little Pigs" is currently running on Channel 4 … and on YouTube, the Guardian website, in cinemas and no doubt on a smartphone near you. It’s a worthy successor to "Points of View", the last campaign they ran way back in the late 1980s, and as with PoV it is an intelligent and ambitious piece of communication.

A couple of commentators have wondered what is its purpose, why the ad doesn’t have the obvious call to action that most media commercials have – “buy it tomorrow”, “collect the vouchers”, “special edition” etc. Clearly this is because it’s a brand ad – it’s reminding existing buyers why they buy the paper and non-readers why they should consider buying it.

In talking to what the publisher calls the paper’s operating system "open journalism", it sketches out a much bigger point – not just the style of journalism it holds dear but a new agenda of interaction with readers, other journalists, bloggers, tweeters. The idea that it doesn’t just want to passively engage you as a reader but to actively engage and involve you in what is happening in the world. Suggesting that you have a role to play – perhaps even a responsibility to engage and have your say.

What surprises us most is the irony of using that most traditional of media – the TV commercial – to kick off the debate that news is different in the age of social media.