Kim Williams: News Corp marketing techniques inherited were from the 1980s
The former CEO of News Corp Australia Kim Williams has fired back at his former employer, after its current CEO Julian Clarke questioned changes he made to the company’s marketing of newspapers during his 2011-13 reign.
Yesterday a leaked News Corp financial report showed major declines in newspaper revenues for the Australian business under Williams, who exited the company 12 months ago.
At the Future Forum this morning Clarke said the documents were 14-months old, adding all of the trend lines he was responsible for are “heading the right way”, and said the company had ignored promotion and marketing in the years preceding his arrival.
Speaking to Mumbrella this afternoon Williams responded to the claims saying:”If all the trend lines are heading in the right way I’m very happy to hear that. It’s very different from the experience I had.
Williams is right – news ltd papers are back to kiddie stickers, DVD giveaways, cheap hamburgers etc in an attempt to sell more papers. Marketing techniques straight from last century
Kim knows perfectly well was that the core problem was the product. Clarke knows perfectly well that they simply have to have the promos because people won’t buy the actual product stand alone. They are both right!
It wasn’t long before he took over that the marketing department was actually called ”Promotions’ basically a cupboard to knock out gardening gloves and fishing lures. Williams was right about trying an integrated marketing solution, unfortunately the editors revolted. As they say, you get what you wish for…
It was interesting to read in one of the recent Fairfax books that Fred Hilmer commissioned a whole lot of modelling to identify what drives sales. According to the book, the models indicated journalism has little impact on sales and that the only thing that drove spikes was giveaways, cds etc.
News Corp papers hopefully have about the same shelf-life remaining as Rupert.
It is rumoured that the News Corp Marketing department in Sydney was once known as the Balloons Dept.
@Simon: I realised that in 1982 when the old Daily Mirror was running the Bingo card competition and I went into the newsagent and they’d all sold out. The Telegraph tried to run a scratch Bingo card comp in 1983 and on the first day there were over 500 winners. The next day the paper ran a front page story saying that the competition had been immediately cancelled due to “mistakes in the printing process”.
Under Kim Williams distributors were encouraged (by the T2020 vision) to join co-operative clusters that reduced customer service to such a poor level that we lost 20% of our newspaper sales, virtually over night. Since resuming direct control of our own customers we have already recovered 10% and are trending up. So we’re on Mr Clarke’s wavelength,
Kim wanted to re-invent it to survive then thrive in 21C. Problem is that the change hurts in the short term, future state is not clear and owners lost confidence in face of old guard pressure.
Julian wants to revert to and then slow the decline of the old model. Makes the old guard feel validated and easier to execute against but will result in inevitable collapse once tipping point is reached if you leave it too late to reinvent (not tinker) and we are close.
They should have created a buzzfeed. the 21C tabloid. But the old guys wouldn’t have understood or liked it (sonny we don;t do it that way!).
Good on Kim in having the courage to have a crack.
If it’s about newspaper sales, we have well and truly proven that newspaper buyers respond to outstanding customer service, even if they also consume news from other sources, like buzzfeeds. Good newsagents (although fewer of them) are a very big part of the solution for many years to come.
It’s not an issue of replacing hard print with online (of which ever form) , it’s a matter of how they complement each other. Convergence over time is the name of the game and I am afraid Kim’s ideas were more on the divergent side of the scale.