PPA New Exec is all Print and all Consumer

Oh dear. The PPA has announced its new CEO. A print man through and through apparently. At the same time the AOP starts to distance itself from the PPA. What use is this to business media companies. Why would UBM, who make a tiny proportion of their profit from magazine publishing be interested in continuing to fund the PPA? Why would RBI who are driven by the desire to grow its proportion of income earned online want to pay for this? Who in business media thinks the main purpose of its trade association should be to lead with propping up magazines. We wish the new CEO well, but with a consumer print editorial background he faces an uphill task to convince the business media world that this is good news.

Rory Brown who blogs regularly about the b2b space has already written about his concern. No doubt there will be a period of honeymoon but the demons that led to the demise of Jonathan Shepherd (runours of many members threatening to resign) will surely rear their head again. Lets look out for an early statement of intent from the new CEO and hope for the best

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• Jonathan Shepherd leaves PPA (guardian.co.uk)
• UBM Will Cut Magazines To Expand Multimedia B2B (paidcontent.org)

Innovation Shines Through at PPA Awards (irony)

I don't think I have had a more dispiriting evening in a long time. Not that the company was bad or the food awful but watching the PPA awards was a pretty indigestible feast of complacency. Where was the innovation? Where was the understanding that the magazine publishing model has got to change?



B2B winners were Legal Week.TES,Building Services Journal, Property Week, New Civil Engineer, Building, Farmers Guardian, Retail Week. Fine mags all, but what's new? This could have been the list of winners from any PPA awards bash of the last 20 years.



The judges salutation for the weekly business magazine of the year says, "there has been a nine per cent increase in requested readers..." Oh puhlease.



Good that half the salutation was devoted to the online companion website but seriously folks, if the magazine of the year wins this gong in part because its requested readers tally went up a notch there is a lot to do in the innovation departments of business media companies.

Business Publishers Admit Its Getting Tough

Business publishers are normally very cautious about talking themselves into a recession so it is interesting to hear the CEOs at the PPA conference acknowledging that things are getting tough. Tim Weller says we have to get our heads out of the sand -it's going to be tough he says. William Reeds Charles Reed is bleating that online recruitment is tough too, which is surprising given their strength in that sector. CMP complained that the building sector was tough and so is recruitment.



David Gilbertson says magazines aren't dead. Just resting perhaps. Magazines may not be dead, but they are not growth businesses and will not drive shareholder value growth says I.



So, in a an uncharacteristic agreement with Weller, there is still time to get the heads out of the sand - but not much. Every day of dithering means that advertisers are losing the habit of doing business with business media houses. Recruitment revenues are being stolen by the job boards and the recruitment and selection agencies.



So, a question for Charles Reed - if recuitment is falling in print, and you are struggling to make it work in online - what are you going to do?



It's too late to mind the shop and hope the customers will come back, we need a new innovative approach to business media. Without it, when Bernard Gray of TES says that the elephant in the room is the sale of RBI, we will soon be saying that the dinosaur on the plain is all the old behemoths of business media.

PPA research proves all is well in business media land (Sic)

I still haven't seen the PG article but I guess its referring to the PPA sponsored research reported here which claims that the UK business media sector is worth £23b in 2006. The research claims that this is an increase from £15.6b two years earlier - ergo all is well and booming.

Now call me an old cynic but I am not so sure about this. In 2006 the total turnover of the listed business media companies in the UK was £13.3b. I don't have the numbers for 2004, but lets imagine that the rate of growth as in 2004-2006, (as reported in the PPA survey), continues in 2007 and on into 2008. Business media is booming as they say at the PPA.

Based on this assumption what would you think the forecast for 2008 revenue for UK listed business media companies is? If we believe the PPA research and my hypothesis it should be around £20b. What do you think it actually is? I went and looked up the analysts forecasts and the 2008 forecast is - wait for it - £14.4b. Still a healthy annual rate of growth of 4% but rather less bullish than this survey would have you believe.

Why should this "discrepancy" exist? Three theories. First - the survey is sponsored by the media most likely to benefit from saying that all is well in the world and it is therfore optimistic. Second - the methodology of the survey is completly flawed - Third - the survey is broadly accurate but the spend is not going to the traditional business media companies but to somewhere else. Where is the somewhere else? Digital marketing services? Google ads?

Who knows for sure but what we can know is that this research is as illuminating as a spent match in the slough of despond. Or even Slough. We need to do better than this to understand what is really going on in business media. Self serving, unbelievable research will make no difference to business media customers and lulls media owners into a false sense of security.