Barking Up the Wrong Tree as Barkers Dies

If you are in b2b media you can't but help but have noticed that recruitment advertsing is a little hard to come by. Barkers, the oldest and one of the most highly regarded of recruitment agencies sunk in to the mire of collapsing revenues and too much debt earlier this month.

Recruitment agencies used to make 10-15% commission on ads that cost thousands of pounds plus the creative fees and the production fees. Now they get to book the odd print ad and lots of job board ads at a £100 a pop. Ok a bit a of a simplification but you get the point. Couple that with a load of debt and phut!. In a prepack deal the Barkers assets have been bought by Penna, just days after 60 staff were laid off by Barkers. Those poor souls won't now even get their redundancy as the leave behind company is wound up. For media companies the position is also grim. Some I am told, are left with bad debts of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

There is nothing illegal about pre pack deals, but it leaves a sour note for creditors and many staff.

Recruitment advertsing is going to be in the doldrums for a t least two years. My guess is that Barkers won't be the last casualty.

Centaur In more Trouble

Centaur Media continues to stagger from one piece of bad news to the next. For the first time since it floated, the Board has issued a profit warning as recruitment revenues slump by 2/3rds. The thing about recruitment is that every pound of revenue fall is almost a pound of profit fall.

Although costs have been cut and some titles closed, more radical thinking is required and urgently if this business is to be saved from the triple whammy of paridigm shift, recession and management inaction.

The share price is down to 23p (down 1op this morning) valuing the business at around £33m
- more than £100m less than it was worth when it floated. Management and the City have been surprised by the deterioration in trading. Pity they didn't ask any of us eh?

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• Half graduate recruiters cut jobs (news.bbc.co.uk)

Charterhouse on the funeral pire of b2b

Charterhouse Communications, a specialist financial mortgage mag b2b house has finally fallen into administration. Its share price had collapsed to almost zip and revenues were falling off a cliff as the credit crunch bit. But this is not just a story of the US sub prime crisis destroying a good business. Even before the recent crunch this was a business with a poor outlook. Too small and too dependent on magazines to walk across the shifting sands of the b2b media industry, the crunch has simply accelerated the demise.

This is further evidence that survival for everyone in this sector is going to depend on substantial and meaningful innovation on a scale not seen before in the sector. Too many survival strategies are based on;

More events and conferences and awards.

More companion web sites to magazines.

Cost cutting.

This is unimaginative and insufficent to turn the revenues into growth. As the economy downturns publishers are already seeing a tightening in the events sponsorship market. The exhibition and conference sector is overpopulated with events, print advertising decline is accelerating and web initiatives as currently unimaginatively invented are struggling to build meaningful advertising revenues.

The challenge is to create something entirely new that will enthuse users and customers. Here are three possible areas to think about:

1) Building professional networks (vertical LinkedIn)

2) Developing a better recruitment solution that focusses on push marketing rather pull from users.

3) Solving the vertical search conundrum.

We'll explore each of these in future posts.