A cheesy tale of change for publishers

I find myself discussing the topic of the need for change in publishing more and more these days, but despite the conversations, I am still not sure that the industry is ready to embrace what’s required, nor whether it knows how to execute differently to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

The topic prompted me to turn to the change management book, Who Moved My cheese by Dr Spencer Johnson. The book looks at how two mice and two mice-sized human characters living in a maze deal with change – which in their case is their cheese being moved. As the short parable progresses, they scrawl a number of important points on the wall of the maze.

It seems to me that several of these wall writings could easily be applied to the publishing sector. For example:

“The more important your cheese is to you, the more you want to hold onto it” Advertising is publishing’s lifeblood and there is an ever greater desire to increase revenue from advertising customers by providing them with a wider variety of advertising mediums. There are many examples of newspapers selling advertising under cost price, but surely it is more important to look at ways of providing a better service to the customer, so that they want to advertise more with you. There might be new markets which traditionally the product hasn’t been able to reach. Not only could this increase advertising revenues, it may also increase the circulation.

“Old beliefs do not lead you to new cheese”
Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of stupidity. Yet for how long have publishers been reviewing their production costs and reducing their staff? Has this even enabled their respective companies to become more profitable?

Technology should be an enabler to reduce production costs in the same way as it has in the retail sector, for example, where processing has moved further down the supply chain as a result of data exchange and automation. Tools such as AdSEND from Vio can facilitate this for the publishing industry. Where those tools enable the use of metadata, it’s mapping and management, they can be integrated to your workflow and provide high levels of automation enabling the publisher to push booking data out to the ad sender, for example, providing for the automated  reconciliation of submitted ads against the original booking.

Vio, for one, allows this to be extended, providing automated job ticket creation for senders who can then just attach the PDF. Further, the sender can integrate their own workflow and fully automate the ad sending process from their internal applications.

“It is safer to go out and search in the maze than remain in a cheese-less situation”
Publishers should be applauded for the amount of time and money spent chasing the next big thing. They have begun to truly grasp the internet as a platform for their products. However, it is unlikely that digital versions of publications will be able to generate the same revenue as print versions. Costs can be reduced though and the challenge now is to find a different business model that will allow revenue to be maintained and increased.

So how can you, as the books says, “move with the cheese and enjoy it”? We need to adapt to survive, and there are many new avenues that can bring savings or new forms of revenue.

If you are a publisher this might mean exploring different ways of accessing existing or new markets, such as by utilising online self-service tools; it might mean reducing existing production costs by increasing automation, or being strong enough to force change into your supply chain by increasing the responsibility for finished product to your ad supplier.

If you are an ad sender, it is about driving out costs through integration, automation and improved systems; about seeking new ways to add value to traditional processes that technology now enables to be more consistent, and about accepting the need for change.

There is no need to run the advertising supply chain in the same way as it has been run for 20 years - there can be a different way forward if you want to find and embrace it.