Something that's been contributing to my frown lines in recent weeks is BSkyB's decision to cut the frequency of its customer magazines from 12 issues a year to ten. This was announced back in the summer but didn't get that much coverage at the time.
The titles include the top three customer magazines in the UK: Skymag, Sky Sports Magazine, and Sky Movies Magazine. These have circulations of 7.4m, 4.4m, and 3.6m respectively. The other title affected, Sky Kids, is a bit further down the ABC's list of leading consumer magazines, but still involves over 760,000 copies a month. Hardly small beer.
The move is part of a cost-saving exercise that also involves standardising the formats of all four magazines at 237x190mm. So far, so understandable. I'm sure the paper savings alone on the change of trim size and reduced number of issues will be substantial, let alone the mailing costs.
However, surely this reduction in frequency has the potential to be deeply problematic from a printer's point-of-view. In one fell swoop BSkyB has cut its annual print production requirement by more than 32 million magazines, which is a hell of a lot of print whichever way you look at it.
Customer: Would you like a contract to print my magazines? I need loads of them.
Printer: Oh, yes please.
Customer, some time later: Actually, we've changed our minds and we don't want them every month anymore. In fact, there'll be a couple of months where we don't want any at all.
Printer: Errrmm....
While I imagine this change will be an interesting test of a print supplier's (in this case Prinovis) ability to "flex", to use the trendy parlance, its manufacturing platform and staff resources it sounds like a potential nightmare to me - especially if other customer publishers think this looks like a good wheeze and decide to follow suit.
As one print boss (for the record, not someone connected with any of the titles mentioned above) commented to me recently when we were discussing this conundrum: "I would be reluctant to take on a contract that stands the factory for two months".
