Bauer Media Closures and Why COVID-19 is NOT to Blame.
Bauer Media Australia today announced the closure of eight titles, including the iconic ELLE Australia, InStyle, Harper’s Bazaar, Men’s Health Australia, Women’s Health Australia, Good Health, NW and OK! Australia.
Both the print and digital versions of these titles were deemed no longer viable.
This is the latest in a long line of bad news at the company.
But it’s not that the titles are inherently unviable — the underlying business model is.
There is a tendency for both media and non-media companies alike (and people too if you think about it) to blame COVID-19 for their shortcomings. Recently, Jeffrey Katzenberg blamed the failure of the US$1.3 billion Quibi app on COVID-19 — and conveniently ignoring the fact that the market is already flush with high quality and free short-form content already.
Bauer Media Australia CEO, Brendon Hill, has echoed Katzenberg’s sentiments telling The Guardian that no one could have anticipated the swift, widespread and ongoing impact of the pandemic on the magazine business and industry (month-on-month advertising revenue is down 38.8%, according to Nielsen).
Be that as it may, the warning shots for media were fired in the 90s, more than two decades ago (below), as the internet ushered in a new way of consuming, and perhaps more importantly, creating content.
In the 1930s, radio program hosts acted out plays on the air, having failed to adapt content to the medium. Similarly today, traditional media companies haven’t done a great job of adapting to the new distribution medium that is the internet.
As Niccolo Machiavelli put it in The Prince, “It is a common failing of men not to take account of tempest during fair weather”, and “The prince is successful when proceeding with the times and is unsuccessful when his mode of proceeding is no longer in tune with them.”
Traditional media executives have been guilty of both not taking account of said tempest during easier times, and not adapting their business model to the times.
It’s human nature to externalize blame because it helps us to feel better about ourselves, and orient towards the future without too much debilitating self-deprecation. But it doesn’t help us to learn, to grow and to get better.
Blaming COVID-19 and a decline in advertising revenue too is easy and convenient, but it won’t help executives fix the underlying problems. If you need advertising revenue to stay consistent in order to cover your bloated cost to serve for what amounts to modest reach, then what’s really to blame here?
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