Thai-Australian Chamber of Commerce has dropped printing its monthly member magazine Advance. This month, October 2014, the magazine was distributed for the last time. From now on, all communication with the members will be online and via emails.
Scandinavian Publishing Co., Ltd. – who has for the past ten years been selling advertisements and producing the layout and printing of the magazine – inserted in the last issue a “Goodbye letter” to the members in which Publisher Gregers Moller suggests the closure could be a “Hello!” to a new direct cooperation between his company and the members. In the letter he proposes being the printer for the members as well as producing content marketing via Mynewsdesk.
“I have warned the Chamber that they are in my opinion doing irreparable damage to the member relationship,” says Gregers Moller.
“Printing and paper remains a superior media for a range of communication jobs and client magazines is one of the areas, where new companies without a prior history of printing, today start up publishing a magazine,” he says.
“Recent technological developments has shifted traditional offset printing demands to digital print for short run printing jobs, and computer-to-plate technology has lowered the cost on traditional offset, which was the way we produced the Advance,” he adds.
In the particular case of the Advance magazine, which had 32 – 40 pages monthly and print run of 1500 copies, the production cost was not the reason to close the printed version down. Advertisers paid for the production cost and from what was left, Scandinavian Publishing paid the chamber a royalty fee which equaled a local staff wages.
However, the magazine did face some challenges.
“The clouds assembling in the horizon, which would eventually pose a threat to the magazine, was the current shift in marketing communications among the advertising clients. The advertisers are fast moving money out of their printing advertisement budget in order to finance their online marketing efforts – rather than allocate “new money” for the online activity,” Gregers Moller explains.
“So maybe there is a blessing there. Dropping the print today may have saved us all the pain of witnessing a long and slow starvation to death of the Advance,” he adds.
In his letter to the members, Gregers Moller suggests that Scandinavian Publishing could print marketing communication materials like posters, brochures and fliers for the members. But he also emphasizes the services within online marketing communication, which Scandinavian Publishing offers.
“Content marketing – publishing good stories relevant for your customers online – is currently the winner and Mynewsdesk, which we represent in Thailand, is basically the only product available in this market today,” he says.
“Mynewsdesk keeps surprising me. Even in its most affordable packages it enables smaller companies to level the playing field and become equally visible on the internet as their global competitors – if they understand that they must produce prime content and publish it through all the social media channels that is the strong side of Mynewsdesk,” Gregers Moller says.
“And if they need help producing this content, why not buy that from us, too?”
