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AdMedia,  Sep 17, 2003  by David McNickel

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Just eight weeks after taking over INL, Fairfax New Zealand's two top managers invited AdMedia in to chat about the future - the NAB, the magazines division, the Sundays, and Stuff. David McNickel reports

In the ground-floor lobby of the Alcatel building in Auckland's al- ways strangely-deserted Silicon Alley around the corner from the America's Cup Village, it's clear Fairfax NZ is still settling in. Where the building's other residents have their names & floor numbers neatly stenciled into the granite wall, Fairfax directs its visitors with a sheet of A4 paper roughly taped up beside the elevators. They had trouble finding decent office space, CEO Brian Evans explains, so they've only just moved in.

In Evans' sixth floor office, however, it's clear that he and COO Peter O'Hara aren't wasting any time getting their ducks in a row for what looks like a fairly marked shift away from the way the old INL did business. Fairfax purchased INL for its huge upside potential, they say, and over the next 12 to 18 months they're going to turn that potential into reality. We asked them how.

There was some concern prior to the INL takeover that INL was distancing itself from the NAB, and forging ahead with a more go-it- alone attitude to national newspaper buys - what's happening with that initiative now?

Evans: From the INL days through to Fairfax we've quite clearly established a national sales arm. It's actually more of a selling tool to the agencies, whereas the NAB tends to be more of a service- orientated organisation, offering things like one booking, one account - those sorts of issues. I think ourselves and Wilson & Horton would say we need to be in the market selling ourselves and promoting ourselves and there's no doubt that Fairfax NZ is developing that further.

Sandra King joins us from Pacific Magazines to head up our national sales selling arm. So we're looking at extending what was already being done and Sandra's job is to develop a national buy for Fairfax products. Technically over the long term that will allow people to buy any of the Fairfax products - both magazines and newspapers - and beyond that any Fairfax products in Australia as well, so agencies would be able to come to one point to do that.

Sandra is getting a good reception because she's talking a different language; she's saying, "yes we can do that" so we're no longer talking about one silo at a time - we can talk about a group.

So does that mean you're stepping back from NAB involvement?

No, no. Look, the NAB fulfils a role and we're comfortable with that part of the role but when it comes to promoting our group and what Fairfax has to offer, we're the best ones to do that and clearly nobody can do it like we can.

We also think that taking on that network and developing it further is not just selling advertising or just servicing people in terms of what their needs are today. We want to talk to them about markets they might not have been in before and products they might not have been in and look at group opportunities. So it's quite a different approach.

In the past we were sold on an individual basis. You basically bought the Dominion Post or you bought The Press, we're saying there's an opportunity for people to buy a multitude of papers in a suite, which would give them a lot of benefits - so that's where we're going.

Sundays are big business offshore but still comparatively underdeveloped here. How are you going to grow the Sundays?

We see the Sundays as having a tremendous upside. When you buy a business it's great to have something you can see that's going to blossom over time. To a certain degree Sunday papers in NZ are reasonably new. There's quite an interesting dynamic, particularly in Auckland, in that you [advertisers] have technically got to buy both Sunday papers to get good coverage of the Auckland market, because the readership is so different.

No one paper, whether it be the Herald or the Star-Times, or the Sunday News can cover Auckland. We see an opportunity to joint market the Sunday News and the Sunday Star-Times from an advertising point of view. That will actually give us a cross-fertilisation of readership and there's only about 15% overlap. So putting the two papers together from a marketing and advertising sense and marketing them that way will be very powerful.

There'll be a pricing incentive involved in that buy?

Sure. We see results for advertisers as paramount - that is to say if a package of papers will give a better result, then that's what we've got to sell, rather than just buy this paper, even though it won't give you quite the result you want. We'd rather give them the result; that's very important from our perspective.

What about the magazine division? Hiring Sandra King indicates you're committed to that aspect of the business.

It's quite different to our Australian experience. Over there our magazines are inserts into daily newspapers and we've been very successful in producing high-quality magazines for large print runs. Here we've bought a true traditional magazine group, with some fantastic titles ... Cuisine, New Zealand House & Garden, the TV Guide ... so this is quite a different model for us. We see some great opportunities to market our magazines and newspapers a lot closer than we have in the past.