News

The reception of the Periodical Publishers Association’s (PPA) London headquarters would put a local branch of WH Smiths to shame. Although it may lack the sheer scale of the high-street retailer’s outlets, the association’s magazine racks make up for this through the diverse range of consumer, business and customer titles crammed onto the shelves, covering everything from popular music through to yachting, and dentistry through to zoology.

This veritable smorgasbord of titles is fitting given the PPA’s remit to promote and protect all magazines and the publishing industry that produces them, whether it be a 300,000 circulation glossy tabloid magazine, a B2B behemoth or a 1,000 run hobby title. Clearly print plays a large part in this, as it is the main medium used by the PPA’s members and it is also widely used by the association to promote its aims.

Just recently, the PPA launched a highly successful Magazine Week – backed by PrintBuyer publisher Haymarket – a pioneering initiative designed to inform consumers about the power of printed titles. On top of events such as this, the association also runs regular promotions and produces its own magazine and news­letter, which all demand some level of print activity.

The person tasked with overseeing this function is Anne Ridyard, the PPA’s commercial director. Ridyard, who joined the association in April 2005 after 18 years working in publishing in a number of different roles, admits to being passionate about print. She partly attributes this enthusiasm down to the fact that she has worked in magazine publishing for so long and partly because earlier in her career, she worked on titles like Digital Arts and Macworld.

Balanced budget
Ridyard heads up a team of three and says that although the association doesn’t strictly speaking have an annual overall print budget in place (other than for its magazines), each project it undertakes has a marketing budget, some of which will inevitably be spent on print.

These projects include handbooks, professional guides (32-64pp A5 booklets), event flyers, awards winners brochures and a lot of direct marketing.

“With every project, we try to get a piece of print to the market because it’s something that people are not doing any more and we hope that by using print we will get noticed,” explains Ridyard. “People are inundated with emails these days and there are so many spam filters, which mean that the intended recipient may not always get the message. But with a piece of print, you are guaranteed that the message gets to the named individual.”

Most of the print work that the association places is produced sheetfed – primarily because of the length of the runs. “We only do one web-offset print job per year because we don’t have the volumes to put through. We do some digital work for flyers and marketing pieces and we also occasionally print our awards brochures digitally because of the volumes.”

Those run lengths vary wildly from 1,500 for a regular newsletter to 10,000 for the quarterly magazine, with the work doled out to a relatively smallish band of printers who are regularly used by the association. Contracts are distributed either annually or on a project-by-project basis mainly due to the volumes concerned. “Our regularity is not the same as commercial publishers in that it’s not one title on a monthly basis. We can’t sit down with a printer and say this is what we want to achieve, these are the volumes,” explains Ridyard.

Flexible requirements
This approach demands that the association’s print partners be as flexible as possible and flexibility is the key criteria that she looks for when placing work.

“As a publisher, we want a printer who is sensitive to flexibility. If you’ve got a ‘hold the front page’ scenario, then we want our printer to be able to keep a print slot open for us,” says Ridyard. “We also want the quality of print to be consistent and, in addition, we want good levels of customer service. If a printer can be creative and come up with a clever solution to a marketing query, then we tend to go with them.”

While price is important, the PPA’s standing as the publishers’ trade association ensures it has a number of interested suppliers who are more than happy to work with it on competitive terms, but price alone is not enough to secure work, says Ridyard.

She’s also not averse to seeking help from print managers, although this has nothing to do with price. “I’ve used a print consultant before who I’ve known for a long time and I knew could give me good advice. If people are new to buying print or to certain print processes, then I would advocate using a print manager. Even if you’re experienced, it’s always good to get another opinion,” says Ridyard.

Another area in which she is happy to work with external partners is when it comes to environmental issues. In addition to the promotion of measures such as Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper to members, the PPA is also working on establishing a life-cycle assessment template so that publishers can evaluate the impact of the magazines that they produce – from the planting of the tree right through to when the recycled paper enters the supply chain again. It has already worked hard to persuade members to encourage the recycling of magazines that are not going to be archived under a voluntary producer responsibility agreement set up with WRAP and DEFRA. The target it set itself was 40% of all magazines back into recycling, but it has already exceeded this figure (currently 50%) and is well on the way to hitting its target of 70% by 2013.

The printers that the PPA uses have already made major environmental inroads through initiatives such as the recycling of ink cans and waste, the use of vegetable-based inks, and investment in new, more efficient equipment.

“At the moment, while we don’t stipulate that a company has to be ISO 14001, for example, we’re very lucky in that we know that the suppliers we tend to use on a regular basis are already following environmental standards and working as sustainably as possible,” adds Ridyard.

As for the future, Ridyard says that the association is a great advocate of print and her message to the magazine industry is not to cut run lengths, but to target its print better.

“We believe that there is a strong future for print,” she explains. “You can scribble on it, make notes on it and it is eminently portable. We operate for our members and this is their voice – they believe in magazines obviously, and we do too.”

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THE PPA
The Periodical Publishers Association (PPA) is the organisation for magazine and business and professional media publishers in the UK - its role is to promote and protect the interests of the industry in general, and member companies in particular.

The association’s membership consists of almost 400 publishing companies, who together publish more than 2,260 consumer, business and professional magazines.

The PPA was incorporated on 21 November 1913, as The Society of Weekly Newspaper and Periodical Proprietors. It began life under the chairmanship of Sir George Allardice Riddell, secretary of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association. The Periodical Proprietors Association became the Periodical Publishers Association on 29 August 1967.