Click here for the current MPA – Application for Authorisation A91472
It will be interesting to see what others have to say about it. This is my personal view after reading it.
It has positives such as, they intend to look at historical sales. Early returns, will be allowed if it is a weekly, fortnightly or monthly title, that does not help if it one of those on pilot wants to return something that is not one of those magazines, which actually came up at the ACCC meeting.
I liked that they do admit that there will be some excess supply. I do feel its best to take a chance to make a sale rather than lose a sale. The only way to do that is by oversupply. Oversupply can be reduced, but it cannot be eliminated.
I was a bit unsure what they mean by the term "the above category management principles" since they have not mentioned anything to do with categories. Not that I am particularly worried about it as the most important point is the historical sales, if a magazine does sell in an outlet who cared what category it is in?
I thought it was strange in the way analytics was proposed to be used. If I read it correctly analytics will be used to analyse the results but not to calculate the quantities being issued. Why? If you are going to use many factors, including historical sales, surely you should use analytics. That after all is what it is designed to do. Having said this the pilot result is proposed to be analysed by a data analytics company.
Which comes to what I see as a negative. I do not see how the pilot is going to be transparent. I am not sure about whether the ACCC will get the raw figures, but it appears only the aggregate results will be shared with the newsagents through the Australian Newsagents Federation (ANF) and individually to each shop participating in the trial. Without raw figures, it's very hard to confirm much as all you know is what you are told. It leaves many people totally out of it such as many magazine retailers and newsagents who are not with the ANF and so will not have access and there were quite a few of those at the ACCC meeting. It also leaves many such as us and tower who both expressed interest in monitoring the trials plus every other software provider out, something actually that was not my interpretation of what the MPA and Bauer Media stated would happen at the ACCC conference.
The rest of the stuff I have no views positive or negative on.
