The straight line between Dixons, Hugh Grant and the Guardian ‘weekend’

According to Sebastian James, chief executive of Dixons, the retailer sold five tablets a second in the weekend before Christmas.

That’s 300 a minute, 18,000 an hour, say 180,000 a day (conservatively allowing an average 10-hour day), and let’s say getting on for half a million over that period immediately before Christmas if we chuck in Christmas Eve.

Add in a couple of extra weeks either side, multiply that by the other retailers, and it’s not hard to see that a tablet phenomenon is sweeping the UK.

That’s some take-up rate. It’s only spring 2010 since we saw the first iPads. Critical mass has been reached already. From zero to 30% penetration of the adult market in less than three years of a device that costs several hundred pounds, is not essential, and in a difficult economic climate, is nothing short of astonishing.

About a year ago a senior figure at the Independent told me he believed that the acceleration in the decline of his paper’s print sales – and that of the Guardian too – was down to the fact that readers of those papers were most likely to be early adopters of tablets.

There was no hard proof, of course, but intuitively the idea seemed to have merit: relative to the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail, you would expect readers of the Independent and the Guardian to be younger, more metropolitan, more-tech savvy, more likely to be early adopters of tablets – and thus more likely to cut back on their analogue reading habits.

Certainly, looking at year-on-year changes in the latest ABCs, the figures bear this out. Both papers are among the bigger fallers over the extended period.

But while the tablets may accelerate the death of print, they may actually be the saviour of publishing. All the evidence suggests that owners of tablets increase their readership of newspapers and magazines. According to an NRS study released in August, 44% of tablet users read newspaper content on a digital device. The trend in magazine consumption via tablets is similar too.

So how does this lead us to dear old Hugh Grant and the Guardian/Observer ‘weekend’? For those who haven’t seen it, the thesp-turned-privacy-campaigner fronts up a three-minute video ‘spectacular’ launching a new concept: the Guardian/Observer weekend.

When I say ‘fronts up’, I do mean that more or less literally: a rather embarrassed-looking Grant appears for the first 20 seconds and that’s it – but then he did do the ad for free.

Why is the ad significant? Well, the ABC for December 2012 shows the Guardian’s average daily print sale at 204,000. In fact this masks a growing disparity between a pitiful daily average of around 130-140,000 and a much healthier Saturday sale of about 400,000-plus.

Clearly, with the paper bleeding money and the coffers emptying, its owner, the Scott Trust (bizarrely, the Scott Trust mandates that the Guardian only ‘seeks’ to make a profit, not necessarily make on – just as well given the circumstances), understands something has to give.

Many believe that the most likely is the daily. Clearly there’s no point in advertising that any more, which brings us back to Hugh Grant and ‘the weekend’. So those who do think this will interpret the ad as a) a coded warning of its impending demise and b) an attempt to make a pre-emptive claim for what’s left – i.e. Saturday and Sunday.

The ad itself is a parody of a trailer for a Top Gun-style Hollywood action thriller, laden with bombast, a melodramatic voiceover and flames bursting out all over the place. It’s mildly entertaining in a knowing, advertisingey way but ultimately devoid of substance – and it knows it, hence the bombast.

Of course, the idea of a Guardian/Observer ‘weekend’ is utterly specious, and nor is it something the pair can uniquely claim. In fact, it’s almost a generic idea since any other publisher, were they so minded, could do the same.

And will it recruit new readers? I doubt it. It is neither a promo – lacking either a specific ‘offer’ or a call to action – nor really a brand ad, since apart from Hughie’s endorsement and a quick mention of a new supplement on cooking, no brand values or product attributes are highlighted.

But it does at least point to a way forward, not only for the Guardian/Observer, but for the other nationals too. And it is certainly true that the tablet/print model seems ideally suited to newspapers: tablets for weekdays, print for a more leisurely weekend read.

With a (global) online presence that is significantly larger than print, the Guardian has already put itself on this particular route.

Whether, of course, the money stacks up is another matter. But while consumers clearly don’t like paying for stuff on the web, they seem more prepared to pay for a tablet subscription – which means publishers won’t be pushing water up such a steep hill.

Pearls of wisdom from MediaTel’s Year Ahead

MediaTel’s Year Ahead event last Wednesday was a rapid and stimulating run-through the major issues facing the media and advertising communities. Chatham House Rule prevents me from attributing them, but of the many gems, three caught my ear. You can agree with them or not.

1. Without a print product, newspapers’ influence will be diminished.

2. Big data: “it’s what people used to call research.”

3. On newspaper editorials castigating HMV for the lack of an online strategy: “Pot, kettle, black.”