It’s not just newspapers that are feeling pain at the moment – the advertising industry itself is in an enormous state of flux, writes Kylie Davis.
IBM Global Business Services claim the advertising industry will undergo more change in the next five years, than it has in the past 50, in a cheerily named report, “The end of advertising as we know it”.
So if the advertising industry is being turned upside down, how can newspapers be expected to react and chart a course through such turbulent waters?
Bundled sales – combining print and online space – is loudly proclaimed as the answer. It marries the brand awareness of display space in newspapers – a medium where readers are widely reported not to “mind” ads but where marketers are never sure how much of their ad is working – with the cut through and direct delivery of eyeballs and transactions from online – where the ads are often intrusive and annoying but you can see exactly how many people clicked you.
But is anyone doing combined sales really effectively yet?
And in asking that, I don’t mean just slapping together a fixed offer, but creating ad campaigns across online and in print that delivers yield and plays to the strengths of each medium’s strengths (not just column centimetres and banner ads).
A lot of people are trying to bring the two departments together, but in some places it’s a herculean task.
The lovely thing about newspapers is that the space is finite. You can easily see what it looks like and when it’s sold out, you put the price up before you offer the next round.
But online is infinite. And the performance of the space is affected by the creative delivery, the relevance of the content around it, its connection to the home page, and how many links you’ve got pointing to it. And with so many campaigns now being paid on click throughs, rather than space taken, there are a huge number of variables that determines how much – or how little – you’ll actually get.
How do newspapers create a love match?
Tell us how it works – or doesn’t – at your newspaper. Or even how it should and could work.
Tags: advertising, bundles, newspapers, online, sales
October 23, 2008 at 11:01 am
And so we continue to wilt under the weight of the doom and gloom merchants who have yet to convince me, you and one billion other people around the world daily that newspapers are not the way to go – all media works if you know how to use it – none more effectively than newspapers where readers still flock with expectations of current, credible, reliable, readable, useful daily info. A media mix is a wise move; that’s not rocket science! Are we becoming our own worst enemy though? Is it time to question the confidence/doubts of the people in the business who are charged with selling something they wouldn’t themselves buy – time to rethink how carefully we recruit, train, develop the people we need to take the ball forward (and knock out a few hurdles on the way past). Harden up!