The newspaper industry has been on the hunt for new business
models for some time now. Kicking off the New Year, it has also done a
brisk 180-degree turn in the promotional story it is telling to sway
advertisers.
In 2006, with considerable fanfare, the Newspaper
Association of America launched a $75 million campaign touting newspaper print
advertising as "a destination not a distraction." The NAA had not done large-scale promotion earlier
in the decade. With survey material [PDF]
backing the premise that readers come to the newspaper looking for information on products and
prices, it trained roughly 20,000 ad-sales people to use the summary of the survey results last
fall.
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Newspaper Association of America
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Now, less than a year later, the "destination" campaign is
headed for the scrap heap.
New ads,
previewed Jan. 30 at the
NAA Marketing Conference in Las Vegas, carry the tagline, "Newspaper, the Multi-Medium." The first in the series shows a wired-up,
multi-tasking consumer, known in-house as "gadget guy."
The NAA is aiming for a "more aggressive tone and a more
contemporary look" with the new ads, which will be used in newspapers and media trade publications starting in April, chief marketing officer John Kimball said
in the press release announcing the switch.
Which is not to say the old ads were a flop, Kimball said in
a phone interview with Poynter Online later. "The message was sound, but there was perhaps a sense that we were not
telling the online story adequately."
And the graphic approach was controversial -- retro hip or just
plain retro depending on your viewpoint.
Many felt 19th-century poster style used for the 2006 ads was not the best choice
for an industry often accused of clinging to its past. "Too much of the industry is stuck in the
destination mindset," newspaper consultant Ken Doctor wrote, "as if this were the
time of Andrew Carnegie, not Sergey Brin."
Kimball said the 2006 look was meant to invoke Monty Python or
the Guinness Brothers ads and that the target audience of 22- to 34-year-old
media buyers "got it." Both the old and
new ads are the work of the Martin Agency of Richmond, Va., highly
regarded for its Geico-caveman commercials among other campaigns.
The ads embody a sort of split personality the industry has
developed. Online is hot, growing in revenue and sure to play bigger with both
readers and advertisers over time. But
print still generates 90 to 95 percent of the revenue at most companies. As Kimball put it, "No one has thrown in the
towel on the core product."
Meanwhile the business news of the industry is picking up in
early 2007 where the grim second half of 2006 left off. So far this week, McClatchy announced that it
expects an ad slump to continue at least through the first half of 2007. The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch has offered 25 newsroom
buyouts, the Sun-Sentinel of Fort
Lauderdale, 15.
After two rounds of bidding, Tribune Co. has yet to attract
a premium offer for the company. Exploration of a possible deal has now turned
to some combination of selling off parts, recapitalizing with a special
dividend payout to shareholders or taking parts of the company private.
The New York Times earlier this month marked down The Boston Globe and the Worcester, Mass., Telegram and Gazette to
about 40 percent of what it had paid for the two papers, suggesting McClatchy's post-Christmas sale of the Star Tribune of Minneapolis at a big loss was no
fluke. Metro papers are not worth what
they once were -- perhaps not even what they were worth this time in 2006.
In a less-noticed transaction, Journal Register sold three
small Rhode Island
dailies and a group of weeklies for the clearance price of $8.3 million.
Not to be a gloom and doomster, I think that there is a
chance that at least some of the ski-slope trends of the last several years
will be a little better this year.
Some say the industry is nearly done trimming marginal circulation that advertisers don't care about. If so, the rate of loss could ease compared to the most recent report -- down
2.8 percent daily and 3.4 percent Sunday.
Also, the cuts of people and paper width and weight,
together with flat or lower newsprint prices might improve the earnings picture. Any improvement will have to come from the
cost side. Ad revenue, despite contributions from online operations, is
expected to be flat or slightly down.
With The Wall Street Journal's re-launch in its first
print edition of the New Year and Gannett's plan to convert all its newsrooms into
multimedia "information centers," 2007 promises to be a year of continued
online development and design refinement.
That is beginning to spill over into rethinking the print product so
that the two are quite different and complementary -- big progress from the
shovel-ware days not long ago when the typical Web site was just electronic recycling
of the morning edition.
A caution is that online advertising growth, which had reached 30 to 35 percent for the last five years, fell just below 30 percent in 2006 and is expected to level further at
22 percent in 2007. Partly that reflects that overall Internet ad growth is
cooling some, partly that newspapers will need to be inventive to hold their
share.
"Wait till you see what's in tomorrow's newspaper," read the
headline of the first of NAA's new series of ads. The industry is showing an innovative spirit these days, but even better would be solid successes in 2007 and a glimpse of the path to a better economic model in coming years.
