The future of print advertising

I have often complained about the dearth of business news in our area. Our local weekly paper, the Courier, can only manage a double page spread and the resources of one freelance journalist. The Argus, which is daily, has business news once a week and tends to be centred on Brighton. Across the border in Kent, The weekly Kent Messenger produces an 8-page supplement once a month.

In magazine form, we have South East Business, which is increasingly beholden to thinly disguised advertorials. Kent Director is run out of Cambridge, Sussex Business Times has disappeared and I haven’t seen a copy of Business First for several months either.

The issue, of course, is advertising, or rather, a lack of it. With advertising revenues having plummeted and so much content being available for free on-line, there is no money to pay the journalists. This is not a healthy situation for any of us. We need quality journalism in a democratic society, whether it is reporting on local news or international conflicts.

The dilemma for media owners is well documented, and, whatever the answer to their conundrum is, it is hard to see how it lies in advertising. A recent survey showed that most marketers now find print advertising the least effective form of promotion when measured in ROI terms.

This is hardly surprising. The Internet in general and Twitter in particular has allowed us all to become our own editors. We can pick out the content we want from a vast array of sources and easily filter out anything we don’t want – most commonly, the advertising. There is no shortage of readers; it is just that they have gone to other sources, such as blogs, e-newsletters and social media.

I had these thoughts in mind when The Courier came to see me this week to talk about its new approach to business news. The paper, like the Kent Messenger before it, has decided to consolidate the business news into a monthly 8-page supplement. I like the idea. In fact, I’d like to see it go further and set up an on-line forum to allow two-way dialogue with the business community on business news.

Naturally, the representative didn’t come to see me for my insight: it was to sell advertising and what struck me this time was, rather than give me the usual spiel about stellar circulations and perfectly aligned audience demographics, the approach was to say “if local businesses want a business paper, they will have to support it with advertising”.

I don’t know if I find this resigned or refreshingly honest. Either way, it does raise the question about how media owners will be selling their advertising in future: as a means of raising awareness of products and services, or as a form of corporate social responsibility?

But isn’t this the way that newspapers started in the first place – as a way for business people to promote their political persuasion and points of view? Perhaps it’s true. Everything does come full circle in the end.

What do you think? Do businesses have a responsibility to support their local media with advertising?

What price a relationship?

Business life is rarely without its ups and downs and there are occasions when we all have to call in the odd favour.

Such was the case this week, when an issue arose with an advert for one of our clients. With the fault laying fairly and squarely at our door, our first response, after apologising to the client, was to arrange to run the advert again at our expense.

Having worked with the publication in question for many years, and purchased a reasonable amount of advertising from it, we asked for some leeway on the price. The response was an uncompromising 'No. This is your problem, not ours'.

This might seem perfectly reasonable. After all, why should the publication compromise its margins to help us out, particularly in these straitened times?

The answer lies in the pricing strategy.

The incident brought home to us that what we had seen as a relationship, the publication prefers to treat as a series of unrelated transactions, each to be exploited for the maximum possible price. No value is placed on our future spending power: the priority is to maximise revenue now.

This is a legitimate pricing strategy, but not without its consequences.

The discovery forces us to re-appraise the way that we will do business with the publication in future. The loyalty that we have felt towards it now looks misplaced and leaves us feeling a little foolish. We must now start to treat each transaction as the publication does and judge it primarily on price. We are also motivated to look more closely at the competitor publications and get to know the people behind them a little better. These are all the characteristics of a transactional relationship.

In contrast, a small concession would have deepened our sense of loyalty, encouraged our advocacy and even left us feeling a little in the publication's debt.

The publication has great confidence in its brand and, if it is right in its assessment that it is the No1 brand in its niche, it can indeed dictate terms in this way. For most businesses, however, applying transactional pricing in a relationship situation is a dangerous and short-termist approach. The pursuit of margins, in the absence of, or at the expense of customer loyalty, ultimately shifts economic power to the customer. Customers quickly leave when a better offer arises elsewhere.

Sour grapes? We hope not. We accept our misjudgment of our worth and respect the publications right to act as it pleases. We are happy to work under the new rules.

Advertising: rumours of my demise are exaggerated

There is a huge debate raging online about the future of advertising. Started by Eric Clemons, a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, on Techcrunch last weekend, even the mighty Google has become involved.

Professor Clemons argues that advertising is not trusted, not wanted and not needed. His target is internet advertising, but his comments might be said to apply to advertising in any form.

The main premise of his argument is that pushing a message at a potential customer when the message has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of doing something else, is destined to fail. He goes further and says that advertising is misdirection, almost a crime.

Nobody minds a point-of-view, but Professor Clemons is wrong and shows a lack of understanding of marketing and brand development. Advertising placed with the right frequency and in the right place works.

Search advertising is one of the most powerful forms of advertising precisely because it does not misdirect searchers, nor interrupts them, but instead provides the answers they seek: classified ads in print work for the same reason. A well designed brand advert in a glossy publication can be said to be an enjoyable part of the browsing experience while at the same time creating positive associations for the advertiser.

Businesses need to be visible and consumers buy from brands that they know and trust. Advertising supports these aims. While it is fair enough to wax lyrical about blogging (ahem), Twitter and other forms of PR, not everybody has massive reach through these media and nor are they always appropriate to the marketing objectives and target audience.

Advertising can be a money pit and there are alternatives, but the fact that there are options doesn’t discredit it as a tactic. Indeed, with the economy in turmoil, there is no shortage of places to advertise and prices are being driven down to acceptable levels. Don’t rule it out.

PS. If you think we should put our money where our mouth is, take a look at the back cover of South East Business this month.

Article by Eric Clemmons
South East Business - April edition

The future's bright, the future's...

Yellow?

The representative from Yell came to see me on Friday to talk about the clients who we look after the Yell advertising for.

I had my speech prepared on how the printed Yellow Pages were dead for anything other than plumbers and double glazing companies and for our clients at least, it was now all about Yell.com.

To a large extent, he got the speech. He put up a good fight though and I was encouraged by many of the things that I heard. There are some interesting developments available now or on the horizon, which show Yell has been listening to its customers.

The objection about a lack of measurability of advertising in the printed directory has been addressed with the introduction of call-tracking. Call-tracking routes all calls through a dedicated local telephone number and allows accurate response statistics to be provided. Most business have no idea how many calls their Yellow Pages adverts are generating and this is, therefore, a step in the right direction.

More exciting is a move to pay-per-call charging. Using the call tracking system and combining it with predictive data, Yell will be able to base its pricing on the number of calls generated. Customers will decide how many enquiries they want over a certain period and Yell will use its data to advise on the size of advert required. The charging will be based on a cost-per-call and monitored through the tracking system.

I am told that cost-per-call should be available on Yell.com within a few months and for the printed directory in 2010.

Another innovation that catches my eye is the introduction of video into Yell.com. This gives businesses a great opportunity to talk to visitors and stand out from the crowd. At £1100 for a Yell produced video (which can also be used for other purposes) or £350 to up-load an existing one, the pricing is within reach of many businesses and is something that I will be talking to clients about. We might even try it ourselves.

To see innovation inspired by competition and changing customer needs is encouraging and reminds the rest of us that we need to react, not submit, to changes in our own markets.

Gorilla marketing (sic!)

This post is by Bryony Saunders, Marketing Executive with The Marketing Eye.

Advertising is not about simply promoting a product. We are no longer satisfied with companies telling us how good their products are or how unbeatable their price is, these days we expect to be entertained as well.

A perfect example of a company that has managed to entertain us is Cadbury’s.

Cadbury’s recent run of adverts has both bemused and entertained us. I mean, a gorilla playing the drums along to a Phil Collins track?!!

‘Gorilla’ has quickly become one of the most popular and critically acclaimed TV ads of recent years. This has been followed by trucks racing each other to a Queen soundtrack and, most recently, children with dancing eyebrows!

But where is the chocolate? Not once is the chocolate bar shown or mentioned.

The adverts help us form a relationship with the brand. They make us smile and implant a sense of, not how the chocolate tastes or looks, but how it and Cadbury's make us feel: happy and ready to go...just great. The adverts are so different, so obscure that everybody is talking about them.

We have all seen Cadbury's chocolate, we know what it looks like and we know what it tastes like, we don't need telling again. The marketing people at Cadbury's have seen this and have had the courage to stand out from the crowd and do something different.

Update - There is a good article on the BBC website on the same topic.

We'll get through this together

We are launching our new advertising campaign today. Based on a theme of ‘We’ll get through this together’, the campaign recognises that many of our clients are currently focused on survival and security.

Survival and security doesn’t mean cancelling all marketing – on the contrary – it means marketing wisely and in areas that will deliver results. There are several things that we are talking to clients about at the moment that don’t involve them spending more money.

Knowing and staying in touch with customers is probably the most important one and is at the forefront of many plans. We describe this as ‘reviving that first date feeling’: looking for excuses to get in touch and be together.

Watching competitors also yields results. Competitors are eating our client’s lunch and we need to know what they are doing. Asking customers if they are being approached and to see what they are being offered can be very informative.

Whatever field our clients are in, we look for the one thing that will make them stand out from the crowd. Without differentiation, there is only price to compete with, which can often be a downward spiral. The starting point for differentiation is to understand what our clients are very good at - what the signature dish is. With this established we can focus the marketing effort on the core strength.

Finally, we advise concentrating on one thing at a time. In reality, and particularly now, it is better to take small steps towards a goal than embark on a huge project that will absorb a lot of resource and take a long time to deliver. Results breed confidence and confidence is what is needed right now.