Circulation study: Digital up, print down

[I Should Coco]

I think the ad market is that bad. I traveled a lot this summer after being a COVID captive or 14 months. I slept in 17 states. I tried to buy the local paper wherever I stayed. I saw ads for the following. There is someone selling hearing aids that advertises a lot in papers. There is another company that sells walk in bath tubs and also advertises in papers. Then there are obituaries, which papers sell. There would be legals (politicians do not want to stop buying legal ads because they want to receive the editorial endorsement of the paper). And that would be pretty much it.

I was shocked by the drop in the number of circulars. A Sunday paper might have four or five. Even a couple years ago the retail chains and fast food joints would still have circulars.

The drop in inserts/circulars certainly has been noticeable at our shop.
You might see a Lowe's, Fred Meyer and Target insert in the Sunday paper (along with coupons! Get your polyester pants and Thomas Kinkade plates!). Our Wednesday paper has the Safeway/Albertson's weekly inserts along with a handful from local grocery stores. That's it.
We used to always have slick sheets of coupons from fast food and other restaurants in our paper, but I'm told our inserting equipment didn't do well with those. They stuck together and so you'd have 3-4 coupon sheets in the early part of the press run, and none by the end. The restaurants weren't getting great results because only one-third of our readers got their coupons in the paper.
And don't even get me started on spadias and/or stickers. My favorite is when they schedule them for the same issue (usually Wednesday or Sunday), and the sticker covers the name of the business at the top of the spadia.

 

[Sam Mills 51]

There was an amazing special football section in the Raleigh News & Observer last weekend. I'm not criticizing the work behind it because there was a lot of good writing. But in a 24-page broadsheet section, ZERO ads were sold. The only ads were a full-page ad for a Roy Williams book that the newspaper is selling and a half-page house ad about its website.

At most newspapers, this section never would have been produced if it wasn't sold. I guess it's good that it was published anyway. But it's troubling that the ad folks couldn't sell any ads. Are they just incompetent or is the ad market really that bad?

Yes.
Now … how much of that is failure by the ad sorts?
How much of that is the failure by McClatchy sorts to put out a product that appeals to ad buyers?

 

[Sam Mills 51]

A nearby small daily with crashing circulation was bought up by Adams Publishing from the longtime family owner. I hear that they've really jacked up the display ad rates. Meanwhile, they've farmed out the obituaries to Legacy.com -- if there is a lucrative print ad that serves older newspaper readers, it's the obit.

That kind of logic is hard to fathom.

"Adams" and "logic" should never be put in the same sentence. They've done something so stupid at one spot that it's almost impossible to fathom. And at an Adams property, there's little that we can't fathom.

 

[wicked]

The drop in inserts/circulars certainly has been noticeable at our shop.
You might see a Lowe's, Fred Meyer and Target insert in the Sunday paper (along with coupons! Get your polyester pants and Thomas Kinkade plates!). Our Wednesday paper has the Safeway/Albertson's weekly inserts along with a handful from local grocery stores. That's it.
We used to always have slick sheets of coupons from fast food and other restaurants in our paper, but I'm told our inserting equipment didn't do well with those. They stuck together and so you'd have 3-4 coupon sheets in the early part of the press run, and none by the end. The restaurants weren't getting great results because only one-third of our readers got their coupons in the paper.
And don't even get me started on spadias and/or stickers. My favorite is when they schedule them for the same issue (usually Wednesday or Sunday), and the sticker covers the name of the business at the top of the spadia.

I remember when spadias and stickers were both gonna save the industry...

 

[Twirling Time]

Most of us nowadays, the only circulation studies we worry about are those in our feet.

 

[sgreenwell]

Yes.
Now … how much of that is failure by the ad sorts?
How much of that is the failure by McClatchy sorts to put out a product that appeals to ad buyers?

Not that I ever want to defend ad people, but - Thanks to the pandemic, when a bunch of businesses pretty much *had* to stop advertising, it was kind of like a weird "control" experiment when it came to advertising. If you're Company X, and your sales barely declined when you stopped advertising, why would you start them back up? I think even more companies probably switched to online advertising (targeted ads via Google and FB), and I don't think they're ever coming back to the paper.

 

[LanceyHoward]

The drop in inserts/circulars certainly has been noticeable at our shop.

We used to always have slick sheets of coupons from fast food and other restaurants in our paper, but I'm told our inserting equipment didn't do well with those. They stuck together and so you'd have 3-4 coupon sheets in the early part of the press run, and none by the end. The restaurants weren't getting great results because only one-third of our readers got their coupons in the paper.

Coupons in newspapers are expensive. A fast food joint has to pay the publisher. Then some 16 year old ahs too deal with them at point of payment. When the pandemic started credit cards were considered safer and there has been a huge change in the fast food industry. The industry is going electronic in its ordering and payment.

A paper coupon just interferes with this electronic transaction. Now fast food places are pushing customers to download their app. This eliminates the need for a 16 year old to take the order and to receive payment, who is probably making more than a junior reporter in today's economy (I saw a lot of sign boards for fast places starting at $14-15 an hour. That is 30K a year). The fast food joint can then offer the the promotion through the app.

Since a newspaper today rarely ahs a penetration of above 15% of the market their reach is probably not that much higher than the percentage of the population that has downloaded the app. And the people who have downloaded the app are probably the best customers of fast food. For example, I don't like McDonalds and try to avoid them. If McDonalds pays for a coupon in my local paper they will not attract me to the nearest restaurant. But chances are pretty good that someone who downloaded the McDonald's app would be a potential customer.

 

[Matt Stephens]

There was an amazing special football section in the Raleigh News & Observer last weekend. I'm not criticizing the work behind it because there was a lot of good writing. But in a 24-page broadsheet section, ZERO ads were sold. The only ads were a full-page ad for a Roy Williams book that the newspaper is selling and a half-page house ad about its website.

At most newspapers, this section never would have been produced if it wasn't sold. I guess it's good that it was published anyway. But it's troubling that the ad folks couldn't sell any ads. Are they just incompetent or is the ad market really that bad?

Thank you for the compliment. Worked our butts off on that section. It was budgeted to be a 32-page section, but when they said they had sold no ads, we dropped it to 28 pages.

When we got the section green-lit, we had a long meeting with advertising, which was confident it could sell the section. I gave them some potential companies/groups to reach out to about ad sales and I was told they'd put them at the top of their list. Ad deadline comes, no ads were sold, so I ask for a one day extension and I call those vendors. All of them said they love the idea and had they heard about it earlier, they'd be in but they already spent their media buy budget for the period. (All of these were vendors that focused on sports/college football so why their advertising budget would be spent 2.5 weeks before the season starts make sense.) It was frustrating these easy leads were never contacted.

For background on what the section was: Previewed all 23 Division I football teams in NC and SC, with three takeout stories, a more traditional "Page 2" and columns. Each FBS team got a full page, FCS teams got a half page. We ran a different cover in Raleigh, Charlotte and Columbia (we operate as one large sports staff) to look more local in each market. Inside content was the same with the exception of the SC stuff being up front in Columbia.

 

[LanceyHoward]

Thank you for the compliment. Worked our butts off on that section. It was budgeted to be a 32-page section, but when they said they had sold no ads, we dropped it to 28 pages.

When we got the section green-lit, we had a long meeting with advertising, which was confident it could sell the section. I gave them some potential companies/groups to reach out to about ad sales and I was told they'd put them at the top of their list. Ad deadline comes, no ads were sold, so I ask for a one day extension and I call those vendors. All of them said they love the idea and had they heard about it earlier, they'd be in but they already spent their media buy budget for the period. (All of these were vendors that focused on sports/college football so why their advertising budget would be spent 2.5 weeks before the season starts make sense.) It was frustrating these easy leads were never contacted.

For background on what the section was: Previewed all 23 Division I football teams in NC and SC, with three takeout stories, a more traditional "Page 2" and columns. Each FBS team got a full page, FCS teams got a half page. We ran a different cover in Raleigh, Charlotte and Columbia (we operate as one large sports staff) to look more local in each market. Inside content was the same with the exception of the SC stuff being up front in Columbia.

It sounds like you produced a wonderful product. Do you think it will run next year?

 

[Matt Stephens]

It sounds like you produced a wonderful product. Do you think it will run next year?

I'd like to, but if we do it, it will need to be supported better by ads. We still came out OK because it was a premium section, upcharging rack sales in Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Columbia, Myrtle Beach and Rock Hill. An alternative premium section strategy for 2022 could be building it into an annual subscription cost as a premium section so subscribers will be paying a little extra. (I know that's a common strategy on print subs, building into the cost X special sections per year, but that wasn't one of them.)

My hope is that we can use this as a pilot/POC to go back to advertisers next summer and say "See this? This is what you're buying into," rather than just some marketing words and a couple of dummy covers. I would like to do it again this fall for college basketball but only North Carolina schools. Could hit the Triangle schools, Wake, Charlotte and Davidson, smaller UNC system schools and all the HBCUs -- CIAA included. May be a pipe dream, but we now have a roadmap at least for how to do it.

 

[SportsGuyBCK]

When we got the section green-lit, we had a long meeting with advertising, which was confident it could sell the section. I gave them some potential companies/groups to reach out to about ad sales and I was told they'd put them at the top of their list. Ad deadline comes, no ads were sold, so I ask for a one day extension and I call those vendors. All of them said they love the idea and had they heard about it earlier, they'd be in but they already spent their media buy budget for the period. (All of these were vendors that focused on sports/college football so why their advertising budget would be spent 2.5 weeks before the season starts make sense.) It was frustrating these easy leads were never contacted.

Have any heads been lopped off in the advertising department for this incredibly incompetent foulup?

 

[TexasVet]

I was shocked by the drop in the number of circulars. A Sunday paper might have four or five. Even a couple years ago the retail chains and fast food joints would still have circulars.

Post offices across the country have negotiated to send the circulars through direct mail so they can make that money. That's why mailboxes are full of them now and newspapers aren't.