Strange Bedfellows And New Business Models For Marketing The Media

Philip Stone November 21, 2007

City AM is a free business newspaper with a near 100,000 daily circulation to the main financial centers in London. So how come it had a cover-wrap on Monday promoting the business coverage of the Times of London?

Obvious answer is that The Times figured if it wanted to get to the very people it wants to read its business pages then it might as well advertise in the very same newspaper those people are reading for free.

Now, one might ask why would those people opt to pay for coverage from someone else when they get it for free from their regular read, but we’ll leave that for the marketing folks to spin how The Times’ business coverage might be more complete than the freebie, but the point is The Times used an opposing publication to flout its wares, and that opposing publication let it do it. Money, perhaps, does speak louder than words.

Lawson Muncaster, City AM managing director, didn’t see any problems with his newspaper promoting another newspaper’s financial coverage. “It might well be the first in its kind regarding one publisher utilizing another’s advertising inventory but it’s pretty common in the broadcast world,” he noted.

The Times’ wrap read, “Sharper business writing. The Times. TimesOnline. No.1 for Business.”

Perhaps one reason City AM accepted The Times’ ad is because it does not consider The Times to be its competition. Its target is the Financial Times, and it may be having some success there in that the FT seems able to hold onto its UK circulation of 140,000 plus but not really grow it much with full price sales whereas within just a couple of years City AM is just a few copies short of 100,000 daily.

There may not be much readership overlap  – the FT usually ends up with the senior executives whereas City AM’s readership seems further down the ladder, but it has found its niche, obviously the right niche to get The Times interested.

One’s imagination could just go wild with the possibilities opening this Pandora’s box could bring elsewhere. Could we expect the New York Times to run a spadia for the Wall Street Journal or vice versa?  Highly doubtful either would ask or either would accept, but why not?

And on the subject of The New York Times, having spent some $400 million plus on a brand new building the advertising department figured why not try to claw a bit of that back. So for the official opening day of the building Monday The Times published a 16-page advertising section funded by advertisements from just about everyone who was involved in constructing the 52-story tower on Eighth Avenue.

Andy Wright, vice president, advertising, told Editor & Publisher, “At first glance this is not something some companies would do. We looked at it as, this building for a lot of different reasons has some interesting stories. It is the whole opening up of the West Side, the greenness, and high-profile architecture.” What it really was  was a great  way to make some “robust” revenue, although Wright wouldn’t say exactly how much.

Elsewhere, with so many new 24-hour English language cable news networks now available – France 24, Al Jazeera and Russia Today in addition to the stalwarts CNN and BBC World – just how does one make a breakthrough with the global viewing public? Well, Russia Today has been running a “different” campaign in English language newspapers using that great pitchman, Joe Stalin, with the slogan, “Proud To Be Different.” Well, yes, he was different -- he sent  millions and millions of Russians to their deaths in the Gulag, but Russia Today wants us to know his softer side. “Stalin wrote romantic poetry. Did you know that?”

Now that was just too much for Germany’s der Spiegel.  “It’s about as subtle a message as a scenario in which German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle were to advertise with Hitler and the question: ‘Did you know that Adolf Hitler also painted?’”

Spiegel quotes Margarita Simonjan, Russia Today’s editor in chief, saying the ad campaign has been very successful. “We knew that the Stalin theme would be ambivalent in the eyes of many. But it fulfilled its purpose wonderfully. The number of visitors to our web site has doubled.”

Meanwhile, with newspaper economics being what they are these days newspapers are busy reinventing themselves so they can produce less in print, with less print journalists and pile as much as possible onto the web. Thus Howard Kurtz’ piece in The Washington Post on how the San Jose Mercury is reinventing itself  is chilling reading, especially for this writer whose first job after graduating university was on the San Jose Mercury-News (In those days there was a News and the Mercury and they were just Ridder papers before Knight came along).

They were proud papers, supposedly they made a fortune, the word being they had more classified advertising at the time than any other US newspaper  -- least that’s what the ad people told the newsroom as they continually reminded editorial who the really important guys were. (At the time editorial was not overly fond of advertising and vice versa, but as journalists have discovered everywhere, if advertising doesn’t deliver the goods then journalists lose jobs, something not really taken for granted in those days!) Today, under Media News, the Mercury is a shadow of its former self and obviously it’s not going to get any better to judge by some of the article’s quotes. 

But hidden away in the article was actually the answer to the question perplexing newspaper publishers today – just what should be the new business model?  The Mercury has fallen upon the answer by accident.

 “The loudest complaints so far have involved a cutback in Sunday comics and the difficulty in finding crossword and Sudoku puzzles – hardly what journalists spend their time worrying about. ‘That is the main thing that drives people nuts. Wow, people love the puzzles,’” according to reporter Chris O’Brien as quoted in the article.

So there it is – throw all the news onto the Internet and publish comics and puzzles as the daily print read. From the way Kurtz’ story reads, when the Mercury does “reinvent” itself it won’t be that much different to that.

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