Those 600,000 Extra Sales For The Prince CD Giveaway All Disappeared The Following Week, and A Los Angeles Times Column Is Killed For Suggesting A Similar Promotion
Sales for last week’s Mail on Sunday indicates that all, yes all, of those 600,000 additional sales with the new Prince CD giveaway were lost the following week. As so many pundits have said, those kind of promotions work on the day but usually there is no glue – the additional users wanted that CD and not the newspaper and they would be gone for the following issue.
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The figures are in from last week’s UK Mail on Sunday giveaway of Prince’s new CD, Planet Earth, and circulation on that day was up a whopping 600,000, a huge financial and promotional success for Prince, but also for the newspaper? All depends how advertisers will look at the circulation numbers and how many of those extra 600,000 sales stick.
So, while obviously these promotions are great for the CD artists – in Prince’s case he got a license fee and royalties for the giveaway that totaled some 2.8 million copies whereas his last CD release in Britain moved just 80,000 copies, is it really worth it for the newspaper – in this case the total cost including promotion was around £1.25 million ($2.5 million, €1.8 million).
At £1.40 a copy for the additional 600,000 newspapers sold, the additional circulation income was around £840,000 and then there is the additional advertising that issue attracted at higher prices, and so depending on additional newsprint costs and the like, the financial loss is manageable for a company like Associated Newspapers that was looking for additional readers and not necessarily to make a profit on the deal.
And even though Rupert Murdoch has said how much he dislikes these types of giveaways because he believes they are one-time wonders just for the freebie, his Sun tabloid is said to be negotiating a similar deal for a new CD by Madness – not a bad name to describe what the newspaper is up to!
The Mail on Sunday is putting a positive spin on last week’s results, pointing out it believes it has retained some of the new readers because last Sunday was the first weekend of the British school holidays and with people on their way out of the country this summer period is notorious for dropping sales, so to have actually maintained its numbers means, it says, that there are some new readers in there. At least, that’s the spin.
So, might an idea like this work in the US? Patrick Goldstein, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times thought his newspaper, in dire financial straits, should give it a go and he wrote a column suggesting exactly that, except Times’ readers never got to read that column – it got killed by the managing editor for features and then the Times actually lied and told its readers the column didn’t appear because the writer was on assignment. For an industry that is continuing lecturing others who lie maybe the Times should take a look inside its own glass house, and especially review its honesty policy with its readers.
No explanation from the Times management, but there are probably two reasons the column didn’t appear – each one perhaps being at play. Firstly, the Hollywood entertainment industry absolutely hates what the Mail on Sunday did—it’s bad for CD sales – and while big powerful newspapers like the LA Times are proud of their Chinese wall separating advertising and editorial, maybe that wall just isn’t as high as it should be! Remember a couple of years back when General Motors pulled advertising for some three months from the Times because it didn’t like how editorial was treating it, and that was said to have cost the newspaper some $10 million in lost revenues. It really couldn’t afford that kind of loss then, and with the Tribune privatization lurking it certainly can’t afford to upset big advertisers today.
And secondly, here was a columnist suggesting to his bosses what they might do to improve the newspaper’s financial performance. Maybe they didn’t like that laundry being washed in public although Goldstein actually was on a committee assigned to come up with new ideas and the Times’ management has been quite public in saying it needs to come up with new revenue ideas such as running front page ads.
No matter what, apparently this was one promotion that didn’t carry so well across the Atlantic, but to kill a column suggesting it? My, skins are getting very thin these days – July 27, 2007.
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