Newspaper Publishers Looking For New Additional Advertising Revenues Should Add The Word 'Spadia' To Their Vocabulary

It’s a good enough idea that the New York Times for the first time sold four of them for one day’s publication on Monday and the Los Angeles Times sold one the Friday before. Ok, fine, but what is it?

Spadia is a back page advertisement that wraps around the entire section of the newspaper and creates a flap covering part of the front page of the section. Similar to a wrapper that covers the entire back page and almost a quarter of the front of the section, wrapping around the section’s spine.

Is this a big deal? The New York Times thought it a big enough deal to issue a news release on what it had done. In its case it sold four spadias to NBC television that was promoting Monday night’s new TV lineup, and the spadias wrapped the Metro, Business Day, SportsMonday and theArts sections distributed within the New York area. And inside the main news section was a full page ad for an additional program.

But since the Times considers itself a national newspaper, for distribution outside of New York it sold NBC the back pages and a front cover strip for all its sections except the main news section. As far as the newspaper was concerned that was a total of more than 2,000 column inches of advertising sold – not a bad day’s work with one advertiser!

ftm background

The Death of TimesSelect As One Of The Web’s Few News Subscription Services Begs The Question Whether Newspapers Should Dump Circulation Revenue And Go For Free Just As They Do On The Web?
The accountants won the day at the New York Times. Its TimesSelect subscription service was making some $10 million plus on the web– that’s more than petty cash -- but the newspaper killed it even though senior management still thought it was the right long-term strategy. But the accountants made it clear – the company will earn more by opening those pages to paid advertising that everyone can access and with the Times Company shares hitting 10-year lows this week the deed was done.

When USAToday Announced Its Annual 6% Advertising Rate Increase For 2007 ftm Cried Out That Newspapers Needed To Think Again About Such “Business As Usual” Antics Given Falling Circulations, And The Q1 Results, Including a 7.9% Revenue Drop at USA Today, Proves The Point
This is a story about newspaper Q1 revenues. It is not a “good news” story – even digital growth at the New York Times Company is slowing. The best perhaps that can be said is that at Dow Jones the revenue slip was not as bad as expected. But it is still a story of newspaper groups posting losses – at Tribune its first loss in five years and the quarter down 81% -- and at USAToday, the nation’s biggest circulation newspaper, advertising revenue slumps 7.9%. We’ll understand if you read no further.

Large US Newspapers Had An Awful February -- Can Publishers Still Maintain Their “Cyclical” Argument Or Is The Reality That Advertising and Circulation Revenues Are In Perpetual Decline With No Signs Of Recovery
Advertisers gave most large US newspapers a financial thrashing in February, bringing shivers and chills to many boardrooms and on Wall Street. Publishers can’t do much more than pray that February is just part of the “cyclical” argument and everything will eventually get better. But what if February’s slump is not cyclical, but much worse – the formation of a new, much smaller, newspaper advertising landscape.

The Fall In US Newspaper Print Advertising Revenue Has Now Reached A New Negative Milestone – Even With the Double Digit Advertising Growth From Newspaper Web Sites Overall Advertising Revenue in Q3 Is Down
Overall US newspaper advertising revenue in Q3 came in at $11.8 billion, a 1.5% drop from a year ago. But newspaper web sites saw a 23% increase in advertising revenues over a year ago, so the sad conclusion for publishers is that their print revenue is now dropping faster than their superlative online products can replace it.

As If Metro Was Not Already Giving Publishers Heartburn by Taking Their Younger Readers
Now It Is Going For the Jugular Targeting Classified Advertising Revenues By Converging With New Web Sites

ftm knowledge

Free Newspapers

The free newspaper phenomenon is rocking media landscapes across the world. This ftm Knowledge file looks at publishers and their battles in the UK, Europe and the US. Includes data on the successes and weaknesses. 65 pages PDF (August 2007)

Free to ftm Members, others from €39
Order

Both the Times and NBC gushed at how great the promotion was, the Times talking about its “innovative advertising units.” and NBC, making a play on its hit international returning series Heroes, boasted of “heroic units for a heroic line-up.”

NBC apparently likes Spadias. Last week to promote its movie release, “The Kingdom” it bought a Spadia that wrapped around about half the front page of the Los Angeles Times. And talking of front pages, remember the hue and cry a year ago as some newspapers announced they were going to have front page advertising? Today there are few US metropolitan newspapers that don’t offer front-page space, albeit with all sorts of caveats on size and style and the like.

But the bottom line is all about earning additional revenue to replace that advertising spend finding its way to the Internet.

When The Wall Street Journal last year announced it was giving up front-page advertising space publisher L. Gordon Crovitz boasted, “As we and marketers have reviewed the role of different media, it's clear that there is no more powerful medium for brand and product marketing than high-impact print advertising. The front page of The Wall Street Journal will provide the greatest opportunity available anywhere, in any medium, for advertisers seeking to reach a large, affluent and influential audience."

The Los Angeles Times played with ads on front pages of various sections, but the main news section was taboo. That is, until this year’s Q2 results came in --“one of the worst quarters ever experienced,” publisher David Hiller told staff in a memo – and front page ads on the front section got the go-ahead, against the wish of editors. At the time Hiller said the ads would provide several million dollars in new revenues, “We will have standards to ensure the ads look good, not schlocky”, and, besides, he said, front-page ads are common at reputable newspapers across the US and Europe.

In Europe, the big fuss about front page ads, where they are placed, and how they look is all a bit amusing because European newspapers have for years had front page ads in one form ranging from large display ads to “ears” placed on either side of a newspaper’s logo. But what might be quite amazing to US readers is that in Finland until about 25 years ago the major AM newspapers had display ads filling the front page through around page four or five, maybe even deeper, depending on how strong an advertising day it was, and they sold at premium rates (Any US newspaper ready to try that one out?).

Finnish newspapers could do that because most AMs depended almost entirely upon annual subscriptions, very little newsstand business, so the front page wasn’t necessary to “sell” the news. Readers knew to just go along to page 4 or 5 and there was the front news page.

And the greatest advertising front page this writer ever saw was in the mid 1970s when Philip Morris bought the front page of the leading circulation broadsheet Helsingin Sanomat newspaper on the day before Finland’s new law took effect banning newspaper tobacco ads. It was a full page picture of the Marlboro Cowboy waving his hat, astride his magnificent stallion reared up on its two hind legs, and if faded memory remembers correctly there was just a one-word tagline: “Goodbye” . Great stuff.

Doubtful, we will see the like in a US newspaper, but as the American Journalism Review (AJR) said in a recent headline and sub-head, “A Fading Taboo – Paper by paper, advertising is making its way onto the nation’s front pages and section fronts.”

Most editors aren’t too happy to give up that prime news space, but faced with the choice of new ways of adding revenue or cutting more news staff then the decision isn’t really that difficult.

The advertising downturn for print in the past few years has probably focused journalists more than ever on what their advertising compatriots are up to. What used to be an uneasy relationship (“if it wasn’t for all those ads those people sell we would have the space we need to really write our great journalistic masterpieces”) but in today’s newsroom reality has firmly set in. Jobs rely on just how successful those advertising folks are, and journalists now fully understand that.

So, back to those four spadias that the New York Times is so happy about. You’ll note they didn’t sell it to wrap around the main news section. So, is there a line in the sand on that, (they’ve done it for in-house promotion of stories within the newspaper, but not for third parties) or just how long will it take for the Times to be issuing yet another news release promoting a paid front section spadia?

As Tim Farish, vice president for media for NBC, said in the Times’ new release, “We feel the New York Times did what they do best – take an idea and make it just a little bigger and a little bolder.”

Newspaper Publishers Looking For New Additional Advertising Revenues Should Add The Word 'Spadia' To Their Vocabulary

With so much emphasis on cost-cutting these days one should really rejoice when newspapers are willing to do something they have never done before in trying to boost their advertising revenue. So give a welcome to 'spadia'.

Free Newspapers