Want To Sell 193,000 Additional Copies Of Your Newspaper – Well, Just Have Your Team Win The Super Bowl!

Philip M. Stone February 9, 2010 Follow on Twitter

All the buzz is about how CBS broke the all-time US viewing record with the Super Bowl – seen in about one-half of American homes – and there is the usual viral talk about the ads – some very good, others having you really wondering about the ad business – but spare a few moments for the New Orleans hometown Times-Picayune newspaper that suffered terrible economic hardships from Hurricane Katrina but has come back like the community it serves – on Monday it more than doubled its print run to around 360,000. People just love buying good news!

The newspaper already had a taste of what to expect when its hometown Saints pulled a thriller a couple of weeks back to get into the Super Bowl. It reported then of bringing "traffic to a standstill on one highway” and "parked along the North I-10 Service Road in nearby Metairie,”  as people went searching for their print read. The paper figured it eventually printed around 150,000 additional copies of that paper and after the Saints’ Super Bowl win it was printing an additional 193,000 copies – makes one wonder how it came up with such a figure but that’s what one of their columnists Twittered.

UPDATE

By Tuesday evening the newspaper announced it had printed half a million copies and it still wasn’t enough – sales still going through the roof.

And can you imagine what the circulation will be for today’s issue trumpeting the team’s proud return Monday to New Orleans? No doubt there will be many subscribers again reporting this week as they did two weeks ago that their home-delivered newspaper had “disappeared” from the front lawn.

Yet again proof that the public has not forgotten newspapers – they just need a very good reason to buy (or take) them. Something publishers should think long and hard about. True, a Super Bowl win for the sentimental favorites doesn’t come along every day, but people still want to buy newspapers – all you have to do is hit the right buttons.

The Times-Picayune hopefully will do very well financially from its Super Bowl coverage. It has already printed poster-quality reprints of the semi-final game newspaper and the same will be done for this week’s main issues. And it is good that the newspaper gets some good economic tidings for there were days just five years ago when things looked very very bleak.

When Hurricane Katrina was approached on a fateful Sunday in August, 2005, the newspaper’s staff knew they were going to be in for hell, but probably not as bad as they actually experienced. They had decided not to evacuate their downtown building but rather stay put in sleeping bags and the like, so they could work their shifts as they recognized the enormity of what was approaching.  They, and their nola.com website colleagues, continually posted Katrina updates until the building just had to be evacuated three days later. Staff then set up offices on the campus of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

For obvious reasons the paper could not actually be printed for three days – the presses could not operate -- and even if the paper got printed who would deliver, to whom and how? But that didn’t stop PDF issues being posted on the web site.

Nola.com site became THE site for Gulf Coast residents who used blogs and forums to give out whatever information they could to one another, including leading rescuers to people who desperately needed rescuing.

If ever a newspaper’s service to the community is to be lauded then the Times-Picayune comes tops of the list for how it served its New Orleans community. So as the town celebrates a Super Bowl victory it should be very proud that the Times-Picayune is still there to bring all the details and to share in the joy.

It probably comes as no surprise that some 82% of the TVs in New Orleans were tuned to the Super Bowl (it was 80% in Indianapolis) according to Nielsen who said the game this year became the most viewed TV event in US history with some 106.5 million people tuned in. The previous record had been 105.97 million for the final episode of M*A*S*H in 1983.  Now you understand why the ads went for around $2.8 million for 30-seconds and were sold out.

Probably helping the high viewing numbers, up by some 8% over last year, was that New Orleans, while considered the underdog, was the overwhelming sentimental favorite because of Katrina. As many people seemed to say, the country was not just rooting for a football team; they were rooting for a city. And for the city, it finally had something to cheer about as CBS’ live shots of Bourbon Street showed shortly after the game ended.

Then there was that massive snow storm on the East Coast that probably kept a lot of people at home who might otherwise have gone to sports bars and the like to watch the game (in Washington, D.C., really nailed by the storm, some 72% of sets were tuned into the game). It is even thought the economy itself may have played a role with people choosing to stay home rather than fork out bar money.

And the game probably had good viewing numbers outside the US, too – it was certainly widely available. In Europe, for instance, several broadcasters showed it live even though it didn’t start until midnight 30 on the continent, (in the UK, for instance, which is one hour earlier than the continent, the BBC showed the CBS feed but without the commercials, ESPN America went with the NFL’s own feed (with some very good funny in-house ads for its new Sports Center program that starts March 1) and BSkyB had it in HD.

As for the ads, everyone seems to be talking about the Google ad which actually was really very good – it has been on their own Website for a while but it deserved the wider attention to really show the power of the search engine. And then there was that Dodge 60-second ad on which we have written about that $5 million spend before. For the first 45 seconds you had absolutely no idea what product was being pitched; in all there was 15 seconds of dynamic brand from a 60-second buy. Chrysler thinks that’s good value for money?

And the worst ad? No matter how many times you watch the US government’s Census 2010 ad you still don’t get the message. Another great reason to blast government spending waste.