Turning the Front Page Green

And that bring up the memory of an idea born some 35 years ago that if had been approved, would have changed the face of American newspaper advertising.

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It took place at the San Jose Mercury-News in 1970 when it was still just a Ridder newspaper run by Joe Ridder. The Knight merger was not to come for a while longer. This writer had joined the San Jose News in 1969 fresh out of college. This was a time when Silicon Valley was full of fruit trees with not a silicon chip to be found, but the area was developing to such an extent that the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains were a distant memory lost in the smog.

The Mercury-News was an advertising powerhouse – it was the main financial engine for all of the then just Ridder newspapers. Curiously, circulation didn’t move much even though its own real competition came from San Francisco some 50 miles up the road. Ridder had showed his faith in the valley by building just a couple of years earlier what was then the world’s largest single-story newspaper plant.

It was in the days when a young guy walked through the newsroom shaking hands with staff and asking if everything was okay with our work environment – something we really had not been asked before. When we told him the color of the walls reflected the light and was hard on the eyes he took vociferous notes. We asked when he left who he was and we were told he was distant family, “some guy named Tony Ridder.”

For those of us working in the newsroom there was enough gossip to tell us that advertising ran the newspaper and we were there basically to fill in the holes they couldn’t sell. Thus it came as a great surprise when the following story started making the rounds. No one ever proved it was true, but in that building, large as it was, where there was smoke there was usually some fire.

Advertising had been told that no matter how well it was doing it had to do better, and had been told to make a presentation to Joe Ridder on how exactly it planned to do that.

And the idea advertising came up with was indeed quite ingenious, and simple. Advertising was built up from the bottom towards the top of the page. Whatever space at the top had not been sold would be the news hole. But it was obvious that the way the eye traveled one looked at the top of the page and remembered what was there far more than what was at the bottom.

So, simple solution to boost advertising revenue; Build the ads from the top down rather than the bottom up. Whatever space was left at the bottom of the page would become the news hole.

If you think about it, it was really rather clever, and very simple. And in a newspaper known for a management that fully backed the advertising department this had to be a sure-winner.

But for whatever reasons – whether Joe Ridder believed this was one-step too far, or perhaps his editorial senses told him this would cause mayhem in the newsroom – he turned down the idea, a very rare defeat for advertising. If he had agreed it would have literally turned the newspaper advertising market on its head!

And if you think that idea of putting ads before news is crazy then you should have been in Finland some 30 years ago. Until the mid 1970s, the first few pages of many daily morning Finnish newspapers, including the front page, were entirely display advertising. And those pages sold at a premium.

Finnish publishers could do that because the morning newspapers were mostly sold on a subscription basis – in fact many at annual subscriptions paid a year in advance, something others might want to take a look at! -- so the newspaper’s sale each morning did NOT depend on its headline. Therefore, why not devote the most looked-at pages to advertising?

The Finnish afternoon newspapers, having to rely on newsstand sales, were in the true mold of tabloids – the headline selling the issue.

In markets around the world today, especially in those one-newspaper towns where the headline doesn’t sell the newspaper, it could just possibly be something to look at. Of course it defies tradition, as did what the Mercury-News advertising department allegedly tried to do – but a lot of traditions seem to go by the boards these days.

Incidentally, my most favorite front page of all time comes from that period during the mid-70s. Philip Morris bought the front page of the leading circulation broadsheet Helsingin Sanomat newspaper on the day before Finland enacted a new law 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.

Finnish newspapers a few years later gave up the practice of those first few pages, including the front page, being just display ads, but, in their particular circumstances, it was a pretty good profitable practice.

Compared with the past, the new ideas of today of making a false page one cover for Marshall Field Department Store, or changing the color of pages, even bleeding car advertisements down the edge of a page in step ads, all look pretty tame in comparison.

But who is to say the time for creativity in newspaper ads is not upon us? After all, just a 3% growth, compared to the double digit advertising growth on the Internet, dictates it’s a time for some change.

With Newspaper Ad Spend Up Only About 3% in 2005 Newspapers Look For New Ways of Attracting the Spend. Here’s the Story of One Idea That Didn’t Come Off, And Another That Has Come and Gone. Time for a Revisit?