Four US Media Companies Team To Attract More National Advertising To Their Newspaper and Broadcast Web Sites – Now Why Haven’t They Done That For Their Print Properties Where It Is Really Needed?

Philip Stone February 27, 2008

One of the biggest complaints that US national advertisers have in conducting a national newspaper print ad campaign is how difficult it is to actually place the ads. Apart from the chains, each newspaper has to be contacted separately and it’s a real time-killer, and something that advertising agencies have seemingly forever asked newspapers to fix.

So what do the newspapers eventually go and do? They establish exactly the kind of organization the ad agencies have been begging for, but for their web sites and not print.

Here’s how Lincoln Millstein, senior vice president for digital media at Hearst Newspapers explained it, “We think it is in the best interest of the industry for all these companies (Hearst, New York Times Company, Tribune, and Gannett) to create this alliance. It solves the big problem we have in the industry, which is national advertisers cannot buy our web sites very efficiently. They have to make literally hundreds of calls.”

All you have to do is take out the “our web sites” and replace it with “our newspapers” and the quote holds true for print, too. But they don’t have the solution for print.

That they have at least agreed to do something for their web business is a start. The thinking probably goes that newspapers are losing national advertising to the Internet so why not try and get that advertising back again through a national organization. Of course web ads don’t pay the same as print ads, but that’s another matter.

The quadrantONE independent company will be able to sell online ads to nearly 200 Web sites and it hopes to put those newspapers in a better position to compete with the newspaper online ad programs launched by Yahoo and others.

Combined the four newspaper chains sites have about 50 million readers a month and they are in 27 of the top 30 advertising markets. The company will focus on display ads and will allow marketers to target specific areas of the country and specific subject segments such as sports.

It’s a lot easier to sell a display advertisement on the web where ads are pretty much standardized, as opposed to print newspapers where it seems each has its own rules and there is little standardization.

But it is print where newspapers desperately need to keep existing advertisers and attract new ones. After all a print reader is said to be anywhere from 20 – 100 times more financially valuable than web readers and if newspapers were to make it easier for national advertisers to spend money with them then wouldn’t that be smart?

In essence, quadrantOne really will do just half the job that national advertisers require. What advertisers would really kill for is to have an easy way to buy ads nationally for both print and online – one purchase for an ad printed in many group and independent newspapers and their web sites across the country. The fact that large daily newspapers and their trade organizations still haven’t figured out to how to achieve this – they will tell you the fragmentation and lack of standardization is difficult to overcome – just means more lost revenue opportunities at a time when the industry really cannot afford to give up those dollars.

Newspapers today, for instance, bemoan the drop in advertising from such retail giants as Macys Department Stores. Before Anne MacDonald got booted out as Macy’s chief marketing officer last year she told a publishers conference that the newspaper industry desperately needed to coordinate national ad placement so a Macy’s doesn’t have to deal independently with each newspaper. It was a perfect explanation of how an industry desperately trying to retain all the advertising revenue that it can shoots itself in the foot by making the buy so difficult.

And it’s there that local community newspapers seem to have taken the upper hand. LocalPoint Media is a national sales network owned by an alliance of 20 community newspaper companies including some of the country’s largest community newspaper chains, and Suburban Newspapers of America (SNA), the largest trade community newspapers trade group in North America. SNA manages the network.

The whole idea of the national placement network is described by its tagline, "Local Papers. Local Websites. One Order. One Bill”. Can’t be much more direct and simple than that!

The network concentrates on national advertising segments that were underserved previously for suburban and community newspapers -- travel, luxury, telecommunications, automotive, financial, insurance, pharmaceutical, packaged goods, health and beauty, food and beverage, technology, pure-play internet companies and national political. But it still wouldn’t make Macy’s happy because it doesn’t do retail.

It was not an easy business to get off the ground, having to collect rates and information from thousands of community and suburban newspapers in the United States and Canada. SNA itself represents more than 2000 daily and weekly suburban and community newspapers and has an open invitation to community newspapers to join the program.  it only launched last August so it is too early to tell if it's a success, but the idea sure sounds like a hit. It has just hired a sales director, a former account manager with the Wall Street Journal.

If the community newspapers can pull this off, then why not the bigger metropolitans, too?