What does today’s Sydney Morning Herald tell us about the state of the newspaper. As the photo below shows, the marketing department has succeeded in having their ad – for cheap home delivery – stuck on top of the masthead, obscuring the Sydney in the title.
I was shocked when I saw this when I arrived here this morning. At least the folks at The Age stick their ads over editorial, not the actual masthead itself. Journalists I correspond with in the US tell me they would bring on industrial action if their publisher permitted such an attack on the brand.
While I am no marketing expert, I would have thought that covering your brand in this way is a bad move.
On the home delivery offer itself, I doubt newsagents will be happy – they make less from a home delivery sale than retail from the product itself and add on sales through retail. A smart publisher would develop an incentive program with retailers so they can drive single copy sales. This is fertile ground yet of little interest to some publishers as they don;t have the same control they have through home delivery.