The coat of arms on the masthead of The Age newspaper today is covered up with a stuck on ad featuring a mouse-like finger. If the coat of arms is deemed by the advertising and accounting teams to be of little value why have it on the front of the newspaper every day?
Oh puhleeease, give it a break! I actually picked up my paper this morning, saw the sticker and knew you’d waste another blog post with this ridiculous obsession about the sticky notes on the top of newspapers.
If your customers are too stupid to identify the difference between the daily newspapers because of a post-it note then give up the retailing game now because the papers need every cent of revenue they can get right now. They clearly trust their target audience to be smart enough to go through the day without your angst over a post-it covering a small portion of the masthead.
Find an important issue to blog about… like this from Eric Beecher’s story in Crikey this week:
“Each newspaper (SMH, Age) is publishing 50 fewer classified advertising pages each week than it was a year ago, according to the latest research by Goldman Sachs JB Were. This reduction in advertising translates into at least $1 million off this newspaper’s profits every week compared to a year ago.
Average classified advertising pages in The Age, SMH and Financial Review were down 55% year-on-year in April, following declines of 47% in March, 41% in February and 40% in January.
* At the SMH, employment ads fell 60%, real estate 50% and autos 80%.
* At The Age, employment and auto ad pages declined by around 65% in April, while the decline in real estate pages fell 65% compared to last year.
* At the AFR, display classified property ads fell 62% and employment fell 49% on a year ago.
Another alarming trend to emerge from today’s Goldman Sachs research is a large reduction in the total pages being published by the three Fairfax flagship newspapers. Each paper is running around 100 fewer pages each week than it did a year ago — supporting the anecdotal evidence that as well as lopping off pages they no longer fill with ads, The SMH, Age and AFR are cutting hard into editorial pages to save costs (and deprive readers).”
There will come a day when someone in your newsagency will pick up a daily paper, feel how light it is due to this decline in pages (both ad revenue and editorial content pages) and decide the money they give you isn’t worth it.
Stu, I cover the challenges of newspapers here regurlarly and have done for five years. Disrespecting a brand can only lead it to extinction faster.
Hi Stu
The encouraging thing about your post and I mean no disrespect comes directly from your first paragraph, this blog came to mind when you saw that post it note this morning, personally I see the humour in that first paragraph and that is no disrespect to Mark.
This is the place to come and find out the issues good or bad regarding Newsagency News, issues and views, its the only open and transparent operation I have seen regarding the Newsagency Channel and maybe all retail channels.
Derek
I’ve been quiet about this topic for quite a while now.
It does annoy me as well, but I just let it slide or just take the sticker off the paper, seeing I have to take them of the counter after customers dump them there anyway.
My now, not so secret goal is to get enough of these photos to turn it into a pixelated picture of Mark!
I still need more (and to work out how to do it) so keep sending pictures of them to Mark.
Has anyone noticed that the Sydney Morning Herald is missing the date on its masthead today? Only noticed it myself while topping them.