Newspaper marketing

News Ltd’s SA subsidiary, Advertiser Newspapers, has turned its back on newsagents with their latest promotion Ai2 Robots. The Ai2 offer commences October 29 and will be available exclusively through BP and On The Run fuel outlets. This continues News’ SA rejection of newsagents as their retail network of choice. While News executives say newsagents don’t offer the same compliance as BP I’d say prove it. I have been to SA BP outlets and their treatment of newspapers is appalling. Newsagents provide a more compliant front of house offering, better customer service and better in store merchandising. Fuel transactions can be slow compared to rap[id transaction processing in a newsagency.

Spurning newsagents in this way gives newsagents further reason to question the value of the News Ltd relationship. Either News is serious about the newsagent channel or not. In SA, I suspect not.

I appreciate that the SA distribution model is different with most delivery newsagents not operating a retail store. This is no reason to reject newsagent shingled stores from being the shop front for such offers. Newsagents are more conveniently located and provide better customer service than any petrol outlet. News Ltd needs to address this, nationally.

For the distribution newsagents dealing with BP is a challenge since they often wait 30 days for accounts to be settled from head office, leaving the newsagent cash-flow negative for the run of the campaign.

The Age defiled its masthead again yesterday with a post it note ad stuck in the middle. If I were the editor I’d be angry but the folks at The Age seem to not care about such things. Pity.

News Ltd telemarketers have been calling country NSW with a special home delivery offer for the Daily Telegraph, promising a 6 am delivery. This is a challenge when the newsagent in at least one region does not get delivery from News before 8:30am. News has known about this for years yet allows the telemarketers to make the offer. The newsagent is left to field calls from disgruntled subscribers.

We’ve been trialing an impulse stand with the folks at the Herald Sun for a few months. The project started with some ideas I pinched from a trip to the UK last year. This is the next version of the stand. Sexier. Customers can see the spring holding the papers at an even level regardless of how many in the stack. This unit is responsible for a well above average sales kick in our store. We have located the stand to grab impulse purchases from our lottery counter. The Herald Sun sales growth we are achieving with this unit is proof that there are valuable sales growth opportunities in the newsagency channel for innovative newspaper publishers.

I’ve commented here several times about the challenges with some newspaper publisher giveaways: consumer frustration at lack of stock; the rules and lack of compliance by some retailers. Last night I stumbled across this blog entry by astrovisionary, an employee at Fairfax, about complaints publishers receive about the giveaways.

I’ve wondered about the etiquette of outing someone blogging about their employer but then I figured, hey, they have published their opinions so go ahead.

I found the blog interesting because the writer makes it clear she works for Fairfax and talks frankly about her employer. I also found the content of this entry interesting because it presents another side of a topic which frustrates me.

Consider these comments:

signs that its a monday morning at fairfax #87046:

dozens and dozens of phone calls from whinging old people flood in complaining that they missed out on the Sun Herald bonus cd/dvd/poster/free pile of crap that they were meant to be giving away with the copy of the paper. the best part is, i’m not even meant to field these calls.

what i don’t understand is why our company only seems to print of a handful of these freebies, because it seems like so many newsagents etc never have any.

but what i understand even less is why so many people are so devastated at missing out on these crappy free things and so determined to get their hands on one. DON’T YOU PEOPLE HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO WITH YOUR LIVES?!

happy monday, everyone!

I wonder if her boss knows she blogs? Here is a selection of the comments posted:

bizza on May 29th, 2006 01:29 am (UTC)
what i don’t understand is why our company only seems to print of a handful of these freebies

to save costs, silly! also, probably the newsagents steal them all.

astrovisionary on May 29th, 2006 01:34 am (UTC)
but it gives people the shits!

and by people i mean those who want these free things, and me – who has to field half the complaints relating to these free things.

i think the SH advertising manager has a secret stash of flags in his desk. i might go and steal one.

protag on May 29th, 2006 05:03 am (UTC)
Meesh, any chance you can get me copies of the free colour dinosaur liftouts from April–June 1999.
…each signed by David Kirk?

Publishers could certainly benefit from reviewing their giveaway strategy.

I was talking with a newsagent yesterday who told me that he ran out of newspapers on one day a week ago and was not able to get additional stock from the publisher so he took fifty copies from a major supermarket he is required to supply as a sub-agent. Within fifteen minutes he was called by his newspaper representative and told to return the fifty copies to the supermarket. His shop was without the newspaper for the rest of the day and he had to point customers to the supermarket. The supermarket returned 40 copies of the newspaper the next day.

there was a time when newspaper publishers relied on newsagents to manage distribution in their ‘territory’. Now, thanks to corporate deals between publishers and some national retailers, newsagents are no longer local managers. As my story illustrates, the new arrangements can treat newsagents as secondary outlets. No wonder newsagents are losing their top of mind position with consumers when it comes to newspapers and magazines.

I was surprised to discover The Age promoting subscriptions in my shopping centre this week with a giveaway of their newspaper.
So, on this same level, The Age is available from our shop, Coles and Safeway at full price, Starbucks for 50 cents and from The Age subscription offer stand for free if you sign up for home delivery.

While I am grateful for The Age promoting home delivery I don’t want to lose an existing full price direct customer to a cut price indirect deal (meaning less money for me). I also wish they were providing something else as a gift rather than the newspaper.

This Saturday The Age is giving away a sheet of wrapping paper free with each copy sold. It’s a good promotion but hey guys, the final shopping day before Christmas???

The Age today carries a 28 page tabloid insert cataloguing items punters can bid for. bid2buy is a business to consumer concept so I expect the more eBay aware readers will be confused. It’s good to see a newspaper using promotion mechanism more closely aligned with their product to woo readers.

bid2buy is being used by over 250 newspapers. The technology and strategy is from Cityxpress in the US. The Age joins Community Newspaper Group in Perth and Life Gold Coast in using the concept to revitalise advertising.

On Saturday The Age came with a free reusable carry bag. The bag had been well promoted in a TV campaign. By day’s end, over the counter sales for The Age sales were up 42% on the average Saturday sales for the previous eight weeks (exclusive school holidays). It was a well executed campaign by The Age. Sales for the Herald Sun were down 10% when compared with the same eight weeks. What I’d really like, from a retailer’s perspective, is a bundled offer I can use to drive sales of both newspapers.

It’s AFL Grand Final Saturday in Melbourne. Our one day of the year in this sports mad city. Everyone embraces the Grand Final – including those who ignore the game all year.

Newspaper sales are always high on Grand Final day. It’s part of the hype: what the experts say, the cartoons, the pre game scandals.

That’s why it is so odd that The Age is giving away a free CD with their newspaper today. It’s odd to have such a marketing push on Grand Final day. Odder even that the promotion has nothing to do with the newspaper as such.

I’m all for marketing newspapers. I just wish that the marketing related to the product and that as a newspaper retailer I could connect with it in some relevant way which could lead to sustainable sales growth.

It’s Grand Final day in Melbourne and The Age should be focused 100% on that in its marketing efforts today. It’s a newspaper, not a brand.

Buy The Age tomorrow and you will be given a free CD of classical music. Last weekend it was drink coasters and a couple of weekends ago it was a Yoga DVD.

I like The Age. It’s a good newspaper. I wish they’d invest as much in promoting the newspaper for its news and analysis content as they seem to spend on gimmick marketing.

I want to talk about my hometown broadsheet, The Age, but note that I could be writing about almost any Australian capital city daily newspaper.

This Saturday you get a free set of coasters if you buy The Age. Recent other giveaways have included: a yoga DVD, a Music CD (several times), posters and so on…

Each of these giveaways provides a sales spike but a sales spike does not create brand loyalty. Thinking about The Age, the best loyalty they have comes from their excellent Green Guide, TV guide (Thursday), Epicure (Thursday), Domain (Wednesday), EG (Friday) and classifieds (Saturday).

I’d rather see them invest marketing dollars in the product rather than investing in spike type campaigns. Coasters have nothing to do with a respected broadsheet newspaper. News is what it’s about and the day by day feature sections. The more the marketing focus is directed away from news and the core attributes of the newspaper the greater the disconnect with consumers.