I remember back to 20 years ago when the internet was starting to be seen as something that just might work. I was working in the newspaper industry at the time and we were very concerned about the impact the internet may have on subscriptions. Little did we realize the impact it would have on advertising revenue.
It is no secret that newspapers are suffering from slumping circulation and advertising revenue. But you know what? Newspaper advertising still works.
In the past few years, we moved our clients away from traditional advertising like newspapers into some new media. Lately, we have been moving some of our clients back into newspaper and are seeing much better results.
Newspapers have never really been a reliable media to target the younger demographic. This is truer now than ever before. However, if your target market is the 45+ audience, then newspaper advertising is a great vehicle to throw into the mix.
Daily newspapers work well, weeklies work great. Why? Smaller communities are more community oriented and everyone wants to know what is going on. In towns and communities like these, almost everyone reads the paper. That’s why they are a good buy.
Newspapers are trying very hard to keep market share. The big challenge is how to integrate the traditional newspaper with the online edition and still retain circulation numbers. The Irving Group of newspapers has recently changed their canadaeast.com site to a pay-for-subscription model. This makes a lot of sense to me. Why should a newspaper work hard to gather all the information readers want, then give it away? I have a subscription to The Daily Gleaner, for only $3.00 more per month, I get the online versions of all their papers throughout the province. To me, this has value. For an advertiser, it has more value because all the ads that are in the papers are online as well.
The next time you are planning an advertising campaign, don’t forget to include newspapers in your buy. They are still very much alive and kicking.