Rick Rochon’s MarketingBlog

I was just reading an interesting article online making the case for newspaper advertising for small/local businesses.  The article provided some very useful data about readership, responsiveness and just how darn great it is to advertise in the newspaper.  As I see it, the issue with newspapers is NOT a lack of audience or a lack of content.  The issue with newspaper advertising and the newspaper model in general, is a disparity between their target customer and the cost of their advertising.  I understand how the newspaper industry arrived at it’s current state with atrocious amounts of overhead and a sales model that is based upon real live humans selling to real live humans, rather than an automated system for ad creation with some sort of human support system.  So, if you are <insert your small business here> you could really benefit from the eyeballs your local newspaper could provide your business, but frankly I don’t know many small businesses that can afford the exhorbitant costs associated with newspaper advertising.  In addition to the high cost of newspaper advertising there are no mechanisms provided by the publishers for providing concrete evidence that the advertising is producing leads or revenue.  At least when I work with a client on Adwords I can provide pretty clear ROI.  How do I know so much about this topic?  I worked in advertising sales for both the online and offline versions of the newspapers for years in sales development and believe me, the model is broken.  I don’t want to see the newspapers go away or reduce staff, but honestly they need to get with the program.

Here’s my simple plan for the newspapers to  get it together:

1. Sell your ad products at a price your customer can easily afford.
2. Provide tracking mechanisms like custom urls and call tracking.
3. Automate the process of ad sales. Auctions anyone?
4. Reduce overhead so you can provide your product at a more reasonable cost.
5. Become the lynchpin in every small businesses marketing program with education, coaching and fantastic products.

Believe me when I tell you I want the newspapers to succeed, but the industry is a slow moving ship that takes 5 miles to make a turn.  I just hope they can make that turn before they hit the waterfall.