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15 Jun 10 What makes Newspaper Advertising Ineffective?

Gone are the days when your daily newspaper used to have 5/6 advertisements and people used to wait to see those ads. Things have changed with time. Now we no longer wait for an advertisement, rather we flip through pages and ignore the advertisement-cluttered pages, and only few good ads penetrate into our mind.

We notice only few advertisements because we relate to only a few products somehow, or some of the advertisements are done creatively, or they have some unique placement innovation. Apart from classified advertisements, rest of the display advertisements have started showing less of overwhelming response in comparison to others forms of media of advertising. Mostly they go unnoticed. Have you ever thought despite of being most credible medium, offering benefits like refer back value why this medium is not doing well in terms of advertising?

Too many advertisements in newspaper, that’s advertisement clutter, may be one big hindrance on the way of its success. Too many advertisements make us feel irritated and we don’t bother to see each of them. So the message goes unnoticed.

News paper advertising has also become quite expensive. To save expense nowadays people advertise within a small space and compromise with the creativity, making mandatory things like logo, brand name, package shot prominent within the small space. So dearth of creative advertisements has made it quite obvious for the people to ignore them.

In a busy day an average person spends around 20 minutes in scanning the newspaper. In that short time grabbing attention of the person towards the desired message is really challenging act. And also daily news papers stay with us just for a day. Relative short life span of the medium is disadvantageous for the advertisers. So multiple insertions are required to get noticed.

Newspapers generally do not use high end quality of paper, which limit’s the production quality. Poor production kills the creativity.

News paper is not a target market customized medium, rather it’s a mass medium, it talks to all. Several times it may reach all unwanted people, who may never buy your product or service and you may miss out your target market. It always has the risk of reaching out the wrong people.

With growing popularity of internet lot of people have switched over to e-paper from newspaper in hand. Online version of publication may not carry all pages bearing advertisements. And in this case print ad turns into online ad, which is mostly ignored and not remembered.

Hopefully some innovation will change the fortune of news paper advertisements.

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25 Nov 09 Why the data between the newspaper readership and and advertising revenue is not complementing each other? why is such a huge gap?

Two recent studies: one done by Scarborough Research about newspaper readership and another by Newspaper Association of America has quote to different yet related information about the condition of the newspaper business in the United States.

The latest Integrated Newspaper Audience study by Scarborough Research has found that nearly three-fourth (74%) of American adults still read newspaper. Not only that, the readership of newspaper is found to be higher among educated and affluent class – indeed, this is not surprising, but despite all thee the revenue of newspaper is falling by 28% as revealed by the Newspaper Association of America in its recent data.

Findings of Scarborough Research

  • 79% of adults with white-collar jobs read newspaper in print or online.
  • 82% of adults that has household income of more than $100,000 read newspaper in print or online.
  • 84% of people who have completed their graduation or have any advance degree reads newspaper in print or online.

According to the Newspaper Association of America total advertising revenue is down by 28% in the third quarter of 2009 in comparison to the revenue in the third quarter of 2008 (from $10.1 billion to $6.4 billion).

What does this mean?

This mean that despite users being confident about the content provided in the newspaper, advertisers are not playing ball. They are not investing. In my view there could be two reasons for that:

  • Advertisers have started to believe that one who reads newspaper do not pay any particular attention to the ads inserted in it, or they are too forgetful to remember anything once they put the newspaper down.
  • They have become cautious of greenery shown by Madison Avenue, as unlike the Internet, they have no way of knowing who is viewing what.

The newspaper industry needs to learn to provide measurable value, if it does not want to become extinct.

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