Newsbrands: know your audience
News International’s Abba Newbery explains ‘News 3.0’ – a new face-to-face consumer engagement project to help define the future of news. The results certainly confirmed a few hunches – but they also offered some genuinely counter-intuitive points…
‘Know your customer’ is one of the first rules of any business – whether you’re selling newspapers or fruit and veg. We all think we know our customer – through research, surveys or analytics – but how many of us actually sit down with them – our customers – to try and work out who they are, what they want and why they buy our products?
To try and overcome this, as part of our News 3.0 initiative we undertook a series of speed research sessions where we brought together our readers with representatives from our agency and brand partners.
Rather than having to rely on the cold, hard numbers that normally form that basis of planning decisions, we wanted our advertisers to be able to put a face to their campaigns, to really understand where news fitted into consumers’ media consumption and therefore the media mix as a whole.
News 3.0 is all about looking at the future of news. The fact is that this future is, in large part, going to be defined by the reader. They are the ones who are choosing how they consume and interact with news, and so talking directly to them lets us understand how we can respond to their requirements.
The News 3.0 research sessions were set up in speed dating style, with each planner and reader getting a few minutes to talk and share insights. Some of what they found perhaps underlines what we already, deep down, knew but getting it from the mouth of the consumer makes it more important than ever to pay attention.
1) Tangibility – It’s something of a cliché but, for readers, the tangibility of a physical print product is still important. Yes, they’ll use digital for a quick catch up, but print is still king when it comes to really engaging with news media. Different readers expressed different views on the topic, but the strong consensus remained that print was qualitatively superior to digital as a reading experience.
2) Cultural differences – We know that different audiences have different preferences when it comes to content and advertising, but the polarised attitudes amongst our panel were notable. Though Sun readers liked large format and colourful advertising because it caught the eye and engaged them better, our Times readers were much more nuanced.
They generally claimed to prefer less obtrusive advertising and some claimed to not pay attention to any advertising, suggesting the importance of more creative, content led strategies for this audience.
3) Brand loyalty – Brand loyalty to newspapers seems to be different than that expressed towards other brands. It’s often tribal and baked into your upbringing, rather than being a personal choice based on your preferences. Readers talked of the relative merits of their title over other publications as the driver for their reading choice. However, they also admitted that their title choices were often formed by what their parents read, suggesting that free choice had less to do with their reading habits than their upbringing.
4) Print vs digital – Whilst print was almost universally preferred when people were given a binary choice, most readers accepted that there were different use cases for each medium. Indeed, a surprising number of our panel regularly paid for both print and digital content. Digital was seen as an ‘on the go’ media, letting you catch up on what’s happening quickly and conveniently.
Print was more ‘lean in’ and engaged, drawing readers into a content consumption journey in a way that ‘snacking’ on digital didn’t. Moreover, the stricter editorial limitations of print, dictated by page count and form factor, were talked of as a benefit by readers, with many feeling that whilst digital ‘went on forever’, print had a beginning, middle and an end, a complete editorial experience curated by editors who shared their interests.
5) Weekday versus weekend – It’s something that our own research has previously suggested, but it was good to see the psychological difference between weekday and weekend newspaper consumption confirmed by readers. Whilst weekday content was a focused and time constrained experience, weekend readers are far more leisurely and are able to plan their reading with care.
On the weekend readers will go for their preferred sections of the paper first, safe in the knowledge that they’ll have time to read the rest later on. During the week, however, consumption was more linear and focused.
Weekday reading is about professional interest or information discovery with a clear objective, whilst weekend reading is more considered and reflective. Our separate research even identifies a difference between the Saturday and the Sunday reader, with the former being more family-focused and the latter more individually engaged.
All of this backs up anecdotal experience, but really underlines the importance of understanding your edition for advertising impact.
For everyone who took part in our News 3.0 research sessions, the experience was genuinely eye-opening – in some cases it confirmed our hunches or our reading of the data, but in others it brought up genuinely counter-intuitive points.
In the end though, two things are clear; firstly, newspapers retain the loyalty and engagement of their readers, both in physical and digital forms.
Secondly, that our readers remain, as they ever have been, intelligent and involved individuals with a set of clear and differentiated preferences when it comes to content and advertising.