Opportunity for newspapers to improve their buying and selling process
Claire Myerscough, business intelligence director at News International Commercial, says newspapers are trailing behind when it comes to creating simple and flexible solutions for buying and selling…
Pundits have famously predicted the demise of the newspapers. Whilst individual titles or specific market sectors may be struggling, many continue to inform and entertain audiences and offer a level of reach other media can only dream about.
Some 10 million national newspapers are sold every day (ABC Dec 10). This compares to 14.8 million Brits that use Facebook (Comscore Nov 10). The key difference is that the 10 million newspaper readers invest both their time to make a trip to buy their favourite newspaper and, ultimately, their money to consume the product. What would that 14.8 million Facebook figure look like if there was a 20p charge for access? It’s a sure sign of engagement.
Now, in case you were thinking this is a “newspapers can do no wrong” sales piece, let me say, there is one particular area where the publishers should rapidly turn their attention. Some media sectors have made significant improvements in their trading policies and practices resulting in an easier and more efficient buy. Examples include the J-ET trading system for radio, the CARIA method for approving television campaigns and the Attribution service, which standardises campaign data for broadcast. These have all benefited agencies and enhanced advertiser value. Are newspapers trailing behind? Undoubtedly so!
As advertisers continue to seek increased value from their marketing investment so too must agencies and media owners build more efficiency into process and systems. As opportunities through multi-channel campaigns and creative innovations are becoming more prevalent, we must adapt with simple but flexible solutions for buying and selling.
The time is right for the newspaper industry to challenge historic approaches to the way it delivers value. Advance booking contributes to effective campaign planning and doesn’t have to limit flexibility, so there’s no reason why it couldn’t be a consideration for print. Defined methodologies for cost per thousand calculations contribute to transparency and provide clients with true benchmarks for campaign effectiveness and improved campaign meta-data allows use of technologies that contribute to overall trading process efficiency.
There is evidence of differences in the value delivered by various ad formats and positions. More work is required to understand these differences and the impact of ad formats on reader behaviour. Our goal must be to continue to develop new ways to deliver and enhance value, and ensure the business remains operationally fit for purpose so agencies can focus on where the real value lies and not on the administration of trading.
As with any competitive market, publishers will continue to fight for revenues and market share but lessons can be learnt from other media whose trading efficiencies were greatly enhanced when they agreed to recognise and co-operate on non-competitive issues. Newspaper publishers must now co-operate on service efficiencies that enhance customer value and release revenues for investment in further innovation. I am sure agencies will be supportive as it can only bring greater efficiencies for them too.
Your Comments
I think Claire makes the vital point that trading technologies need to be deployed – this is not about currency; this is about understanding that the majority of the ad transaction is a low added-value process – expensive sales people just transmitting incremental changes by telephone and email.
Which leads to the logical conclusion – if it can be done by email, why not put the transaction process itself online? Simplifying (and standardising) the process itself, treating like it is a supply chain, is the result.
P&G in America have a direct link to Wal-Mart central purchasing that drives factories – why not media?
At Ebiquity we have been discussing with a number of large UK publishers the possibilities of doing just this – but within the regional newspaper market. If it can be done with regional newspapers – the extension to national newspapers should be a straightforward one.
The only barrier is the idea that trading processes can be rule-based and standardised, which cuts at the heart of what sales people actually do.
Of course Brian (Jacobs) is correct when he says ‘the way forward is to sell audiences online’ and he asks for ‘commonality in the way in which those audiences are defined, on to offline’. Surely the way round this is to understand what the consumer is doing across all media.
None of us consume media these days in isolation. We read newspapers, watch telly, listen to the radio and go online regularly each day – we are exposed to all of these media opportunities. So the trick is then, to better understand the how and the why of this consumption across the day and the week.
Brian said that ‘measurement of cross media campaigns has been an issue for as long as (he) can remember’. The IPA has worked some way to resolving this issue with the IPA TouchPoints survey, which is a consumer centric piece of research that delivers a cross media planning database.
It does allow us to understand audiences better and specifically how they use different media channels at different times of the day and for different reasons. Undoubtedly this helps from both the media buyer and seller point of view. TouchPoints has been available to the market since March 2006 and is now in its third iteration.
Claire makes a very good point when she mentions multi-channel campaigns and innovative creative solutions. One area where newspapers can benefit is in closer links between the selling of off and online forms.
The measurement (in every sense) of cross media campaigns has been an issue for as long as I can remember, but new technologies and the ability to tie together online and offline research sources is increasingly allowing newspapers and other publishers to sell the same audience online as off.
I must express a vested interest here – my business, Enreach uses sophisticated data fusion techniques, linked to proprietary semantic analyses to allow for traditional offline data sources like TGI to be used together with the likes of behavioural targeting in online planning and buying.
The way forward is to sell audiences online – I doubt there’s anyone reading this who would doubt that – but that doesn’t get us as far as it might unless there’s a degree of commonality in the way in which those audiences are defined, on to offline.
Newspapers are a powerful and vibrant media form, be they represented in a printed format or on a screen. We are already exploring with some publishers how those well-established, tried and tested sources like TGI can be brought to bear in the definition of online audiences, and in the planning and buying process.