Newspapers in the news: for better or worse?

The last 48 hours have seen two major pieces of coverage on the newspaper advertising marketplace.

The first, an article in this week’s Sunday Times business section, chimed with all our prejudices and data sets at MC&C. “Advertising spend on press has halved from £8billion to £4 billion in just 5 years”. This piece reflected the well-worn wisdom of advertising money chasing the classified efficiency of the internet, and following the eyeballs as they desert press for other media. A cursory glance at the new Touchpoints data reinforces this view - all adults now spend less than 4% of their day reading, down to 2% for the under 35’s.

But the second piece took a contrarian view - suggesting that total time spent reading newspapers had actually increased over the last two years, by about six minutes per day. Not surprisingly, this news came from what was the Newspaper marketing agency, now launched as Newsbrands, claiming that a physical presence is no longer a pre-requisite of a “paper” as an effective advertising medium. Fewer people may read a paper, but more gaze at their pixels, and total reach of online and offline is up by 1.8 million to 24.4 million readers.

Our view? Their stats are right, but there is as yet no proof of their underlying premise. Newspapers have found very few ways to monetise their online readers, for the simple reason, that unlike their offline counterparts, they don’t respond. Or at least not at the same levels, and directly to transact. If Newsbrands can help solve this gap then they will add real value, both to their publisher masters, and to the industry at large. But we see it as rather telling that they are (allegedly) being sent out to do this job, on what is a larger audience base, with a smaller budget than the NMA had to cover just the papers!

Mike Colling
Managing Director