Forget bad journalism. The LAT front page ad is bad advertising

By Tim Windsor

Almost all of the hand-wringing about this week’s front-page Los Angeles Times ad has been focused on journalists, and how hard this is for them to swallow.

“There is not an editor in this nation — including me — who really wants to see something like that on the front page of his or her publication,” (Russ) Stanton said.

Stipulated. And yet, this misses an important point: This may be bad journalism, but it’s even worse advertising. Good advertising doesn’t try to trick the viewer by pretending to be something it’s not.

The LAT ad is the print equivalent of a Windows-shaped pop-up banner that warns you that your operating system may be infected with a virus. It may get your attention, but it succeeds only in annoying you once you realize it’s just trying to fool you.

It would seem the Los Angeles Times paid no attention this week when Google’s CEO warned them and the rest of the newspaper industry not to piss off their customers:

“I would encourage everybody when they think about — in all the rhetoric, all the concern about this or that — think in terms of what your reader wants. Try to figure out how to solve their problem. These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more, right”

Yes, management of the Los Angeles Times should be smacked, but not for the reasons already cited around the web. They should be smacked because they sold an ad that pisses off both their readers and NBC’s snookered targets, all while making a major U.S. newspaper look as desperate as Mister Haney trying to scam a few dollars from the citizens of Hooterville.

Why it’s so hard to move print revenue online: The loss of scarcity

By Tim Windsor

It’s shorthand for the chief problem of transitioning a local news operation’s business model from print to online: Newspaper revenue dollars become online pennies. Despite increasing readership online, advertisers continue to pay a much higher price when they place their ads in print.

A lot of that has been laid to inertia on the part of advertisers and a lack of sales imagination at papers. But there’s also something very real at play as well: the loss of scarcity.

This can be see in some very simple numbers. At the right are the two places a print advertiser can distribute a message, for instance, in Baltimore, MD on a typical Sunday. They can choose The Sun or The Examiner. Or, if they’re feeling especially flush, they can choose both. Even with greatly diminished circulation, the local newspaper remains the best way to put your ad in the hands of a lot of local people. And in most major markets, there’s only one — or at best two — organizations that can pull that off. Scarcity.

But what happens the same advertiser wants to reach online users in a metro market? That’s when the picture gets a lot more complicated for traditional local publishers. Keep reading »

The end of Google’s print ad effort

By Martin Langeveld

It’s not terribly surprising to me that Google has given up on its two-year-old program to funnel print ads to newspapers.  As a newspaper publisher, I provided pre-alpha feedback to Google on this program in 2006, and was involved in it from its earliest rollout until I left the business last spring.

No paper that I know of saw anything more than a trickle of advertising through this channel.  Google won’t say how much business Print Ads did.  But Google probably anticipated plenty of volume, so it built in only a small commission for itself.  My guestimation is that their cut came to $1 million or less — probably not enough to cover costs, and certainly a figure with not enough zeros to keep it going as part of Google.  I would not read this as Google giving up on newspapers — in better times, they killed programs with similarly minimal revenue, such as Google Answers.

Among the program’s flaws was the bidding system incorporated in it. Not only did this require a potential managerial decision for each individual ad, but it involved some back-and-forth dickering for every ad.  Most of the very few offers that came through this channel were extremely low-ball ad proposals from sometimes questionable advertisers.

Meanwhile, Google has introduced Google Ad Planner, still in beta rollout, a tool for creating online advertising plans that incorporates the ability to find and select sites based on demographics — a feature that was entirely absent from Print Ads.