Britain 'Evening Standard' Introduces Smart Card Payment

By: E&P Staff Gone are the days of Londoners searching their pockets for the 50 pence ($1) to buy a copy of The Evening Standard. The afternoon tabloid has introduced its new cashless payment system: the smart card.

The card, dubbed Eros in reference the famous Piccadilly Circus statue and the winged figure on the Evening Standard?s nameplate, uses ?near-field communications? technology, already popular for public transit systems in London, Paris, and Hong Kong. To pay, readers touch a card to specially equipped devices, available at more than 150 of the Standard?s vendors around the city.

The Evening Standard isn?t the first newspaper to use innovative ways to increase sales. Swiss publishing company Edipresse experimented with using cards for payment seven years ago and The Financial Times is evaluating the potential of using cards and other cashless payment methods.

The card is the paper?s latest technique to win back its share of afternoon readers from the free dailies that have entered into the competitive London market. In two years the Evening Standard?s circulation has fallen from 321,000 to 284,000.

?The motivation for the introduction of the card was that we believed that central London was going to become a tap-and-go society,? said the Standard?s Managing Director Andrew Mullins in an International Herald Tribune article.

Mullins hopes the cashless payment method will help differentiate his paper from the afternoon ?freesheets,? like The London Paper and The London Lite, and boost morale for vendors experiencing lagging sales.

Buying with Eros has other benefits too: Users get discounts on the paper that increase with the frequency of purchases. And readers can also register for ?rewards? if they provide some demographic information when they purchase the card online.

Even London?s biggest daily has implemented new options. In November, The Sun, a morning paper, unveiled a new voucher system, where frequent readers can use vouchers mailed to them to receive discounts. The unique bar codes on the vouchers also provide the Sun with information about when and where their readers buy the paper.