EZ Does It: Full-frontal Ad Pushes Circulation Plan

By: Mark Fitzgerald The Jonesboro (Ark.) Sun has joined the trend of running ads on its front page ? but then there was the day when the front page was an ad.

In a bit of stunt marketing that attracted enormous customer attention and turbocharged its tiny EZ Pay program, the Sun on President's Day published an unusual hybrid wrap that placed a full-page house ad for the subscriber payment plan on the front page, and pushed the full-color newsy front page to A-3. On A-2 was a paid full-page ad for a furniture store. Unlike a normal wrap, pulling the front page off would take away two pages of content in the back of the section.

Hundreds of subscribers switched to EZ Pay in response to the ad's promotion of a $20 annual savings in home delivery. Weeks later, Circulation Director Rick Bales says, people are still referring to the ad when they call to switch to EZ Pay. "This was Rick Bales' brainchild," says Sun Publisher David Mosesso. "He wanted to do something that stood out."

The EZ Pay certainly needed help. Though the 19,645-circulation Sun has more than 11,000 households loyal enough to pay a year in advance, just 5% of subscribers were using EZ Pay. Credit the effectiveness of the President's Day promotion to its uniqueness, Mosesso says.

It was an innovation born of the newspaper's production limitations, he adds. The Sun's inserters have problems handling the kind of white kraft paper used in the average wrap, and the lightweight newsprint doesn't make for much of a wrap, either. But the press configuration does allow for process color on page A-3; it would appear like a normal front page. "So we said, let's just work with what we have," Mosesso says.

To Bales' pleasant surprise, he received far less flak about the ad from the newsroom than he expected. Editorial bought into the idea of jump-starting an EZ Pay program that retains 80% of subscribers over the long term, he says. For single-copy sales, the ad page was folded back in the display copy of news racks.

According to Mosesso and Bales, it's a question of when, not if, the full-page/ front-page strategy will be put to use again. Says Bales, "You raise extra money with a paid ad, you build up a program with 80% retention, and there's not a lot of pushback from editorial. What's not to like?"