NEWSPAPERS REVERSE NATIONAL AD EBB

By: Tony Case Industry More Responsive To Advertisers



(Mediaweek) It seems incredible.
But Colleen Kelly recalls a time not too long ago when newspapers
actually tried to dissuade their clients from using the medium, at least
when it came to buying color advertisements.



It's hard to imagine at a time when virtually every big daily, including
even the once-proudly black-and-white New York Times, has gone
the colorized way of USA Today. But it used to be that when a
client wanted to run a four-color spread, newspapers balked, doing
'everything in their power to talk you out of it,' remembers Kelly,
senior vice president/media planning director at Deutsch LA, whose print
clients include Mitsubishi Motors America, Bank of America and IKEA
North America.



'They would say it was cost-prohibitive, that you could only take an ad
on page two the third Wednesday of every month,' she says. 'They could
hardly make it work - and when they did do color, it was poorly
done.'



Kelly's account is illustrative of the negativity-laden modus operandi
that drove many newspapers as recently as a few years back. Speaking
about The New York Times, Sean Cunningham, executive vice
president/media director at Lowe Lintas & Partners, recounted that 'a
decade or so ago, it seemed the standard answer for most of our
inquiries above and beyond the standard selling space and practice was
'NO,' taped up on a big sign in the ad department. It's simply not the
case anymore.'



The Times was hardly alone in its arrogance. The consensus seems
to be that dealing with the advertising powers that be across America's
dailies used to be nothing short of a nightmare - so it's not a
surprise that media planners stayed away from them at all costs.



'Newspapers have always felt they were the king of their fiefdom,' says
Jack Grandcolas, vice president/West Coast sales for New York-based
Newspaper National Network, which places advertising in dailies
nationwide and has been a leading factor in the medium's national ad
surge.



An advertiser looking to do business with newspapers ran into an array
of problems - and not just when it came to bad color reproduction.
'If a national advertiser called up and asked for a rate, the attitude
was, we'll charge what we want,' Grandcolas says. 'They priced
themselves out of the ballpark and forced advertisers to look at other
media which were more efficient for their needs.'



Planning a multimarket print campaign - and thus, being forced to
deal with dozens of individual newspapers, all with their own rates and
guidelines - proved a most-cumbersome task. It wasn't unusual for
an advertiser, in the wake of a campaign, to get back '47 different
invoices, all incorrect,' recalled one exec. 'Media departments would
spend hours upon hours trying to match the differences.'



(A famous Booz-Allen study a decade ago didn't help matters much. The
researcher found that it cost agencies - already struggling to hold
down expenses - three to five times more to plan and place a
newspaper campaign than to initiate appeals through other media.)



Hardly a pitch for using newspapers. But the publishers were about to
get their act together.



In 1999, while overall advertising grew an estimated 10% year-over-year
and total newspaper advertising (including classified, retail and
national) added 5.4%, to $46.3 billion, national ad revenues alone for
the dailies soared an astonishing 17.7% to $6.7 billion. It was the
biggest gain in a quarter-century.



The picture stands in stunning contrast to the early '90s, when
newspapers suffered a bruising recession and national ads slumped.



The current good times for national are expected to continue, although
at a slower pace. The investment banking firm Veronis, Suhler &
Associates projected national will grow 10% this year. Not just dailies
are benefiting from the national explosion. Sacramento-based Alternative
Weekly Network, which represents such papers as the Village Voice,
Boston Phoenix and San Francisco Bay Guardian, reported that
last year its billings rose 34% to $27.1 million, following increases of
50% in 1998 and 111% in 1997.