'Parade' Adds Edit Supplement

By: Lucia Moses Advance Publications? Sunday supplement Parade is launching single-topic pullout sections that it hopes will appeal to underpenetrated categories including automotive, financial services and corporate branding, in addition to bedrock categories like healthcare, packaged goods and technology.

The Parade Selects pullouts are designed to be single-sponsor, most likely appealing to marketers with multiple brands. But unlike advertorials, Parade will produce Selects using its own edit staff and retain editorial control.

In what Parade expects to be a typical use of the format, Clorox will sponsor the first Selects, scheduled for Oct. 14. Titled Your Healthy Home, the 16-page pullout includes stories on cold prevention and comfort foods. Clorox will use the venue to promote seven of its household products, including bleach and disinfecting wipes.

A second Selects, due out Nov. 18, will be branded The Digital Home. Parade wouldn?t name the sponsor, identifying it only as a major electronics marketer.

The team at Parade has come up with 25 topics it thinks advertisers will support. Among other topics on the slate: holiday shopping, personal finance and family.

Randy Siegel, Parade president and publisher, hopes to get enough advertiser support to produce at least five Selects in 2008. Selects lets Parade?s editors go deeper into topics than their regularly allotted space allows, Siegel said, while allowing advertisers to make a bigger splash than in a run-of-book ad.

In that same vein, Parade recently began pitching another new ad unit: freestanding cards designed to include coupons and messaging. The cards are intended to have more impact than the many freestanding inserts crammed into a Sunday newspaper. Siegel sees the cards as having strong appeal among packaged-goods companies.

Through Oct. 7, Parade?s ad pages rose 4.5 percent year over year to 550, per Mediaweek Monitor, helped by food, retail and technology accounts.

That said, Parade, which appears in the Sunday editions of more than 400 dailies including News Corp.?s New York Post and Tribune Co.?s Chicago Tribune, is challenged to stay relevant as readers increasingly get their news and information from sources other than newspapers. Earlier this year, Parade redesigned its Web site and tweaked the print edition, beefing up the news section Intelligence Report. ?We?ve been encouraged by a lot of our newspapers to think about ways we can creatively evolve,? said Siegel.