Raising Arizona Circulation, Hyperlocally

By: Mark Fitzgerald In certain Phoenix suburbs, The Arizona Republic offers terrific subscription deals. But even if you don't sign up, you might get a hefty paper full of local news dropped on your driveway anyway. That's right ? the Republic will treat you just like a regular subscriber. You can even call in a vacation stop. All you have to do is look like a subscriber.

The Republic's formal name for this penetration-building program is SID, or Strategic Incremental Distribution ? but informally, the non-subscribers who receive a special, very local, compact paper are known as "look-alikes." These households share with their neighbor a demographic profile that advertisers want.

SID helps the Republic keep its household penetration levels in suburbs that are growing rapidly, says the newspaper's director of advertising, Margie Cochrane. Consider the suburb of Glendale. The newspaper estimates that within the next seven or eight years, its population will swell to nearly 700,000. "We knew that this, particularly, was an area we wanted to own," she says. "But in certain ZIP codes we weren't where we wanted to be in terms of our [penetration] goals for advertisers."

The look-alike strategy combines two areas in which the Republic has been ahead of the industry pack: gathering data for delivery at the household level, and creating new hyperlocal papers.

Beginning back in 2000, the newspaper equipped its circulation carriers with an electronic notebook called SoftBook. Carriers download sequenced delivery lists with special instructions and a mix of products to be delivered. The Republic offers advertisers address-specific and route-specific packages that can be mixed according to geography, demography, or information from previous transactions between the household and an advertiser's business. In some suburbs, the papers are also available via racks and store stacks.

What the look-alikes in 18 suburbs or regions around Phoenix get is not the entire Arizona Republic paper, but a thrice-weekly tabloid of "micro-local" news and opinion content that typically weighs in at more than 40 pages. Subscribers get this tab inserted in the regular daily edition. The papers are titled after their 'burb, such as The Glendale Republic or The Ahwatukee Republic. News is reported by a full-time staff stationed in the Northwest Valley.

These compacts represent the evolution of the Republic's pioneering hyperlocal five years ago with a broadsheet that targeted Glendale. One of its problems: Ads from many small businesses ended up in unattractive, cluttered stacks on the page. That was remedied, Cochrane says, when the paper "went to modular sizing of ads, and totally revised our pricing."

SID is not an inexpensive operation, so it's been rolled out strategically. In March, all 18 zones were fully converted for distribution of the so-called "Community Republics." In 2006, the papers had added 1,031 new advertisers, says Cochrane, adding that advertiser churn in the local papers has decreased "significantly."

They're not all small businesses, either, noted Bob Dickey, chairman of Phoenix Newspapers Inc., during November's annual meeting of the Audit Bureau of Circulations. In a multi-media integrated buy, Dillard's, the department store chain, used the Community Republics in the mix with distinct ads that emphasized the stores' community ties.