SAGE Advice: How to Drive Home A Few Hybrid Ads

By: Leo J. Shapiro and Steve Yahn The target market for hybrid cars is growing happily. According to our Leo J. Shapiro and Associates January 2006 national poll of U.S. consumers, 11% of consumers said they were eager to buy a hybrid auto, double the eager 6% in 2003.

However, unhappily for most newspapers at this time, auto manufacturers and car dealers don?t have enough in their hybrid car inventories to support substantial advertising, so for now this market growth is demand-driven.

At the same time that dealers have no incentive to advertise hybrids (high consumer demand plus low inventories of these cars leaves no immediate pressure to advertise), slippage of all automobile advertising dollars away from newspapers is turning ?into a landslide,? in the assessment of Joseph T. Hallinan, a staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal who covers the newspaper industry.

Contributing to this significant erosion is the continuing strength of Japanese auto competition and the rise of consolidated mega-dealerships, both of which tend to be less likely to lead to advertisements in newsprint. In addition, used autos, once a mainstay of newspaper classifieds, are increasingly marketed on the Internet instead.

The hybrid auto is maneuvering uncertainly via what needs to be done to break through to the mass market.

In 2003, consumers took the lead in creating a potential market for hybrids. By 2005, automobile manufacturers became convinced that consumer interest in hybrid autos was real and began to commit themselves publicly to the production of hybrids in commercial quantity.

When hybrid autos become available for sale in some abundance, we can expect the dealers to leap on board the hybrid bandwagon and begin to actively promote those hybrid cars.

THE BOTTOM LINE

But when hybrid auto manufacturers and dealers selling their cars are ready to advertise, will newspapers be ready for them?

To get a fix on what the hybrid auto might mean to newspapers and other local media, we have been interviewing some dealers about how they use various media and how advertising media rate in terms of providing them with audience data that they can use to reach the clearly defined target market for hybrids.

Of the 19 auto dealers we have interviewed to date, 15 advertise in metropolitan newspapers. Nine rate metropolitan papers as their most important advertising medium and three rate metro papers second in advertising importance.

Yet only four of the 19 believe metros to do the best job in giving precise enough information about readership to reach a target market efficiently.

While that deflated tire is being worked on in the repair shop, however, there?s no need for newspapers to spin their wheels searching for directional signals pointing to hybrid auto-related revenues.

What newspaper in America doesn?t have a web site, and often one complete with rich media? So why shouldn?t newspaper web sites, for new-model hybrid cars as well as used ones, offer online ads that demonstrate the look and some of the special features of this new and increasingly popular generation of automobiles?

Advertising agency people we talked to for this column see no difficulty in creating full-motion, living-color ads for newspaper web sites?from ads showing these hybrids performing in traffic or out on the open road, to formats as straightforward as a hybrid car seen on a revolving pedestal, or even with the commonplace device of clickable stock shots of the car seen from several different angles.

Then, too, there is the possibility of hybrid-car giveaways by newspapers, in print and at their web sites, as sweepstakes subscription builders.

Finally, given the great and growing interest among consumers for more information about hybrid autos, production of robust ?advertorials? about hybrids on at least a quarterly basis would seem to be a no-brainer?a low-cost, full-service way to pipe some gas into the revenue tanks at newspapers across the country.