A regional daily has adopted a sister title’s campaign aimed at attracting more print advertisers.
HTFP reported last month how the Liverpool Echo had announced the launch of its ‘Prints Charming’ campaign, which urges businesses to advertise with it in print and online.
Now the Echo’s Reach plc stablemate the Hull Daily Mail has taken on the campaign itself, albeit under the slightly amended name of ‘Print’s Charming’.
The campaigns follow research from the Advertising Association and WARC has shown an increase in print advertising for the first time in seven years.
In a piece about ‘Print’s Charming’, Mail editor Neil Hodgkinson, who began his career at his hometown paper the Fleetwood Chronicle in 1979, said he has “never fallen out of love with the industry”.
Neil, pictured, added: “It still excites. It still stretches your mind and it is still a major responsibility to deliver a service to a community – not only with stories but also opinions, campaigns and fund-raising.
“The latter is often forgotten – especially in swivel-eyed social media comments – but all the papers I’ve been involved in have raised millions of pounds for local charities and groups over the years.
“And that will continue because papers like the Hull Daily Mail – founded and trusted since 1885 – continue to sell thousands upon thousands of copies each day as well as reaching a huge and new audience with their websites, different than the paper but under the same brand.”
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Really ?
Who are they trying to kid?
Business people aren’t stupid,they know that falling copy sales equates to far fewer people seeing adverts so have chosen other more effective,alternate means of advertising which is why ad revenues,and certainly decent yields, have all but gone.
The new independent community publishers have taken the market and many of the bigger groups advertisers with them, it’s all about numbers and response and the traditional local paper no longer delivers either.
This is just a commercially driven push to bundle up digital and print ads to make the numbers up,nothing wrong with that but please don’t gush over it making out doubling up digital and print advertising in papers with freefalling copy sales is an effective way to advertise,it isn’t.
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Sounds more like a plea for local businesses to double their ad spend to shift digital inventory and get some pre year end paper space sold.
Traders go where the audience is so the editor expecting them to double invest when the audience and their potential customers have gone elsewhere is naive and comes across as a tad desperate.
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