The Telegraph, chicken and egg

As the row over the Daily Telegraph’s HSBC stance rages on, BJ&A’s Brian Jacobs – who once convinced his biggest client not to pull adverts from a TV channel following a highly critical documentary – gives an ad man’s perspective. He’s not impressed.

The mighty row over at The Telegraph ignited by the resignation of that well-respected journalist Peter Oborne (pictured) has brought the relationship between advertising and editorial centre-stage, once again.

This is not by any means the first time that a publication’s editorial team and its commercial sales team have found themselves on opposite sides of a dilemma. But more of that in a moment. We all know The Telegraph is a respected publisher with a largely conservative readership. Peter Oborne is a ‘name’ journalist, in part responsible for attracting readers to the newspaper and its digital variants.

Oborne resigned because he felt that his and his colleagues’ reporting of the current scandal around HSBC and tax avoiders/evaders was either ignored or at best down-graded by management on the back of threats from HSBC to withdraw its advertising.

What seems to have been very largely absent from the thousands of words written on this is the impact a row like this has on the reputation of The Telegraph amongst its readership. Given that this whole thing seems to be about securing ad revenue it’s somewhat ironic that the end result could be fewer readers, thinking less well of the paper. And that’s hardly a recipe for securing ad revenue.

This is not the first time that editorial and advertising teams have faced a clash of interests that needs to be solved. Those with elephantine memories will remember The Sunday Times‘ famous, long-running and ultimately successful campaign to get compensation for the victims of thalidomide. This was a drug marketed as a cure for morning sickness by a division of Distillers, now part of Diageo. The drug caused birth defects. The campaign led to many victims being compensated by Diageo.

The Sunday Times editor at the time, Sir Harold Evans, interviewed on BBC radio this last weekend said he was well aware of the importance of spirit advertising to his titles, but the fight he was expecting never came as his ad director supported him (mind you, there is no doubt Harry Evans would have covered the story anyway, regardless of any advertising concerns).

Andrew Neil famously banned Harrods from advertising in The Sunday Times after its proprietor, Mohammed Al Fayed, threatened to pull his advertising following adverse coverage of his personal affairs. Rupert Murdoch supported Neil’s position.

So this is not new. What is new, or at the very least extremely unusual, is for such a respected newspaper’s management (if we take Oborne at his word) to bow to threats and influence the paper’s editorial coverage in favour of the advertiser, and for a journalist to take the argument public.

And where is the media agency in all of this? The answer is: in a tricky position. Whatever the principle involved at the end of the day it’s the advertiser’s money and he can spend it or not spend it as he sees fit. But the agency does, I believe, have a responsibility to make the argument to his client’s top management (these client decisions generally come from the very top of the organisation) that a strong and independent press is far more important to advertisers in the long run than winning a minor skirmish. Furthermore, to make the point that winning such a skirmish will have far-reaching negative consequences.

This takes some doing (and I write as one who has done it and has the scars to prove it), but it is very important.

I see as the key principles as these:

1. Editors are there to ensure that the newspaper first covers and second gives the right prominence to the right stories. It’s a curiosity that according to all the stories flying around over the last few days The Telegraph appears not to have an overall editor.

2. Every other serious newspaper considered the HSBC tax avoidance story to be important. The Telegraph it seems didn’t.

3. According to Oborne, and it’s hard to know why he would make such a thing up, HSBC has brought pressure to bear on The Telegraph not to write negative things about them.

4. No advertiser has any right to do that; and if they do the editor and the paper’s management should tell them to ‘go away’ (he says choosing his words carefully).

5. HSBC has every right to advertise wherever they want. If any paper writes what they consider to be unfair or harmful things about them, thus in some way turning their readers against them then they should certainly consider not advertising in the paper.

6. If any advertiser feels that any publication is spreading falsehoods, then they can always sue.

7. By allegedly giving in to an advertiser and excluding or downgrading a news-story everyone else seemed to consider important The Telegraph will have diminished itself in the eyes of its readers.

8. It seems more than likely that as a result readership will drop, across all platforms.

9. The Telegraph will thus lose ad revenue in the long term.

10. And all because The Telegraph didn’t want to lose ad revenue.

The growth in native advertising makes it even more important that editors should have the final say over what goes in the newspaper. Agencies aren’t editors, indeed they’re driven by a wholly different set of priorities around doing the best for their client as opposed to serving the publication’s readers. These priorities overlap over the longer-term, as I’ve said, but they do sometimes clash when it comes to short-term objectives.

When they do clash, editors have to win.

To have it any other way starts to threaten the objectivity of the press, which is exactly why so many people read newspapers in the first place.

Advertisers buy audiences; less audience (in numbers or type) equals less money. It’s pretty simple really.

Brian Jacobs is the founder of BJ&A and a frequent blogger on The Cog Blog, where a shorter version of this article first appeared.