Newsbrands’ effectiveness assault opens up digital’s weakness

There are two fundamental problems with digital, writes Dominic Mills – but are they enough to swing the pendulum back in print’s favour?

Like my fellow columnist Richard Marks, I also sat in the same packed auditorium last week for Newsworks’ Effectiveness Summit.

His expert take on it, also on Mediatel, is an excellent read. Like him, I found the Newsworks arguments confident and cohesive.

Unlike him, however, I did see it, in effect, as an attack on digital. Well, let me qualify that: nobody was saying advertisers shouldn’t use digital. Indeed, both newsbrands and the independent presenters went out of their way to say that digital (although they presumably mean their own digital inventory) is an essential part of the schedule, and that, combined with other media, there is a multiplier effect.

But the presentations revealed to me two fundamental weaknesses about digital. One, that the industry is having trouble building effectiveness models that can properly account for digital beyond low-grade measures such as reach, time spent, likes, shares and that sort of stuff.

Maxus’ Alex Steer, who is head of technology, effectiveness and data (a brilliant title, since he can call himself ‘Head of TED’), suggested that this is because, while the industry drowns in data, it has failed to move from metrics to new and appropriate models. “Numbers aren’t in short supply,” he said, “but sense is”.

Is this a problem? Damn right – it must become one at some point, even if everyone is currently turning a blind eye to it.

Thus the industry finds itself in the weird position where, in effectiveness terms, digital doesn’t have to justify its place on the schedule, while every other medium does.

Two, where the effects of digital can (or are – not necessarily the same thing) be measured, they are primarily short-term.

There’s nothing wrong with short-term per se – especially if it aligns with campaign objectives – but as Peter Field, resident IPA effectiveness expert pointed out, the real benefits to a brand come from taking a longer-term approach. This is when key brand business effects come into play: salience, loyalty, market share, price resilience, margin protection or increase, sales and profits.

For whatever reason – and you can take your choice here – digital’s effects on these long-term measures are: one, either small or non-existent; two, can’t be measured; or three, can be measured, but aren’t.

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But as Steer also said, “the short-term is here for the long-term, and we need to think about how we deal with it, not wish it would go away.”

Back to the effectiveness of newsbrands. They work. Hooray. But then Newsworks is hardly going to put its effectiveness stake in the ground without the evidence to back it up.

To me, there are two valuable take outs. One is the role of print acting, as BDRC’s James Myring said, as a ‘primer’ or ‘multiplier’ to digital.

Across 13 different brand health measures, print solus adds an average 5pc uplift. Combine print and digital and the average uplift is 17pc. You only see the multiplier effect when print is included: there’s none when you use multiple digital channels.

Personally, I’m not surprised: tangibility, scale (i.e. you can actually see the ad without squinting) and its unavoidability give print some real welly. So take that Mary Meeker and your ridiculous time spent/budget allocated theory.

The other was the assertion – backed up by reams of econometric modelling – by Sally Dickerson of Benchmarketing – that advertisers wanting to maximise their effectiveness should return newsbrands’ share of budgets to 2013 levels. That’s about 4 percentage points higher than 2015 levels – and even more than current levels, if the dire stories coming out now are to be believed.

As Newsworks’ Rufus Olins notes here on Mediatel, “the pendulum has swung too far”.

Will this happen, and will it happen quickly enough, to prevent further decline among newsbrands? To succeed, the arguments will have to be made at the highest levels of clients and agencies, and they will inevitably require an aggressive stance to be taken against the #1 enemy, digital (although not their own digital).

But, hey, you never know. First, the ANA report from the US is a lesson to clients that they’re being ripped off left, right and centre in digital. Two, buying newsbrands is probably a fair bit cheaper than it was in 2013.

Pop-up newspapers: hmm, interesting idea

I must admit I was highly sceptical when I heard the news that regional publisher Archant had last week launched a so-called pop-up newspaper for ‘Remainers’ still bewailing their fate.

First, it’s called The New European, which is exactly what we won’t be. Second, we lost (ok, so you know which side I was on) and we don’t want to be reminded of it. It’s time to move on…after four weeks anyway, which is the putative shelf-life of the paper (hence the term pop-up).

And third, I’m old enough to remember a newspaper called The European, launched in 1990 by Robert Maxwell and subsequently owned by current Telegraph proprietors the Barclay brothers (why? As far as I can see they are virulently anti-European).

It was miserable, dull and completely up itself. It survived on some mysterious cocktail of life-support drugs (i.e. millionaires funding vanity publishing projects) far longer than it should have done, until a mercy-killing in 1998.

But bloody hell, casting my doubts to the wind, The New European is really good. Good old-fashioned broadsheet. Serious contributors. Some wit and style. No sport, but I get enough of that elsewhere. And plenty of content and perspective that is original and unique. It makes me almost proud to be, er, British.

And there’s an unashamed play by Archant on the badge quality of The New European. As editor Matt Kelly writes, “one of the magic elements [of print] is that it is a visible indicator to the world about who you are.”

Quite so. A digital-only version, the safe option, just wouldn’t have that feeling.

It’s not perfect, of course. Less copy, fewer pages and tighter editing would have improved it. The leisure/culture stuff seemed a bit irrelevant: after all, we can still go to Europe, can’t we? But it enraged a ‘Leaver’ I showed it to, which I call a result.

Will the idea catch on with other publishers? Why not? Archant turned the idea round in less than 10 days, which is going it some. I hope that others take note and imitate.

And I wish Archant every success, by whatever measure it deems relevant.

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