Newsbrands finally promote themselves

The latest Newsworks campaign should be seen as a decent and worthwhile piece of work promoting national newsbrands – but the next step must have a stronger focus on celebrating journalism.

It’s great to see newspapers, or newsbrands, actually putting their hands in their pockets and finally spending a little money promoting the importance of what they do.

The campaign, which launched this week, is being supported by the six largest newspaper groups through 18 titles and will have a “media value” of £3 million.

This of course means they are spending very little at all beyond the cost of the creative work, with perhaps some additional loss on the advertising space, which might have been sold elsewhere.

Such “losses” are rarely finite and can be easily made up across the course of the year.

It is not being unnecessarily grumpy to point out just how modest and how late this initiative is.

It is difficult to think of another industry so much in the grips of technological change, and seeing average falls in its core print product of around 7 per cent a year, that has done so little as an industry to market itself, to save itself.

Until now, and maybe even going forward, only half the job has been done through the important but narrow concentration on the task of making the case for the vitality and effectiveness of newspaper advertising.

It is difficult to understand the reluctance to go the whole way and highlight, if not actually trumpet, the vital social and political role of teams of independent journalists, many risking their lives in war zones, to dig out information that is uncomfortable to authority and important for society.

In one of the six ads – the only one containing any news – there is a picture of a child, almost a generic picture, probably in Syria. The copyline says: “Our pictures attract a reader’s attention. Our editorial holds it.”

And that appears to be the only example of editorial content of any kind in the campaign.

Why so reluctant to draw attention to the almost daily scoops in newsbrands that would help to counter the slippery lie that newspapers are somehow a thing of the past, heading towards oblivion at least in their traditional form? A product which is bought by fewer and fewer people every year which has led some commentators to warn that the half-life of a newspaper is about five years.

The new campaign focuses perfectly reasonably on the level of attention newsbrand readers pay to the product and the continuing scale and depth of readership.

It’s good to point out as 36 million people still pick up a newspaper each month and spend more than a hour reading it – a number that rises to 46 million when all digital platforms are included.

It’s fine to emphasise that “in a world of fleeting attention, we offer you meaningful relationships,” and perfectly proper to note the remarkable extent to which newsbrands still influence the agenda of broadcasters, not least through newspaper review programmes.

It’s neat for Alfredo Marcantonio, a partner at Holmes Hobbs Marcantonio, the company responsible for the excellent creative work as far as it goes, to emphasise that national newspapers are now more widely read than they were in Fleet Street’s heyday. He also adds that such readers would no more change their newspaper than their football team.

The numbers are clearly impressive and absolutely worth drawing attention to and are presumably based on the latest NRS figures.

NRS figures released last week show that no less than 94 per cent of people in Great Britain above the age of 15 are reached by newsbrands, or magazine media content in some form.

On average mobile and tablets add 64 per cent net reach to the individual footprints of the 26 measured print brands involved.

Impressive information and it is important that it is communicated.

But there are still a few small niggling questions.

It’s not entirely clear who the current campaign is aimed at. Even though it is being carried in the mainstream press, and digital versions thereof, the message appears mainly aimed at media buyers.

As the copy headline says: “Nothing works like news works,” which is not the same as “the importance of newsbrands”.

As a reader you don’t need to be told that when you read you are paying attention.

A warm, general feeling about newspapers may spread out beyond the media professionals but you are scarcely likely to touch those who used to read a newspaper but no longer do.

How about having a revolutionary idea and go and spend some real advertising money beyond “freebies” in your own publications.

There is another problem lurking just below the surface. It is an understandable strategy to lump newspaper readership and online readership together to produce a big impressive number.

Unfortunately we all know that all readers are not equal in either the time they spend with a particular format, or more importantly how much money is generated by the accompanying advertising.

Newsworks sets out the numbers very clearly. Advertisers spent £1.37 billion with national newsbrands last year. According to the latest AA/Warc figures this included £214 million on digital platforms.

The digital number is rising impressively but is still dwarfed by the £1.156 billion spent on print advertising.

Maybe the gap will narrow over time but it is unlikely that convergence will happen any time soon unless there is a catastrophic drop in print advertising.

The danger of, in effect, celebrating the importance of large digital numbers is to undermine, whether intentionally or not, the importance of print which still produces more than 16 per cent of the advertising revenue.

Will the print circulations of a number of newspapers eventually fall so low that they will drop below the relevance threshold for advertisers, however large the online presence. The Independent and The Guardian spring to mind.

All good scientific researchers when they produce a decent piece of work say that of course further research is necessary…

The current Newsworks campaign should be seen as a decent and worthwhile piece of work that should then move on to really promote the importance of newspapers and their journalism and not merely the length of time readers spend with them and the intensity of their attention.