The Sun bets it all on footie

Placing the Sun online behind a paywall is an all-or-nothing bet by News International, so you can be certain the company will be throwing a considerable amount of promotional cash at the platform to lure in and maintain readers. However, it’s the newsbrand’s competitors who have the most to get excited about – and whoever the first port of call for Sun readers is, the one thing they won’t be doing is putting up a paywall…

From the moment News International paid £30 million for the Premier League’s goal highlights in January, the Sun’s move later this summer to a paywall, announced last week, carried a certain inevitability.

As my fellow columnist Ray Snoddy notes, there was no way the Sun could have contemplated going behind a paywall without some kind of exclusive, premium content – footie being the only serious contender.

But will that be enough to keep notoriously fickle online readers – probably even more fickle in the tabloid market than elsewhere – loyal? The Premier League highlights deal is for three years, and operates across the Times and Sunday Times, but even so that’s a lot of £2-a-week subs that need to be sold to stop the site’s 28 million monthly visitors disappearing – and it’s been reported that the Sun paywall will need more than 300,000 subscribers to cover outlay.

Indeed, if anyone knows how price responsive this market is, it’s News International with its 15-plus years’ history of price cuts in the tabloid print market.

And you only have to read the comments under the Guardian’s reporting of the story to see how outraged typical online readers get at the prospect of having to pay…and they’re Guardian readers.

Funnily enough, I could find nothing about this exciting news on the Sun online. Imagine what it’s going to be like when this is announced on the site.

Still, there’s no doubt, as with the Times and Sunday Times paywalls, that News International will throw a considerable amount of promotional cash at Sun+ as it is now called. There will be discounts, special offers and all kinds of temptations strewn in the reader’s path.

But it’s the Sun’s competitors who have the most to get excited about – and who will be the most likely first (but not the only) port of call for Sun online readers. And you can bet that the one thing they won’t be doing is putting up a paywall.

Trinity-Mirror CEO Simon Fox indicated back in April that he saw no likelihood of a Mirror paywall. Similarly, DMGT’s Lord Rothermere said he had no plans to put one up in front of the MailOnline. We’ve heard nothing from Northern and Shell’s Richard Desmond, but I imagine he is also expecting a large influx of traffic to the Express and Star sites.

What I find strange is that this amounts to an all-or-nothing bet on Sun+ by News International, instead of a more experimental, step-by-step approach involving a ‘freemium’ or metered approach. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a mass-market tabloid anywhere has gone fully behind a paywall. Most publishers only enact a complete lockdown on the back of some bullet-proof content.

Yet I can go to any club website like, say Man City’s, and watch quick or extended highlights not long after the game.

Plus, of course, the footie highlights are available only for nine months of the year; so that leaves Sun+ with a big content gap to fill in the summer months.

If you want to find an interesting alternative model outside publishing, Spotify is the place to look. There a subscription service – plenty of choice, no interruptions – sits alongside a free alternative that also provides an effective platform from which to upsell.

Alternatively, there’s the recently announced YouTube initiative to start charging for individual channels. The vast bulk of YouTube’s inventory remains free, but niche channels – the ones with exclusive content – will incur a charge of 99 cents a month.

Let’s see whether Sun+ modifies the bet.

Agency sets up PR outfit: back to the future

The French word for ‘advertising’ is le publicite, or ‘le pub’ if you want to get colloquial. When you think about it, that’s what clients want: to achieve fame through publicising of their product or service. By and large they don’t really care how.

That may sound heretical in this era of ultra-specialisation, when you can hire an agency in any discipline you care to mention. But it explains the thinking behind news that Trevor Beattie’s BMB agency is setting up a PR arm, Seven Dials, fronted by ex-Independent editor Simon Kelner.

But as the French seemingly recognise, advertising and PR should ideally go arm in arm. In fact, that’s the way it used to be back in the 70s, when you could pitch up an ad agency and grab some PR help too (not to mention market research).

Somewhere along the line – that’s the specialisation era for you – it all got separated as advertising became the lead discipline and left the rest behind. So what Beattie and co are doing is nothing new.

But if anything, the change in the media landscape and its fragmentation should lead to more integrated campaigns, where the PR is as important as anything else. Indeed, some might say more important: if these days it’s more about brand content and creating brand stories than one-dimensional advertising, then PR is not a bad place to start.

Beattie is someone who understands this better than most. His two most famous pieces of work, Wonderbra and FCUK, were PR gold and created as such. Cynics will say the man himself is a PR construct. That’s wrong; he’s used PR to amplify and exploit a strong hand. And that’s what it’s about.

I’ve been Cornetto’ed

Think of Cornetto and what comes to mind? Yes, Venetian gondoliers blasting out their bastardised version of ‘O Sole Mio’.

It might have been cheesy, but it actually gave Cornetto a distinctive property it can own: love and romance.

The problem was that Cornetto became a seasonal, out-of-home treat, when what brand owner Unilever really wanted was some of that indoor consumption too. This trend is known as ice cream snacking, and the beauty of it for manufacturers is that consumers buy multiple portions, not singles; no wonder the home consumption category is growing at double-digit levels.

Cue a rebrand earlier this year and a modern interpretation of the love theme under the headline Cornetto Cupidity. Here you’ll find it’s modernised itself through a series of lovely and mesmerising films themed around, well, the randomness of love.

And the most astonishing thing? A couple of them are eight to nine minutes long, an eternity in this fast-forward age. But worth it. Think I’ll buy myself a snack pack.