Just over a week since the launch of the Telegraph’s Saturday section, Money -Go-Round, the Sunday Times has risen to the challenge by introducing a new personal finance section aimed at those readers eager to catch up on the week’s financial news and analysis.
The section is made up of 20 pages, although 8 of these contain property and motoring classified advertising. The Sunday Times is promising that Personal Finance will provide expert advice on investments and how to avoid financial and tax pitfalls – to back this up it contains items such as “Six Ways To Save Tax” and “Pensions: guarding your most prized asset”.
It also covers advice which is useful now that we are covered with a gloomy cloud of recession like hints for home- buyers and how to save cash by spending. In fact the section includes items suitable for the personal finance veteran whilst also catering for first-timers, something which is inclined to be overlooked in other such supplements.
As with “Money-Go-Round”, advertising is mostly financial, with building societies appearing on every page. The Woolwich, Legal & General, Bradford & Bingley, Fidelity Investments, Nationwide, Alliance & Leicester and National Westminster Bank are amongst the quarter -page advertisers, with no full page or colour ads in evidence. Colour is used even less in the Sunday Times supplement than it was in Money- Go-Round and is really only apparent on the first page.
Editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil seems determined to push the paper up in the sales stake as far as it will go with revamps and relaunches within the paper being the order of the day over the next couple of months – with the Style and Travel section also being given a change of image on April 18. Sales for the paper have remained more or less stagnent since they dropped from a high of 1,362,743m five years ago, with the August-January 1993 ABC figure standing at 1,181,063m. Neil obviously feels that it is time for change, to give the paper a chance to re-emerge at the top of the market.
Page Mono: £38,000
NB:Rates are identical to those used within the Main News section of the paper but prices for prime positions have yet to be finalised.
Nick Hurst: 071 782 7498
