The Royal Wedding – right up the Daily Mail’s aisle

Paper Boy – the irreverent insider

As I write, the world’s press is still devoting column inches to P. Middy’s derrière. The Middleton sisters and the Royal event helped produce a reasonably good month for newspaper sales.

Considering that Easter fell in April this year and the unseasonally clement weather (two perennial excuses for short term and cyclical declines in newspaper sales), the media attention on the Royal nuptials provided a vital leg up for sales for the month – no more so than at the Daily Mail, winning a milestone sales victory over The Sun (more later). However, the internet and social media has meant there is no replacement and will never be for the “Diana” phenomenon to drive newspaper sales. Although the Daily Express still ploughs this furrow at any opportunity, it hasn’t taken long for newspaper editors to realise the newly-weds are not a long term panacea for making up for the continuing decline in newspaper sales.

Let’s tackle the two aforementioned variables that are always used as factors in newspaper sales.

Generally public holidays have lower sales across the board as we all have better things to do with our time. These bank holidays and particularly this year (3 days off work for 11 days away) result in much of the UK trying to take a holiday and lowering the overall sales of newspapers. Bank holidays are usually excluded from the ABC analysis under the rules of the audit. This is an agreement between media buyers and publishers; everyone knows sales are dramatically lower but newspapers are allowed to exclude it and therefore keep their average sales higher than reality. It is ironic that some of these excluded days are often high yielding advertising days as grocers and DIY sheds vie for our shrinking disposable income in persuading us to traipse along yellow lines as a leisure pursuit.

I have often heard in newspaper sales analysis the fact that good weather impacted negatively on overall volumes. In some circles this is termed the “lawnmower effect”; the first weekend day of the year that it’s warm enough to cut the grass. This can obviously differ by region and no data anorak has made a strict correlation between each degree of rising mercury and the lowering effect on sales. We can and probably should assign this vagary in to the same unproven category as ‘Tit Monday’ (Google it!).

However, newspaper sales are an emotive issue for all involved in the media industry, but no more than in the general psyche of a newspaper as a corporate entity. Not evident in the ABC certificate but evident to some extent from NRS readership figures, it is well known throughout the industry that the Saturday sale for most newspapers (maybe not the Daily Star) is 30% higher than the average weekday. The weekend has been the battle ground for marketing monies to drive sales to keep the overall average above self-imposed levels that both publisher and media buyer can tolerate. Despite the industry weaning itself to some degree off the “cocaine habit” of buying promiscuous readers with CD’s and DVD’s this tool still can be used with devastating effect.

A week before Easter, the Saturday edition of the Daily Mail featured a “Happy and Glorious Royal Weddings” DVD. Apparently this was the first time since The Sun had established itself in the UK as the number one selling newspaper, that the Daily Mail had sold more than The Sun on a Saturday. Recent knowledge implies that The Sun is usually 250,000 to 500,000 ahead of the Daily Mail on Saturday. These competitive leads or gaps are held as sacred milestones by publishers and a level of paranoia exists in newspaper offices regarding their breach. This paranoia seems to ease once these “records” are broken and each subsequent breach seems to hurt less (examples include the Daily Mail overtaking the Daily Express in the 80’s and the debate of what the implications would be of The Sun dropping below an average sale of three million).

So the recent Metro study that said (unsurprisingly) that women were more turned on than men by the Royal Wedding, means that whilst the sale of newspapers and the consumption of Royal Wedding content was bumped up by the fairer sex, it was counter balanced by the male population avoiding the newsagent to tend to the garden and wait for the pub to open!

So on to May and we eagerly await the sales figures that will include the differing news analysis regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden. I am sure the Daily Star will have done well featuring the scantily clad lingerie model niece of the al Qaeda leader…