How Did You Sell Newspaper Ads or Marketing Publicity?

Table of Contents

How Has Advertising Changed

 

I recently interviewed Helen Ayers, a retired, national award winning newspaper editor, who retired from the The Brown County Democrat, a small newspaper published in Nashville, Indiana.  I wanted to know how much advertising had changed, especially with today’s multi-channel advertising capabilities

 

printing press

Image Courtesy of Creative Commons-A Printing Press like this was still in use in The Brown County Democrat in the 1970's.

 

  • How were they designed

 

  • What worked, what didn't

 

  • How did you measure response rates

 

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OK.  Keep in mind, this was long before the concept of social media existed.  Some ads were solicited, especially for special events or even new product announcements, which we would typically be running news stories about to provide local media coverage.  Others were walk-ins or call-ins.  All our ads, or mostly all of them, were designed by our own people who had a lot of artistic talent and we used Pagemaker or Quark Express to design the ads.  Our team also had very close, personal relationships with our target audience.

 

 

Were there ad types that worked better for one type of business versus another type of ad?

 

Some of the serial ads were very successful and most have been running about 25 years or so now.  I guess the developer of these ads had more expertise in that one type of business, attorney ads for an example, than we had time to develop for them.  Those ads came camera ready for us.  They often had a very specific format that the advertising required.

 

Public Relations

 

Some advertisers had their own in-house marketing teams and our ads were part of a larger marketing campaign they were running.  We would work with their marketing team to coordinate things like a press release which would go out to local media outlets.  These were designed to generate positive publicity.  Press releases were more common then than I believe they are today.   Publicity campaigns often involved a Press Release, paid advertising and a promotional strategy designed to generate media attention, even attracting TV stations from time-to-time.  We worked incredibly closely with advertisers.  

 

We measured our responses by the number of comments we got and how well the customer liked the ads.  Because there many news outlets, we could also tell a lot about who our broader audience was.  In particular, we had very detailed knowledge of where the people responding to ads lived.

 

We tried to design an ad by the things customers were asking to sell, jewelry, antiques, artwork, etc.

 

Like windows for example.  We would put the wording in, after asking just what the customer wanted, then we would find the artwork that would go along with it

 

 

How did you know how well the customer liked an ad. 

They would very freely tell us whether or not they liked it by the number of responses they got from each ad.  As you know from experience, news media relies on advertising, so our marketing efforts were focused on ensuring the ads worked, and that we could prove it.

 

How Did News Stories Affect Your Publicity and Marketing?

If there was a newsworthy event, for example, perhaps the high school basketball team was going to the state finals, we would definitely use that to manage publicity.  Any event that generated press coverage definitely played a role in which ads got run next to which stories.

 

Did You Ever See or Use Negative Publicity?

Maybe not the way you would think.  For example, the wildly famous Sheriff's Log contains a lot of negative news, as well as quirky news.  The negative part of that part of the paper was often used by local attorneys who obviously wanted that space.

 

 

Give me some design guidelines you followed

Were the ads part of a publicity campaign, meaning a series of ads?

 

As I said before, these serial ads were common, mostly to the attorney and insurance industries.  Today, these are known as YMYL or Your Money or Your Life business, and even back then they had regulatory requirements we had to meet.

 

Many times they were part of a larger on-going publicity campaign

 

Our customers would generally tell us whether or not they had had a great response or not.  Sometimes the ad just did not work at all and they let us know that also.

 

For instance, an attorney would put in an ad every week, giving little legal tidbits.  People liked those.  The same way with the insurance companies and the real estate companies did.

 

I remember that one.

 

They also wanted to choose the location of their ads, like the funeral homes wanted to be on the same page as the obituaries.

 

I used to learn a lot from that.

 

That makes sense.

 

The realtors fought over who got the back page ad then they could advertise all their listings in one place and root out the rest of their competition.

 

So you had to be careful with placement as well as the design and content of the ads. 


 

Oh, yeah, placement was critical to some advertisers.

 

How about those stand alone type ads? Papers that were inserted like into the Sunday papers.


 

We hated those.  I still do.  I pull out only the grocery ads perhaps and throw the rest away.  They are expensive to produce and to recycle and a sure waste of time and money but a lot of companies liked to have them inserted.

 

Every ad also had to touch some part of the stories in the paper, maybe only one corner touched, but it had to touch news copy.

 

From a fairness point of view.  You would read the copy and your eye would stray to the ad next to it.

 

You mean physically or from a theme point of view?

 

Physically.

 

The only exception would be a large ad, maybe a quarter of the page or larger which would get seen anyway.

 

What was the decision process when choosing ad size? What worked best or could you tell?

 

One of the most successful ones might be a rather large ad and there might not be more than a half dozen words right in the center of it.  The decision on size was made, generally, by how much they wanted to say and whether or not they wanted their ad to dominate the page.  So as you can see it was a big determination factor and lots of decisions which the customer would present to you.

 

What worked best, more words or more graphics?

 

Sometimes they subscribed to a service (like Roberts) who would buy a series of ads to fit our column size and we would number them  1 to 52  and use them chronologically.

 

Graphics are great, but sometimes the word content would be better, depending on what the product was.

 

Lots and lots of things were factored in.

 

Such as?

 

Size, content, placement (which they nearly fought to get), etc.,

 

How many times to run the same ad was another factor.  If the response wasn’t great they might repeat the same ad again, especially if the week the first one ran was a week the kids were out of school and perhaps on vacation and away from home with their parents, like at spring break time.  If the parents were not home they would not have seen that particular ad and they may have been very interested in it.

 

Is there a hierarchy of ad placements

 

You bet.  Little tiny ads got placed at the top of the columns above all the others.

 

Did you guys advise people on ads or just deliver what they asked for

 

Both.  Sometimes the content depended upon the name of the company advertising, such as in the sports ads on special occasions or political ads.  Like, if you were "Dunkin Donuts" for example,  you might see your ad say "Dunk them rascals" Or something silly like that.  It was cheaper for the customer to bring us an already prepared ad sized to fit our column size, so the designer would have to look up our specs in a special book or call us for the size.  There are only 1 to 3 column width sizes in the whole industry so that was an easy one to fix.

 

Where did the artwork come from?

 

From the computer or from clipart books that were scanned in to fit. We subscribed to many artbooks made especially for newspapers. You could scan in the parts of the art page you wanted, or clip the artwork out and use it.

It’s probably all on the computers now.  I'm telling you how it was up to about  20 years ago.

 

What about coupons or discounts, how were those done?

 

Usually we placed a broken line for a border and maybe a pair of scissors following that broken line.  Sometimes we used color inside the ad.  Color used to be fairly expensive but now is more common place.

 

I mean, who decided on the amount of the coupon?

 

The customer, of course.

Most generally at a minimum 10%

 

Did you see the amount of coupon redemptions?

Not usually, but there would be a tiny bcd and a number to indicate issue date or number of the ad they had run in the paper in one corner somewhere so the customer could track it if they placed the same ad in several newspapers.  This was important .  They wanted to know where their ad was the most effective. The initials used stood for the Brown County Democrat paper, of course

 

Now that is an important tidbit.

Yup

Response rate measurement across different newspapers and magazines

Yes.

 

Wonder if they ran the identical ads

You can bet the customer gave attention to those numbers by initials.  Yes, they were identical.  That way they could be measured exactly by the area they were run in. We had customers from all over the US run ads with us so territorial response was critical for those guys.

 

Did they ever have you run ad experiments?

Like what?

 

Well, running two different ads in the newspaper in different locations to see what worked best?  Or two different designs in the same place?

 

Not that I can recall.  Maybe we did.  The customer might place the same ad in the news section of the paper and also in the ad section we sent out to everyone at no charge.

 

Was there a limit on the amount of advertising you would run in one week?

 

We were limited, yes, by the USPS (United States Postal Service).  We were not to run higher than 50% but we generally ran about 80%.

 

But we learned we could separate our figures by claiming the inserts or house ads (where we placed ads to promote ourself when we needed a space filler, were not ads per se so that would bring us down somewhat.  But, generally even doing that we stayed over  50%.

 

Wonder why they would care?

 

The rate you paid for mailing at the PO was determined by this number!

Could change every week.  We had to report as soon as the paper came out what our percentage of ads was.

 

Ah, I get it. Wonder if the same thing is in effect here in Spain.


 

I don't know

 

I will ask


 

We had to mark our paper with a blue pencil for the news and a red pencil for the ads.  Then, add up the column inches of each and give that paper to the PO.

 

But basically, the PO was charging more because you were making more?

 

Yes

 

They wanted their cut.

 

Was the paper third class mail?

 

Yes

 

We paid dearly to mail that sucker out and we had to pay when we delivered the paper to them to mail.

 

Well, they gotta eat I suppose

 

We were their biggest customer.

 

They pass out free newspapers here at the metro and train stops in Madrid-wondering if it is because they save postage or just because that is where the foot traffic is.

 

Each bag was pre-labeled and ready to go. We did all the work.  Placing and sorting each stack of mail and putting it in mail sacks they only had to throw onto the trucks.  We learned a lot by doing this about sorting mail by zip codes.  Now they hand deliver tons of their newspapers to local zip codes.  It must be cheaper to hand deliver and pay these guys and gals a percentage of what it cost us to mail them to the mailboxes.  While it was cheaper for the newspapers, it added to the woes of the postal service since it meant lost revenue for them.

 

Did you get asked much about your newspapers customer profile by advertisers?

 

Oh yes, they would question us, especially the more commercial advertisers who were used to dealing with big papers.

 

By the way, tell me about the project your newspaper funded to develop software to support desktop publishing?

 

We did not pay anyone to develop programs for us.  We bought Quark Express and Pagemaker.  I knew a little about programming in Basic and did most of the design and shortcuts myself.

Thought it would be interesting to interview someone who had done it for a living to contract it with today's Multi Channel Marketing campaigns and the related technology.  Though the technology has changed, the need to be creative, and find the right message, has largely remained unchanged.  Want to learn how to use today's Multi Channel Marketing tools?

 

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Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP

About the Author: Lonnie Ayers is a Hubspot Certified Inbound Marketing consultant, with additional certifications in Hubspot Content Optimization, Hubspot Contextual Marketing, and is a Hubspot Certified Partner. Specialized in demand generation and sales execution, especially in the SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Partner space, he has unique insight into the tough challenges Service Providers face with generating leads and closing sales using the latest digital tools. With 15 years of SAP Program Management experience, and dozens of complex sales engagements under his belt, he helps partners develop and communicate their unique sales proposition. Frequently sought as a public speaker in various events, he is available for both inhouse engagements and remote coaching.
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He also recently released a book "How to Dominate Any Market - Turbocharging Your Digital Marketing and Sales Results", which is available on Amazon.

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