Dear Print Industry: Your Efforts at Self-Promotion are Pathetic.

Let’s take a moment to examine the NAA’s new industry promotion ad. 

Hmmm…there’s a woman with green hair sitting at a table with a very thin newspaper on it (mustn’t be many ads).  Protruding from the woman’s head are three party toothpicks containing images of electronic devices. 

Well that’s a bit strange.

Beneath the woman is a large tagline: “Smart is the new sexy”.

WTF?  When did green hair become sexy?

Wait a minute…is the NAA, in their own clever way, trying to say that newspapers are sexy?

The answer can be found in Editor and Publisher.  As it turns out, the NAA has decided to abandon “campaigns based on logic” in favour of a “more visceral message” created to “remind advertisers and consumers about the core competencies of newspapers, about why they should be – and are – trusted, valued and revered.”

Revered? Ugh. 

For an industry that relies on marketing and advertising dollars for about 80% of its revenue, newspapers have always had a shocking disrespect for the science of marketing. 

Case in point: This particular ad was tested on people at the ad agency that created it, the NAA’s working committee and its board of directors.  And guess what?  They “had a 100-percent positive reaction to that headline”.  Imagine that!  People like to be called sexy!  Who knew?

Perhaps the most spectacularly clueless thing about this campaign is the media plan.  The NAA intends to advertise newspapers, in newspapers.  That’s right, in newspapers.  To people who already read newspapers.

Amateurs. 

Just to be fair, the NAA isn’t the only print industry organization wasting valuable time and resources creating self-promotional campaigns.  Board member Donna Barrett admits being inspired by the magazine industry’s own lame campaign.  And up here in Canada, the Canadian Newspaper Association’s 2009 promotional campaign even included an execution with the word “sexy” in it (while you’re on their site, be sure to check out the hilarious pdf entitled Newspapers: A Green Choice).

I dearly hope that incoming NAA CEO Caroline Little will shake this musty old organization to its core.  They should focus less on reminding readers and advertisers that they are valuable and more on actually being valuable.  That means hard-core research and analytics aimed at understanding how to generate a healthy return on investment for advertisers as well as true reader engagement.  The results may be unsettling, but at least they’ll be useful.

What the NAA shouldn’t be doing is telling its membership what it wants to hear.  That’s an irresponsible waste of their dues.

 

Comments

[Elaine]

Well, that for which you wish has been tried before, with very disappointing results. I worked extensively on the Newspaper Next project, arguably one of the industry's more ambitious attempts to identify new and profitable ways forward. Part I of the project was very warmly received, in retrospect because it didn't really ask newspapers to stretch too far beyond their comfort zones. And in fact most of the innovation that we saw in response to Part I was incremental, very close to the core in terms of revenue models. But the "jobs to be done" approach was new to a lot of newspapers, and a lot of them put it to work.

What we realized after Part I had been completed was that we had failed to define a five-year strategic framework for the industry -- how should newspaper companies think of themselves five years into the future? If we could articulate that, we reasoned, it would help newspapers prioritize investments in research and product development.

So Part II attempted to articulate that vision, identifying all the functions besides news dissemination that newspapers have historically performed, and trying to link those functions to new technologies that enable them to be performed in entirely new and more efficient ways. We went so far as to offer ways to prioritize some of these functions so as to reap maximum gain as soon as possible.

Put aside for a moment any criticism about how Part II was introduced to the industry, and ponder industry reaction to the actual substance of it: a resounding "don't tell us how to define our strategy." (We were told that in so many words.) In effect, it made the industry too uncomfortable, and they weren't willing to go there.

So what makes anyone think that Caroline Little or anyone else with an ambitious vision for industry change can have a different effect, given that the major players remain the same? I'm not at all hopeful, although I'd love to be wrong. But I think history is with me: there has never been a documented case in which an entire industry going through the kind of disruption currently affecting the newspaper industry has managed to reinvent itself successfully.

That is not to say there isn't lots of innovation going on around journalism and, increasingly, around business models to support that journalism; there is. It's just that very little of it is happening at newspapers. Disappointing but not surprising, and I don't see it changing.

[Stevebuttry]

Excellent points, Judy and Elaine. And frankly, part 2 of Newspaper Next didn't give newspapers as strong a strategy as they needed, not even close. But it was more than they were bold enough to undertake. Their strategy was to hang on, cut costs and hope things would get better without any exercise of courage or vision on their part.

Did you catch the NAA dog ad, about how newspaper writers dig and online writers yap? Wonder how many newspapers who've cut back on their digging resources will be running that ad without catching the irony?

[Elaine]

One final comment: The fact that the ads were tested only on the agency that created them and on people within NAA tells you all you need to know about how much the industry leadership has changed since Newspaper Next.

[Giles Clark]

Actually I think your headline could do with a bit of tweaking... I assume that by "Print industry" what you actually mean is the "Newspaper industry". Two very different things!

It's like blaming the electronics industry for rubbish television, or engineering companies for poor public transport.