http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/week-nov-1-7-your-layoff-comments-part_06.html#comments
Anonymous said...
11:26 a.m. -
The problem is more advertising than it is quality of the product. Advertisers that once flocked to newspapers in spite of the quality are now choosing to sound their ad budgets in other places in spite of quality. I left Gannett a couple of years ago and am now in PR. Our firm was recently marketing a new service to Gannett community and we had $20k in advertising money. That amount is not small but It wasn’t huge either. We had to make some difficult and calculated decisions about where we were going to spend the budget and get the biggest bang for our buck, to be cliche. We cast a wide net and spent the money in a number of places, including the Gannett newspaper, Facebook, digital platforms, etc. The campaign was largely a success, but when we asked people where they learned of our service, not a single person said the newspaper. Facebook and Google ads were 100 times more effective and cost us considerably less. Why were they were more effective? Targeted audiences. The way those software programs target your ad buy to a very specific group of people who have the highest likelihood of engaging your product or service is more valuable than any news content, no matter the quality. The next time our firm has $20k to spend, I can assure you we will spend every penny we put into the newspaper this time around expanding our online approach through search engines and social media targeted advertising. Multiply that statement by 1 million times and you can begin to understand why newspapers are losing revenue. The quality of the content has nothing to do with loss of advertising. It’s unfortunate too, as a former journalist and a newspaperman at heart, it makes me sad to know that is the case. Good luck everyone. It’s hard to watch these layoffs come to good newsrooms, even if i am no longer a part of one.
bump