The Marketing Plaza

Did you ever consider that newspapers were the original targeted media? In fact, it was so accepted that newspapers were targeted that most felt USA Today was insane to believe it could be a national (read mass marketed) newspaper when it launched in 1982.

Today, many believe the Internet is leading the way to the demise of the newspaper. In fact, all the Internet has done is what USA Today attempted to do – reposition newspapers as mass media in an increasingly micro-niched world.

While many business moguls might have you think the current problem facing newspapers is its business model, I believe the real challenge before the industry is a marketing one – repositioning (or going back to its roots) as an effective target marketing vehicle.

When radio and TV were first introduced, they were considered a threat to newspapers, but history has proven that theory wrong. The reason it was wrong was that cost of entry (advertising time) was so high and the medium was so different. Network TV is true mass media. Network radio is as well, but radio was first to come closer to the newspaper model with news radio geared to a regional audience.

Cable TV finally broke the TV mass marketing mentality and soon appealed to local car dealers, in particular, followed by restaurants and jewelers whose egos made them adore seeing themselves in their ads. If newspapers can learn anything from Cable TV it should be to encourage entrepreneurs to feature themselves in the ads instead of their products as entrepreneurial egos trump ROI every time.  “My wife’s third cousin saw my commercial,” was a common response I’d hear when accompanying news account reps on sales calls to local car dealers. ROI didn’t enter the ad buy equation. The value was more basic.

But as the famous newspaper cartoon line from Pogo goes:  “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  Newspapers have done as much, if not more, to damage their own unique selling proposition than the radio, TV, or the Internet by forgetting who and what they are.

USA Today has done more to change how newspapers are expected to look and their positioning as a mass media and The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are eternally chasing the national newspaper moniker as well.  Meanwhile, regional newspapers are being caught in the middle – never a good marketing position. They have the big guns above them and the micro-niched weeklies, direct mail and Internet sites beneath them.

The goal then, is to move from the middle, and not necessarily to regain the higher ground. Papers never had that ground. The answer may be in Tom Peter’s In Search of Excellence -”stick to the knitting.”  The first order of business is to agree that the middle ground is not the place to be.  Let’s learn from the retail market newspapers cover so well… big box stores do well as do well-positioned boutiques.  Middle of the road stores don’t last long.  The middle is not generally the place to be for long-term market success.

Content is king, but too much content can be like too much e-mail- spam.  The key is to provide content of value and in enough quantity that it can be digested.

Recently I was at a newspaper conference where we evaluated how well various papers were engaging in the social media world. The irony is that no one has better or more content than newspapers – so much so that many tweets, Facebook posts and blogs take you to various newspaper stories around the country.   So what are newspapers doing wrong?

I think it comes down to two key things:

1. They provide too much content. A news stream is almost like a wire service firing off story after story until hundreds of stories are posted almost within the hour that the news has gone to press.  As a reader, I’d much prefer perhaps one story an hour, or the story of the day, or the story that’s the funkiest, or even a story from the food section, rather than every story being printed in the main section that day.

2. They are too automated.  Precisely because they have so much content, and because they won’t invest in staff or resources to enter the online arena, the newspapers I’ve seen have automated the process.  Too much of any good thing is too much, and the same is true of automation.

I follow social media sites to get the best ideas a business or marketing guru has to offer. I don’t want every line from every book, or every chapter capsulized.  I want a tidbit for the day that I can remember, think about and take with me on my own business travels.  I also follow a person because of the personal touch.

When the tweets put out by a paper are so highly automated that they have no humor, no irony, no personal touch—well, then I might as well be following CNN.  Even if the news is local, I want some sense that a person has decided to put this particular news item out on the internet because it’s special and not just one item out of a thousand for the day.

Social media is best done consistently and regularly, but is not better served by being over served.  Ironically as newspapers moan that their copy is being stolen for free by the Googles of the world, they have entered the social media arena without editing themselves.  And, editing is their strength!

Yes, give some content for free, but learn the art of the tease.  Stop flooding the market with all the news all the time.  Go back to the art of the headline and tell me what’s most important, most humorous, most worthwhile for today rather than flooding me with everything. It’s just too much information.