...isn't a good thing.
Now that I’m back in marketing after a twenty-two year
hiatus I’m noticing newspaper ads again. Mostly because they’re proving to be a
fine way for me to find businesses that would benefit from moving their
advertising dollars out of a dying 17th century media and into the
twenty-first.
One of our local papers had a sale on full page color ads,
selling for $300 a pop what would normally cost over a thousand. Many local
merchants thought that was such a great idea that they crowded like lemmings into
this week’s weekly edition which had over 51 pages in a row of full color ads
…and not much else.
Now how many consumers will want to read all that? Probably
just the merchants who paid for them. I’ll wager the rest of you (if you’re a
subscriber) will take one look and toss the entire thing into the trash. That’s
$16,000 of advertising money wasted.
I’ve always said advertising is supposed to stand out. I’ll
be finding out this week how some of those merchants feel about being squeezed
into the middle of 51 pages of ads.
I’ve also always said you get what you pay for. But in this case I don’t think those
merchants got their $300 money’s worth.
