Too Much of a Good Thing...

 

...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 17^th 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.