MEDIA & MARKETING: A key plank of the 'Sunday Times' marketing drive is giveaway DVDs
MOST BRITISH newspapers sold in the Republic have been losing sales this year. The exception is the Sunday Times, whose average circulation increased by 10,800 copies to 116,540 for the six months from January to June 2009. Editor Frank Fitzgibbon has a simple explanation for the sales boost: effective marketing.
The marketing push comes from the top. The Sunday Timesis owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, where the current chief executive of News Corp in Europe is 36-year-old James Murdoch, the media mogul's son.
Murdoch jnr was in charge of the mass-market consumer business BSkyB from 2003 to 2007.
Since becoming a newspaper man, he has instilled some of the BSkyB marketing ethos into News International, publisher of the Sunday Timesand other newspapers such as the Sunand the News of the World.
“We engage in very targeted and specific marketing which has produced the results we sought, and we see no reason to believe that we can’t keep increasing our sales,” says Fitzgibbon. “Our sales increase is also a reflection of the huge interest people have for issues both national and international, and the coverage we can give those stories.”
A key plank of the marketing drive is giveaway DVDs. Most other newspapers have scaled back this expensive marketing ploy, but in recent months the Sunday TimesDVD freebies have ranged from animal kingdom and history documentaries to old Hitchcock movies.
The Sunday Times'biggest annual sales driver is its annual rich-list supplement, which pushes sales up to 130,000.
The second-biggest seller so far this year was the edition published the day after Ireland won the rugby Grand Slam, which shifted 128,000 copies.
Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Mailtitles, also offers readers free CDs and DVDs, but the incentives now span ice-cream and driving-lesson vouchers as well. The Irish Mail On Sundayhas maintained its circulation level at 114,000, although the average sales for the daily title have fallen by 7,500 to 51,900.
British titles that do not invest in freebies or Irish coverage are also-rans in sales terms. The average daily sale of the Timesis down 20 per cent to 2,900, while the London Independenthas dropped 19 per cent to 1,845.
The Observer, threatened with extinction, has a fan base of 10,290 buyers, 13 per cent less than a year ago.
The recession has also taken its toll on the “red tops”.
The Irish Daily Mirroris down 9 per cent and the Daily Expressand the Irish Sunare down 7 per cent. Sales of the Irish Daily Star, the market leader, also declined in the first half, down 6 per cent.
The biggest-selling British-owned newspaper in Ireland is the News Of The World, which recently recruited former taoiseach Bertie Ahern to its line-up of sports columnists.
Murdoch will no doubt be hoping Ahern’s appeal endures, as the title’s average sale has dropped 20,000 to 134,400.
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CABLE COMPANY UPC has launched a €2.4 million marketing campaign to persuade people to avail of its high-definition television, broadband and phone services.
The target market is young professionals with families, and online will account for about 20 per cent of the advertising spend. But which websites?
According to marketing director Rhona Bradshaw, the websites that will receive most from this UPC spend are Daft, Ryanair, RTÉ, Bebo and Myhome.
“Websites with big traffic volumes work best for us,” says Bradshaw. “It’s quite easy to know who you are talking to when you choose to advertise on a particular site because of the content the site offers. With online advertising, you can get instant results, but your web ads have to really stand out. We feel our price offering gives us cut-through. Humour is another way of grabbing attention.”
Bradshaw says she monitors the data showing the number of people clicking on the UPC banners every day and, if a website is not delivering, she pulls the campaign immediately.
She adds that flexibility is one of the best things about online advertising.
