Advertising Media – Part 3: Newspapers

One of the oldest advertising media out there is newspapers. Since the beginning of distributed printed material, newspapers have shown an ability to reach a large audience.

When newspapers first started to appear on the scene, there was very little in the way of competition for advertising dollars. If you were a business owner and wanted to advertise, you had to use newspapers to reach a wide and varied audience (aside from painting your business name on the side of a building).

Today’s advertising landscape is substantially different. With audiences for any given medium becoming more fractured and the construction of the so-called 24 hour news cycle, newspapers have not only become simply one of many advertising options, the newspapers themselves have dimished value. Today’s readership for newspapers continues to age and dwindle. People in the 25-54 demographic have become accustomed to reaching for television as a source for news. With CNN, FOX News, CNBC, and other cable news outlets, current news is available when you want it. Now that the Internet has become nearly omnipresent from our desktop computers to our handheld devices, instanteous and customized news services push content to wherever we want it, whenever we want it.

That said, newspapers have been around for a long time and as such lend a certain degree of credibility to its content. If you are considering advertising in print, you should keep the following things in mind:

• Readership is older – if you’re hoping to reach the key 18-49 demographic with your print ad, it’s not likely to happen. If you’re looking to be in front of the aging Boomer generation, then this is a viable option.
• Advertising is persistant – your audience can stare at your ad for as long as they want. Unlike a tv spot or a radio spot, your print ad isn’t going anywhere. If they wanted to, they could cut out your ad and save it in a scrapbook.
• Advertising is static – you know how people are sometimes so enamored with tv spot that they saw that they go to YouTube or a similar site and sent the web address to all their friends. Doesn’t happen with print ads. Sure, there are journals with dazzling print ads, but unless you’re in the business, it’s not likely you’ll ever see one.
• Advertising is unobtrusive – you ad will just sit there on the page. Reader’s brains have been well trained over the years to simply pass over the ads and read just the stories. When you buy advertising in newspapers, you are paying a cost relative to the readship numbers. But who’s to say that the readers are reading your ad…or even the paper itself for that matter?