Ad v ert i sing
Classified information
.Philip Kleinman "Good opportunities for intelligent .school-leavers at Lloyd's Bank," "Drilling engineers and supervisors required for Conoco's operations in North Sea oilfields." That's all the ads in the Daily Telegraph last week need have said, and even allowing room for the companies' addresses they wouldn't have taken very many lines to say it.
But in fact, though the messages weren't essentially different from the abbreviations I have just given, the ads said a great deal more. One was headed "Make the most of your A levels with a career at Lloyds Bank" and included pictures of bright youngsters at work as well as a detailed explanation of the kinds of opportunity available. The other featured a drawing of a strong-jawed, hard-hatted Conoco man under the heading "Today's professionals for tomorrow's energy."
The two ads took up respectively a ninth and a sixth of a Telegraph page. There was nothing unusual about either of them. The point I am making is precisely that such generous use of space has become normal on the classified advertising pages of newspapers. Big companies have adopted the attitude that their recruitment ads should blow the recruiters' own trumpets as well as telling the recruits where they can apply.
But it isn't only named employers who take large semi-display spaces to advertise situations vacant. Executive recruitment firms do the same even though acting on behalf of unidentified clients. Large spaces are often used even for relatively low-paid posts and even when the number of words in the ad could easily be fitted into a single column inch.
The reasons for this development — for things were not always thus — are several. Staff shortages have no doubt been one of them. Another has been the efforts made by newspapers over the last twenty years to promote classified advertising. (The Thomson Organisation was one of the leaders in this field.) But, whatever the reasons, the development is self-reinforcing. One executive recruitment firm which decided to try to buck the trend and save its clients' money by printing short concise ads found that its business began diminishing alarmingly. When even a £2,000 salesman's job can rate a fiveinch-deep semi-display ad in the Telegraph, the old-style "sits vac" briefs lose their pulling power.
The growth of recruitment advertising has been good not only for newspapers but for ad agencies, many of which have set up special subsidiaries dealing with that branch of work alone. Leo Burnett, for instance, one of the fastest growing agencies last year, attributed a very large proportion of its £7 million increase in billings to its recruitment activities.
. For anyone aware of this boom it did not, therefore, come as an enormous surprise when the Advertising Association recently published figures showing that classified advertising as a whole accounted for 24 per cent of all ad expenditure in this country last year, putting it for the first time above television. In 1960 classified's share was only 13 per cent.
Now Harold Lind, the Association's research director, has published further figures in the Financial Times showing that in the first quarter of this year, when television advertising expenditure fell by a disastrous 15.6 per cent, compared with the corresponding period of 1973, classified stood its ground far better and rose by 6.4 per cent. (Even this, of course,
represented a drop if you take inflation into account.) As time goes by it will be interesting to see whether classified can maintain this strength. In particular, if the threatened drastic rise in unemployment materialises, will the "sits vac" shrink to their modest proportions of yesteryear?
There is reason to think that 'down-market' jobs advertising, in the regional press and London evenings, is already beginning to feel the pinch. Advertising for "up-market" executive jobs has held up very well, but if widespread executive unemployment arrived, then obviously it would be hit.
If that happened, the Daily Telegraph would be in trouble. Taking the quality national newspapers as a group, it has the biggest share of classified — 29 per cent of volume, against 24 per cent for the Times and 16 per cent for the Sunday Times — but 80 per cent of its classified space is devoted to recruitment.
The one small consolation for the press is the belief that in an economic depression other forms of classified might do well. Classified advertising is, after all, a market place for second-hand goods, and if times get very bad everyone will be trying to sell something.
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