Cheadle Hume School.

Press

Paper promotion

Bill Grundy

Excuse me a minute, will you? I want to put a notice up. It reatl, "Trespassers will be prosecuted and it is addressed to the gentleman living in the next' column. Because the other day ' noticed that my colleague Philip Kleinman was writing °I the Financial Times about ne" tional newspapers. On the as' sumption that it won't haPPercil again, I intend to forgive him a° to take no further action, especially since Mr Kleinman has given me an idea for this colurn0. His article was about newspaPer advertising — not the ads in the papers, but ads about papers, the sort of ads that tell us Top people read the Times. Mr Kleinman, as befits an advertising pundit, vva,s considering the style of this special kind of ad, and trying td

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determine what factors 119, influenced a particular pape' towards a particular medium television, radio, posters, or even other papers. It's something I've often well; dered about, too. I especially have a tendency to wonder about it on Stockport Station, where, most mornings, my bloodshot eyes are confronted with a poster coolmending the Times to me. Th! slogan used is an odd one. It saY' "We won't bore you with Your own opinions." To which the obi ' vious reply must be "Instead, we bore you with ours." This seems me to be hardly the reaction the Times is looking for. It may be. of course, that I an the only person who reacts to ti!` ad in that way, though I doubt it. But the failure of that ad — surely it is a failure if it produces that sort of response — sets Ole asking myself why the Vries bothers. Why indeed do a °Y newspapers bother? Surely a paper's best advert is itself? Nnt that newspapers seem to believe that. I don't know whether manY of them have followed the Finan" cial Times in appointing a PR mall to their staff, but if they have' they are surely wasting money, In 74411e, eaator June 8, 1974 LaYing that I am, of course, not

el

"ocking the gentleman at the FT, 1Whe a nice man who actually f. huught me a lunch one day. (This, f.runderstand, was in an attempt to Ind e out why this column so often

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b, ins phrases like "Leaving the Tuancial Times out of considera'°o, because it isn't really a ,D,roPer newspaper ..." Apparently Att'is used to get Lord Drogheda 7,2Wd so much that the PR man 'yds dispatched to find out what I IRleant by it. I don't know Whether le succeeded, but I do know I ,„.`IlioYed the lunch, thank you very Lord Drogheda). Rovvever, to get back to newsPap ,pob er advertising: surely the best '!‘ for the Financial Times is its 'bustinctive pink newsprint, its tosea,Utifully clean lay-out, its

ed City intelligence, its vlenclid arts pages, its authorita te sPecial features, and its exinsive foreign coverage?

ly013hut if You are going to advertise 41. Paper, and I suppose the Th uggle for circulation means you itP,st, Where is the best place to do so,sin another paper? There seems 1,;"ething odd in that idea to me. I 411A think an ad for the Times s WnthulAe Pages of the Daily Mirror Make me rush to the newse da.',1's to cancel the order for my

t re' dose of brashness and

I do"lace it with an order for a daily r (,Lisre, of smugness. Readers of the r4e-klicln are unlikely to become sj aders of the Sunday Express ta:FIY because their paper conotjled a full-page plug for the ,'Ler. Or vice versa, come to think

of it.

Television advertising is expensive and it is difficult to get the one ingredient that newspapers are supposed to thrive on — topicality. To mount anything but the simplest ad takes time, and that means you're not going to be able to urge us tonight to buy your paper tomorrow and read the wonderful scoop you are running. Not that that stops the Sun, the Sunday People, and the News of the World from screaming at us regularly from our TV sets .about the remarkable goodies they will be seen to contain the next morning. The gentleman who gabbles' the Murdoch copy at us with incredible speed, unequalled vulgarity and weird pronunciation — "Read it in the Sun. Termorrer" — probably thinks he is doing a useful job. As his only effect on me and everyone I've spoken to is to heighten our determination never to read the Murdoch papers except in the line of duty, there would seem to be some reason to doubt his belief. But it is as well to note that the ads are simplicity themselves — a few word-slides, read (for the sake of the illiterate?) by that urgent young man, and nothing else.

Radio advertising, more and more with us as the local commercial stations continue to open up, is a much better prospect. It is cheap, it requires little more than a sheet of paper, a typewriter, and a voice to read the jewelled prose you have so finely wrought, and it is fast. I don't know what the record is, but I see no reason why an ad shouldn't be going out on the air within half an hour of its conception. The appeal of such speed when a big story is breaking is obvious, and since it can't be matched by any other medium, it looks very likely that a lot more newspaper advertising will be going out on the airwaves. And for a local newspaper, advertising on a local radio station has obvious attractions.

Yet, when all is said and done, the most effective newspaper advertising is probably still the poster, assuming the words are better thought out than the Times campaign I quoted earlier. It stays there long enough to be seen by a lot of people, its typography and layout tells you a great deal about the style of the paper and the sort of things you'd expect to find in it, and although in the nature of things it cannot ever be topical, it can plug series or special features, and plug them very well and very cheaply.

But having said all that, I still believe that what sells newspapers is the newspaper itself. People buy the Mirror for its bold simplicity and (though they perhaps don't realise this) for the skill that has gone into the subbing. They buy the Sun, in ever increasing numbers — well over three million a day now — for its tits and tips. They buy the Telegraph for its tremendous news coverage and its dependable political attitude. They buy the Guardian for all sorts of reasons, one of which may very well be that they enjoy groaning at its punning headlines. They buy the Times for its gravitas and its letters. They buy the Express, in far fewer numbers than they used to, because they still hanker after the flair it once had. And they buy the Sunday Express, I suppose, because they always have done.

The point is that, whatever paper they buy, they buy it because it is the paper it is. And when it stops being that, they stop buying it. I don't say that this is the most original observation that has ever been made. But I do say that, despite its venerability, it is a thought that should hang up in poker work over every advertising executive's desk.