Big Promotions vs. Little Promotions

With so many of Main Street’s retail stores closing — and the loss of their weekly retail ads — newspapers and shoppers need to find new ways to promote and sell advertising.

One way is to produce profitable, multi-market special sections that attract the attention of a wide band of advertisers.

The second approach is to create an endless number of one-time-only and every month specialty pages.

The one-time-only projects, sold in process color, might be a Salute to Veterans page or a Spring Lawn Care page made up of 12 equal size ads. In either case it takes a common theme and a favorable per unit rate to make selling the page easy. But, in the end, the real value is in the low price of each of the units usually ads up to much more than what the paper would get for regular full-color, full page.

I will share more about multiple advertiser pages in future editions of Paper Dollars.

Meanwhile, let’s look at a big dollar project that will work in any market: A Day in the Life.

We published this project in our regional N’West Iowa REVIEW the third week of October 2020, to document what life is like today in a way our readers could share with their children and grandchildren. The section was not so much about how the area was suffering during COVID as it was about how northwest Iowans were rising above the pandemic.

The project started with the recruitment of a large number of photographers. Some were members of our regular staff, some part-timers or photographer stringers and some volunteers from nearby colleges.

Once that group was assembled, specific assignments and story ideas were passed around to make sure a wide variety of various activities were photographed and all communities in our five-county circulation area were included.

Starting at 12:01 a.m. and continuing through the day until midnight, our photo team shot almost 3,000 images. Then over the next two weeks our news department reduced that number to 127 pictures.

The photos were printed, with cutlines, in two all-process-color 16-page sections. The cutlines were the only editorial material on the pages.

All advertising was sold in process color in eighth, quarter, half and full-page modular sizes. Most of the ads featured a message that included either “every day” or a reference to “life.” An insurance agency might promote how they take the worry out of “life” with home or auto insurance, for example. A bakery might point out that “every day they make 2,000 doughnuts.”

It took a five-person sales team over a week to sell the project. Most of the ads were eighth pages although there were some quarters, halves and full pages.

Our page designers, while also working on at least one other publication each day, were able to create the lively design in less than three days.

Here are a couple of the 32 pages that made up the two sections:

Peter Wagner

Peter W. Wagner is publisher of the award winning N’West Iowa REVIEW and 12 additional publications. He is often called “The Idea Man” and is a regular presenter at state press Association and publishing group conventions and seminars. You can contact him regarding his programs “100 Ideas for Fun and Profit” or “Selling Print Advertising the Wagner Way” by emailing pww@iowainformation.com.