Newspapers should sell context, not content

Economically desperate times make people economically desperate. It can also bring out the mercenary in those who believe they are in a position of power.

Advertisers who do have dollars to spend in the current fiscally challenged environment are therefore being quick to push their advantage with revenue-hungry newspapers.

They’re insisting they get a whole lot more love for their dollars, with value-adds such as marketing campaigns, additional space and special contract rates. And that’s fair enough because God knows we were guilty of starving them of attention when times were good. If our P&Ls can cope with it, we should be looking after these people.

But some love can’t be bought. Pay for love, and it’s not love any more. Demand love as part of a commercial arrangement and it’s a whole different kind of girl-meets-boy hook up. The magic disappears instantly and something rather seedy takes its place.

So beware – beware, beware!!! - the advertising pitches that require the delivery of editorial.

I’ve now sat through more than a handful of meetings of confident advertising agency types running through Powerpoints that outline their client’s spending capacity, ideas around the creative execution and key messages. Then comes the last slide, Editorial Requirements.

In these slides, the exact tone that is to be pushed is outlined and the talent available to spruik it identified. The intention is spelled out – the publisher that can deliver the most editorial exposure for the lowest advertising contract price will win the business.

Try to be clear with your readers and label the coverage transparently and you won’t get the dosh. To nail these contracts you need to pretend that the sold message really is news and embed it deep.

Let’s stop the tape there for a minute.

Now I am not a wowser. I have extensive commercial and sales experience and understand how the world works. One of the reasons why I get invited to these pitches is because the Ad team know they can rely on me not to run shrieking out of the room or deliver an indignant lecture (although I have been known to do an excellent stony face). But there is no point doing business at a cost that kills your business.

At the very heart of this conversation is an issue that it is now absolutely critical for newspapers. In fact, it is our very failure to deal with it in the past that has ensured we find ourselves – now in the digital age – without a business model to sponsor editorial the way we once did in our glory days.

Advertorials and selling - or worse, giving away - content has always existed in the 20 years that I’ve worked in newspapers.

Our collective thinking has always been that we could a) do it, take the money and to hell with the real cost of such a decision or b) not do it, walk away from the clients who insisted on it and feel a sense of puritan goodness.

Our failure to c) manage (or God forbid, drive) the conversation around the value of editorial content - and a hard value that appears on a balance sheet, not just a warm fuzzy feel-good about brand – is exactly why we are in our current pickle.

What you resist, persists.

So maybe we should deal with it once and for all.

What is the true value of editorial content?

The true value of editorial content is in its ability to create CONTEXT for advertisers.
Stories draw pictures in our minds. They inspire, they move, they inform, they persuade, they convince. Good journalism is not about hard sell. It’s about honest information.

In the past, editorial content was valued by the number of paid pages of advertising it attracted based and the sheer volume of advertisers that wanted its audience. We never sold the content, but we’ve always sold the context whether we called it that or not. Context was the area below the keyline. We sold it once and we sold it by a physical measurement of the space it took up on the page. Lots of different advertisers took us up on that.

We’re now in an environment where a smaller number of clients are in play with a wider offering of platforms across print, online and mobile. They are paying less and they’re paying for the eyeballs they know they have attracted with powerful measurement tools that give real data.

The New Context is not necessarily measured with a ruler. The New Context is about how we can allow advertising campaigns to stick to relevant stories across a variety of platforms. Even better we can grow our business by accepting that individual advertisers are interested in sponsoring new environments giving us more places to write for as journalists.

But that does not mean we have sold out.

Our power as newspapers is to enter a contract of trust with our readers that the pieces we write are timely, independent, well-researched, fact-checked and in line with our stated commitments to fairly and accurately represent our communities and their interests. A single advertiser sitting in the space where there were once many, does not and must never change this.

A single advertisement pretending to be real news however, does.

Some advertising agencies are so lazy, they think it’s easier to beat publishers about the head with the promise of dollars for free content. But that cost is too high and now is not the time to start paying it.

It’s time to start redirecting the conversation.

We will create content. We will create unique stories that are independent of thought, soundly researched, totally in tune with our masthead brands, loved and valued by our readers.

And we will sell the New Context. We will sell it to a smaller pool of advertisers whose exclusive appearance in that space does not change the value of the content, nor seek to trick or fool readers.

Google cannot do this.

Our New Context will be valuable to smart advertisers who understand the importance of environment and can measure its impact. Secure in our worth we can charge a premium.

True love might be free, but it is never cheap.

* First appeared in the Panpa Bulletin newspaper, June 2009. www.panpa.org.au