One of the roles of a Marketing agency is to look out for their clients’ interest. This is especially important when making suggestions on what is the most cost-effective way to get the highest ROI.
Advertising in the daily newspapers; especially the Sunday classifieds for Car Dealerships used to be a no-brainer. In 2005, the Newspaper Association of America reported that newspapers brought in a record 49,435 billion dollars in combined total ad revenue. But 7 years later it had plummeted to 22,314 billion- a 55% drop!
Put bluntly, the Internet is killing American Newspapers.
Many newspapers have sold out, while others have attempted to adapt by offering online subscriptions. In 2009, 105 newspapers shut down leaving 10,000 jobs on the chopping block and 23 of the top 25 newspapers reporting circulation declines between 7% and 20%.
When the economy collapsed, advertising budgets went with it, adding fuel to the Internet fire which was already burning.
Journalist Megan Macardle explains it this way, “Journalism is….being steadily eroded by insufficient demand for advertising pages. For most of history, most publications lost money, or at best broke even, on their subscription base, which just about paid for the cost of printing and distributing the papers. Advertising was what paid the bills. To be sure, some of that advertising is migrating to blogs and similar new media. But most of it is simply being siphoned out of journalism altogether. Craigslist ate the classified ads. eHarmony stole the personals. Google took those tiny ads for weird products. And Macy’s can email its own da*n customers to announce a sale.”
This is definitely something to consider when placing your media buys. When the New York Times reported an average weekday print circulation of less than 650,000 in September but their website and associated apps attracted nearly 54 million unique visitors in January of the same year, it can make dealerships question their loyalty to newspaper print advertising.
But as Paul Harvey would say- Here’s the rest of the story. Though there are many more online newspaper visitors to the New York Times website, they are what are called “Flybys.” The average time spent on their site is only 4.6 minutes, and they don’t consider this experience as “reading a newspaper.” Compare that to Nielsen Scarborough’s 2014 Newspaper Penetration Report, which says 56% of those who consume a newspaper read it exclusively in print while 11% read on a desktop and only 5% read entirely from their mobile device. For a complete breakdown of the newspaper audience distribution by platform click here. To learn the top 25 newspaper rankings (as of January 2015) in digital traffic, you can view Pew Research Center’s study or simply call on a marketing expert in the industry to help you keep up with the changing times.
JVS Marketing is the leader in designing automotive strategies targeted to drive traffic to your dealership.
JVS will help you understand the technology shifts in advertising, and show you how a mix of traditional media, direct media and digital media can turn readers and viewers into customers.
Call 1-855-742-6397 or click here to get answers today.
